Cork is crossing meaningful milestones.
The year kicked off with major progress for risk tokenization, from mainnet launch to live pilots with leading vault managers. It’s all tied up with new capital backing the vision of tokenized risk as a core DeFi primitive.
Let’s dive in.
Cork Phoenix is Live on Ethereum Mainnet
A few months ago, Cork published its Phoenix litepaper. Phoenix introduces tokenized risk infrastructure to DeFi that enables markets to price, hedge, and transfer risk transparently through programmable pools.
Now Phoenix is live on the Ethereum Mainnet. Protocols, asset managers, and everyday users can now access structured risk markets designed to manage depegs, duration mismatches, and liquidity stress events in a capital-efficient way.
This launch marks the transition from concept to live infrastructure. Risk is no longer an abstraction that lives offchain, it’s programmable, tradable, and composable on Ethereum.
Introducing the Cork Pilot Program
With Phoenix live, Cork is moving from infrastructure to integration.
The Cork Pilot Program brings tokenized risk directly into production DeFi strategies through hands-on deployments with leading partners. The goal is simple: validate real-world use cases for programmable risk and demonstrate how structured protection improves capital efficiency for vault managers and liquidity providers.
The program kicked off with two flagship partners: Agglayer and Avantgarde.
Liquidity On-Demand on Agglayer
Cork is powering Liquidity On-Demand for Katana vaults in collaboration with Agglayer and its VaultBridge product. The integration enables vaults holding longer-duration or bridged assets to access redemption liquidity through Cork Pools.
Instead of forcing immediate unwinds during redemption pressure, vault managers can tap a pre-configured liquidity buffer backed by Cork underwriters. This improves user experience, reduces forced selling, and increases capital efficiency across the stack.
It’s a live test of how programmable risk markets can function as an onchain liquidity backstop.
Protected Loops on Avantgarde
With Avantgarde, Cork is piloting Protected Loops as a new product that can enable new forms of looping strategies for vaults.
Looping strategies can amplify yield, but they also concentrate risk. This is especially true for long-duration assets such as RWAs. Protected Loops are Cork’s take on a form of alchemy that isolates and prices that risk explicitly through Cork Pools. This allows vault managers to pursue new strategies that were previously impossible.
This pilot demonstrates how tokenized risk can serve as a structural layer beneath yield strategies beyond reactive protection and enable proactive strategies.
Cork Raises $5.5M to Build the Risk Layer for Onchain Finance
Last but not least: Cork closed a $5+ million seed round to accelerate the buildout of tokenized risk infrastructure. The round was led by Road Capital and a16z CSX, with participation from leading strategic investors across DeFi and institutional finance.
This raise marks a foundational milestone in the emergence of risk tokenization as a new infrastructure category. The capital injection enables Cork to expand protocol development, deepen integrations with vault managers and stablecoin issuers, scale audits and security, and grow the ecosystem around programmable risk markets.
Risk is becoming a first-class asset onchain and this raise fuels the roadmap to make it scalable, liquid, and composable.
Stay in the Loop
Phoenix is live. Pilots are underway. Risk markets are forming. On top of this, the team has also been featured in important conversations recently.
Watch Phil explain why DeFi is still the future:
And don’t miss Match Point at EthCC! RSVP here.
Cork will continue sharing research, insights, and updates on the tokenization of risk straight to your inbox. In the meantime, read the Cork blog and follow along on X to stay in the loop.
If you’re an asset issuer, risk manager, or builder working with risk, contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
Recent blog posts:
