Cork, a startup building onchain infrastructure for tokenized risk, has secured a $5.5 million seed funding round. The investment was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto startup accelerator (a16z CSX) and Road Capital, signaling strong institutional interest in solving core risk challenges within the growing real-world asset (RWA) and digital asset tokenization sector.
The startup's mission is to create a "programmable risk layer"—a new DeFi primitive designed to make the implicit risks in assets like yield-bearing stablecoins and other RWAs transparent and tradable. This infrastructure will enable asset managers, issuers, and stakeholders to launch custom swap markets, aiming to improve "redemption liquidity, risk transparency, and market confidence for their onchain assets."
Cork's technology is designed to be composable, integrating directly with ERC-4626 vaults, ERC-20 tokens, and onchain credit structures. It aims to become a "programmable component of onchain yield infrastructure." By standardizing risk for assets such as stablecoins and restaking tokens, the protocol seeks to allow risk to be measured, compared, and hedged. The goal is to minimize the downside of depegs and rug pulls while "reducing the risk of cascading liquidity failures" and giving "issuers and allocators tools to actively manage stress scenarios rather than react to them."
"Tokenized risk is a conversation the industry has largely not been having over the past few years, and that is now changing with the onboarding of major institutions and maturation of the industry," said Cork co-founder Phil Fogel. "We are building the foundational risk infrastructure layer that the next wave of users, both institutional and retail, will look to leverage."
The funding round also saw participation from a notable consortium of investors, including 432 Ventures, BitGo Ventures, Cooley, DEPO Ventures, Funfair Ventures, G20 Group, Gate Labs, Hyperithm Gate, IDEO Ventures, PEER VC, Stake Capital, and WAGMI Ventures. The involvement of BitGo Ventures, in particular, connects Cork to a major regulated custodian, underscoring its institutional focus.
The capital injection will fuel Cork's development roadmap. The team plans to roll out its first production-grade risk markets in the coming months and expand integrations with vault and asset issuers. This development addresses a critical gap as the tokenized RWA market, projected to exceed $10 trillion by 2030, lacks native, robust risk frameworks. Cork's approach contrasts with traditional off-chain risk management and the capital-inefficient over-collateralization common in DeFi, proposing instead a dynamic, data-driven model embedded directly into asset smart contracts.
