Spotlight on industry research

Thesis

Cost of Trust 2.0

Roughly 35% of the US labor market is trust-enabling work: auditors, escrow agents, intermediaries, paperwork. Blockchain reduces the cost of establishing that trust toward zero. Cost of Trust 2.0 is the framework we use to invest where that reduction is durable.

Crypto is now in the monetization phase of that thesis. Institutions and users are paying real money for the trust reduction blockchain enables. Our Onchain Revenue Report tracks $9.7B in user-paid fees across 1,124 protocols in H1 2025, up 41% year over year, and projects $32B+ in 2026. That number is the proof that real demand has arrived.

The framework grades every network on two mechanisms. The first is 0-to-1 enablement: economic activity that was not possible before blockchain. The second is trust-intermediary rent compression: activity that used to flow through middlemen now flowing through code. The investments we want to make do both.

Research

Onchain Revenue Report

The Onchain Revenue Report is the public-facing artifact of how we underwrite. It tracks user-paid fees across the protocols we evaluate and turns that data into a view of where real economic activity is compounding. The report ships annually. The dashboard updates continuously.

Press

1kx in the News

Where 1kx, our partners, and our portfolio companies show up across the media landscape.