Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) and Road Capital are leading a $5.5 million seed round for Cork, a startup focusing on a new “onchain infrastructure category,” tokenized risk.
In short, Cork is building tools to make implicit risks in the emerging category of real-world assets transparent and tradable.
The startup’s “programmable risk layer” will enable asset managers, issuers, and other stakeholders to launch custom swap markets to improve “redemption liquidity, risk transparency, and market confidence for their onchain assets.” This offers essentially a new DeFi “primitive” for pricing the chance that yield-bearing stablecoins and other RWAs fail.
Cork’s infrastructure can also be used to price more crypto-native products, like vault tokens and liquid staking tokens. Its composable risk primitives are designed to integrate directly with ERC-4626 vaults, ERC-20 tokens, and “onchain credit structures,” becoming a “programmable component of onchain yield infrastructure.”
Standardizing risk for assets like stablecoins and restaking tokens allows risk to be measured and compared, and unlocks hedging opportunities and liquidity backstops, minimizing the downside of depegs and rug pulls, and “reducing the risk of cascading liquidity failures.”
Cork gives “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,” Cork co-founder Phil Fogel said. “We are building the foundational risk infrastructure layer that the next wave of users, both institutional and retail, will look to leverage.”
The team plans to roll out its first production-grade risk markets over the coming months, with plans to expand integrations with unnamed vault and asset issuers.
432 Ventures, BitGo Ventures, Cooley, DEPO Ventures, Funfair Ventures, G20 Group, Gate Labs, Hyperithm Gate, IDEO Ventures, PEER VC, Stake Capital, and WAGMI Ventures also supported the seed round.
Editor’s note (Jan. 21 —15:15 UTC): a16z CSX is Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto startup accelerator.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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