Crypto Fashion Icon Co-Founder @Corkprotocol, @weareflowcarbon, @Corner3VC
New York, NY
Joined November 2009
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My new favorite work is Claudable.
Which Claude defines as:
Claudable /ˈklɔː.də.bəl/ (adjective)
Of a skill: capable of being performed by Claude at or above the required standard, at lower cost than a human, with review that takes less effort than the work itself.
Of a role: consisting mainly of Claudable skills, so that the work could be done by Claude under light human oversight and without anyone needing to put their own name, license, or relationships behind it.
Of a person: holding a professional value that lies mainly in Claudable skills, such that Claude could take over their function with little loss in output.
Usage: The word describes the work, not the worth of whoever does it. A role is Claudable to the degree that it involves digital inputs and outputs, judgment that can be written down, quick verification of results, and no dependence on personal accountability or relationships.
Example: "His weekly reporting is fully Claudable. His investor relationships are not."
Antonym: unclaudable, meaning dependent on tacit judgment, personal accountability, or trust that Claude cannot supply.
Derived forms: Claudability (noun), claudably (adverb), semi-Claudable (adjective, meaning partly replaceable but still needing a human owner).
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
"Nobody's going to hand an agent $100 million without risk controls underneath it." - @Philfog on @TheCryptoMavs.
Most agents have exactly one risk tool right now: sell everything, all at once, the second something looks wrong. Enough agents doing that together isn't risk management, it's a cascading failure.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
"If we had built mortgage-backed securities onchain, 2008 never happens."
@Philfog sat down with @TheCryptoMavs to unpack why risk management may be one of the biggest missing pieces in onchain finance.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Super excited for this launch! @dawninternet is cooking up something super exciting!
There is a once in a generation demand for new infrastructure.
Nearly $7T will be invested into AI infrastructure and data centers by 2030, and the people building it can't get financed fast enough.
DAWN tokenizes AI infrastructure so institutions and retail can access its cash flows as on-chain yield.
Read More Here 👇
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk
At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.
“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
The boats were already coming.
The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.
Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.
On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.
NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.
On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.
The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.
The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.
Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”
In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.
They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.
All available boats.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
A billion dollar liquidity facility can be pulled at any moment. Nothing stops it.
@Philfog on the latest Code to C-suite podcast. The facility stands ready to buy the asset at a known price whenever holders want out, and lending markets get built against it on that basis. Nobody contracts for the facility leaving, which it can do exactly when everyone needs it.
The commitment lives in a relationship, not in code. Cork puts it inside the contract.
Why does everyone keep assuming lending is risk free?
You are being paid to take risk!
How does @Morpho keep ending up in the middle of DeFi’s strangest blowups?
I'm talking about incidents like:
1⃣ @Paxos PAXG oracle misconfiguration
A decimal error massively overvalued PAXG collateral, letting one borrower take ~$230K USDC against roughly $350 of PAXG.
The funds were later reportedly repaid.
2⃣ @usualmoney USD0++ repricing
Usual suddenly lowered USD0++’s early-redemption floor to $0.87 while some Morpho markets still priced it at $1.
The result was a wave of forced deleveraging and liquidations.
3⃣ @StreamDefi xUSD collapse
Stream disclosed a $93M loss as xUSD collapsed.
Morpho markets still valued xUSD near $1, which prevented liquidations from clearing properly and left lenders exposed.
4⃣ @ResolvLabs USR exploit
An attacker minted ~80M unbacked USR from roughly $200K.
Morpho’s oracle kept valuing the collateral near $1 as the market price collapsed, leaving millions in bad debt.
5⃣ @re PT-reUSD liquidation cascade
A ~$320K trade moved PT-reUSD down only ~3%.
That was enough to wipe out ~$36.4M of highly leveraged Morpho positions today.
Morpho’s protocol was not hacked or exploited in any of these five cases.
It just keeps catching strays.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
Most of the liquidity you see onchain isn't guaranteed. It's assumed. @Philfog on the latest Code to C-suite podcast.
As assets move onchain, people are treating them as if their liquidity is guaranteed. It isn’t. The underlying might redeem same-day in traditional markets, but the token that represents it can operate onchain without the same liquidity depth. What holders are agreeing to is a promise of a best-efforts basis to give them liquidity. And best-efforts liquidity can break when exit pressure rises quickly.
That's the gap the market still isn't pricing. Not whether an asset is good, but whether you can get out of it, at a known price, when you actually need to. Cork exists to make that liquidity availability guaranteed.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
Liquidation Heist: Breaking down the reUSD oracle manipulation attack
Last night an unknown wallet executed an oracle price manipulation attack which exposed highly levered looping trades in the PT-reUSD-10DEC2026/USDC Morpho market to be liquidated, resulting in $35,188,279 of liquidations and a net profit of $920,781 for the attacker. In this post I break down exactly what happened and what we can learn from it.
The Morpho Market Setup
In the last months, loopers have been flocking to a new form of yield arbitrage between reinsurance capital from Re (.xyz) and onchain borrow rates. The market which was attacked was the PT-reUSD-10DEC2026/USDC, which at it’s recent peak had $70m of borrows.
The primary use case for this market was to loop reUSD Pendle PTs, which were consistently earning about 10-11% fixed yield against the 8.8% average borrow rate in this market. At a Liquidation Loan-To-Value (LLTV) of 91.5%, loopers could lever up to 10.5 times and as a result achieve an annual yield of 34.6%. Since reUSD is a senior tranche reinsurance token, that is immediately redeemable onchain against a cash buffer the size of 50% of its supply (source: re docs) - the risk of holding reUSD is in theory fairly low from both a strategy and duration point of view, making it a suitable candidate for looping trades. As a result, this Morpho market attracted tons of borrowers and lenders (including vaults from Wintermute, Steakhouse, RockawayX, Clearstar, Keyrock - none of which lost any funds in this event).
The crucial kink in the armor of this trade from a loopers point of view, was the oracle configuration. It is configured as: PT/USDC price = min(Pendle 15-minute PT-to-USDC TWAP, 6% linear-discount curve). So it is the lower of either of the two rates: A linear discount model or a 15min time weighted average price (TWAP) of the PT denominated in USDC.
Steakhouse eloquently expressed the case for this design (which I agree with) as “generally good practice for Pendle oracles to mitigate the possibility of bad debt in the event of an impairment in the underlying asset. “ In practice, what this means is that if there is an impairment of the underlying reUSD, the oracle will pick this up. The alternative which many markets deploy is to hardcode the price with a time-decay curve which can result in bad debt if the underlying is impaired as we have seen multiple times in the past. Fundamentally, the design is a risk transfer from borrowers to lenders. The position becomes safer for lenders to underwrite, but exposes borrowers at extreme levels of leverage to liquidation in the event of even a small impairment of reUSD or the PT.
The attack
On Aug-25-2026 04:28:47 AM UTC a wallet (0x854e3f3b521dbae34cb111ebef0dce41d8b5690d) freshly funded with 1m$ from Gate, mints 1m$ worth of reUSD, converts it to Pendle SY reUSD and proceeds to use the funds to aggressively purchase YT-reUSD-10DEC2026, which has the consequence of roughly doubling the YT price from 0.029 to 0.0575, consequently dropping the PT side to to 0.9425 at the bottom (the Pendle chart below doesn’t show the true bottom).
Because borrower LTV ratios are calculated based on the value of the PTs as collateral, and these dropped in value by ~3%, this was sufficient to cause a cascade of liquidations. Liquidators earn a 2.616% incentive to perform liquidations in this event, which resulted in $920,781 in collected oracle bonuses.
The main liquidator contract (0x51a453d677396F62fbb1dff9925a205fa96fAB5e) was funded by the same Gate wallet at the same time as the oracle manipulator address, so we can safely assume this was the same actor.
Borrowers lost a total of $1,203,803 from the oracle bonus and liquidation at an unfavorable market rate. Because of relatively high rate of effective leverage, the equity losses amounted to approximately 30-40% for the affected borrowers (see img below).
The legality of this market operation is dubious at best. Given the funds came from a CEX at a relatively large size, it should be possible to trace the manipulation back to a specific entity. The legal precedence here is unclear, but this smells like crime.
Oracle design
The fundamental question this event raises is one of oracle design. Is it wise, to configure markets with 15 min TWAPs on thin liquidity, and support 70m$ of borrow capacity? I would argue the design is better than hardcoding oracles as many PT looping markets do, which has blown up for lenders more than once. A major challenge for borrowers is understanding the risks present in oracle design - which I believe as an ecosystem we need to do a better job at communicating. It is a wide and unstandardized design space, that is highly technical, which has huge implications on the risk for both borrowers and lenders. The devil, is truly in the detail. In this case, the oracle meant a risk transfer from lenders to borrowers. At the same time, borrowers are able to capture 34.6% yields at 10x leverage, so you might rightfully say “no wonder this comes at some risk!” - If you are levered to your tits and earning 30%+ yield, then you simply cannot cry in the casino.
I do think there is a fair critique to the oracle set-up in terms of it’s configuration compared to it’s design objectives. If the goal is to guard against impairment of reUSD - the oracle configuration should perhaps have some check against underlying impairment, before printing a lower value. This could balance both the needs of borrowers and lenders, without enabling this type of heist. Relying on Pendle secondary prices at a 15m TWAP, can be relatively easily manipulated, even with $30m+ of liquidity, as we saw today. At the same time, we cannot truly say the current design had a “bug”, in a sense the bug for the borrower is a feature for the lender.
Every blow-up is a chance to make the system itself more resilient, having spent a fair bit of time underwriting vault risk I think it is clear we have come quite far over the past year in terms of risk management and oracle configurations, but there is more work to be done. Onwards.
Give @robdogeth to stay up to date on crypto and vault risk.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
At Arbitrum Open House, Cork, @bondoncredit and @Zyfai_ got two AI agents to price and settle a risk contract onchain, with real capital and no human approving the trade.
One agent wanted coverage on a position it couldn't hold, the other priced it.
It cleared on @arbitrum.
Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾) retweeted
Very interesting take.
Crypto is definitely better suited to provide infrastructure to novel markets not yet dominated by incumbent players, like:
* The retail Eurodollar: USDT
* Ungated everything leverage: HL
* Ungated settlement with slow finality: ETH/ SOL
* Predictions - first vintage: Poly
* Digital collectibles / derivatives: NFT, Courtyard, etc.
The rest is going to be absorbed by traditional players and will morph into either corporate infrastructure, or be bribed as a way to temporarily arb regulation.
Founders are at a crossroad between:
* Imitating crypto category leaders
* Create new markets and become category leaders
* Repurpose for the regulated financial landscape
* Play any narrative
We should all ask ourselves who we are and what we stand for, and it is a profoundly difficult question.
some bear market thoughts on crypto:
1) we're in the peak depth: almost everyone is done selling - we just lack marginal buyers yet
either we get capital rotation back from ai soon (q4 maybe?) or we remain flat for some time
2) fundraising is p bad rn, particularly early-stage
there's no infra trade left and most crypto vcs have either:
- no money
- or no idea on how to fund 'products'
most got burnt out due to overfunding bs infra in '23-24 which were all down only coins (so no exits)
all risky capital is funding ai now
as a founder: unless you've some significant traction or big pedigree, it's a waste of time to even think of fundraising
3) teams are shutting down left & right - mostly due to lack of funds or PMF
which directly impacts job markets - there's some hiring on institutional side (nyc-based) but apart from that, the hiring has decreased significantly
only companies with huge treasuries are able to hire and asian projects are hit the hardest from what i can see
capital is a huge moat for startups for 'right to win' - for otherwise capital-starved early-stage
4) there's a huge gap in early-stage funding:
best time to angel invest at a low val or even start micro-accelerators
due to lack of infra money, hackathon/grants have now reduced by ~95% now
earlier l1 grants/funding used to attract a significant number of early-stage teams - further driving away talent
if fundraising doesn't return by q1' 27 - innovation will significantly shrink and crypto will become a 'legacy industry'
5) crypto is now just 'financial markets' - there's broadly four markets with PMF:
- memecoins & spot (solana/rh)
- perps (hl)
- yields (eth)
- prediction markets (poly)
+ stablecoin payments
and then a long tail markets like pokémon cards etc
all non-financial protocols on governance, social, proof of xyz, identity, gaming etc are now dead - they're now just a feature on speculative apps
6) everyone's either:
- building an 'everything exchange'
coinbase, robinhood, solana, pump, axiom, fomo, polymarket, jupiter, phantom
- or packaging yield
usdt, usdc, usdg, morpho, aave, kamino
7) there're only 2 types of chains left:
- general community-led: eth & solana
- distribution-led: base, robinhood, tempo, bsc
rest all are dead or will be dead soon
8) the survived teams are incredibly product-focussed now:
- better trading execution
- ux/mobile focus
finally, building good products and nailing distribution is the only way to win
the whole game is now like building a fintech app with crypto rails
ofc, speculation will always be the holy grail of financial markets and even stocks & gold now trade like crypto - everything is now a narrative trade!
9) there are some teams which are building non-crypto infra (eg. robotics/data collection/depin types) funded by crypto VCs:
but we all know they're mostly a scam looking to launch high float, low fdv tokens (and will probably fail)
and will abandon the tokens whenever they get some PMF and call it 'credits' (iykyk)
10) there're some incredible liquid opportunities
but with teams giving up/shutting down/abondoning - it's incredibly hard to judge or filter out quality
but i'd still say holding good quality liquid tokens have the best r/r
a simple filter is just buy tokens which has:
- good treasury
- founder-led who understands distribution
- upcoming sector tailwinds
(happy to share my list)
11) there's only few traders left in trenches:
but they're incredibly smart and they can make money in any market now
many are now trading stocks and killing it - as they're the pro narrative traders
safe to say: all crème layer genz traders have traded/are trading crypto
this core audience is always on lookout to try out new experimentations
12) stablecoin payments:
they’re p huge in the shadow economy (eg. an Indian manufacturer buying from china in USDT to escape taxes & regulation hassle)
but organising a shadow market is a challenging and unsolved problem
agentic payments are a huge opportunity but no PMF yet (typical coldstart problem) - all numbers pushed by base/solana are just wash volumes
i'd bet on stripe/tempo (+ trad companies) to gain a lion share in regulated stablecoin payments just because of distribution
13) opportunities now lie on building:
- better trading interfaces & modality (via ai, mobile)
- more novel markets (eg. compute, emerging market coverage, metadao)
- anything around token or memecoins (speculative mechanics)
- cool fintech ideas which failed due to banking/regulations (eg. neobanks)
and ofc, picks & shovels around this
biggest bet: post ai, speculation and trading as a way to show conviction on anything socially will increasingly rise and crypto is the de-facto rails for any new markets
14) and yess, memecoins (internet culture coins) will come back extra-ordinarily as macro moves and capital rotates from ai
it'll bring interest back to crypto and once again, sidelined VCs will be salty
i still remain cautiously optimistic on broader crypto and p optimistic on crypto as 'anything market' rails 🫡
Is there anyone out there who is in favor of this EIP?
I don’t think I’ve seen a single post praising or defending it.
🚨 New EIP: Tapered Issuance Burn
We just submitted an EIP to ethereum/EIPs: a minimal, market-driven fix to Ethereum's issuance policy removing the incentive for stake growth beyond 50% of ETH supply.
EIP-8361 by @pintail_xyz, @jdetychey, @dapplion, @pa7x1, @ladislaus0x & @drakefjustin 🧵
Well now…
we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models. we are sharing what we have learned so far. thanks to @huggingface for the partnership on this.
openai.com/index/hugging-fac…
The way risk has been bought and sold hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.
But thats all about to change!
OpEd: 🗣️ The AI agent economy is already here, and it's only going to get even bigger.
But Cork co-founder Phil Fogel argues that agentic finance is still missing one critical layer: risk infrastructure.
Read on to find out why. 👇
coinmarketcap.com/academy/ar…
DeFi needs more privacy in order to really scale!
The @zama confidential USDC vault from @SteakhouseFi is now in the top 10 largest USDC vault across all chains on @Morpho and top 20 across all assets and all chains