Yield tokenization gave DeFi a new market. Risk tokenization gives it the risk infrastructure layer it never built. RiskON and RiskOFF split the risk of the underlying itself. One BTC or ETH in, two fully collateralized tokens out: RiskOFF with a floor on losses and RiskON with ~2x leverage. The split runs on options, not debt, so there are no margin calls, liquidations, or funding rates. RiskON and RiskOFF is just the beginning: the same engine can split risk along other lines too, like volatility, yield, and more.

Most people ask whether volatility is high or low. Almost nobody asks whether that volatility is mostly upside or mostly downside, and this week, upside is dominating, which is why BTC has climbed back above $84k, its highest since January. Our Historic Volatility Dashboard ( splits BTC volatility into those two halves, and they have pulled far apart. The upward moves are among the biggest of the last three years, while the downward moves are among the smallest. ETH looks the same. This is why the week has felt so easy, and why leverage feels safe again. Nothing has punished leverage lately, which is not the same as leverage being safe. Meanwhile, our Forecast Volatility Dashboard ( looks forward, not back, and it disagrees with the mood. The volatility it expects ahead is far higher than what the market has actually realized, and that expectation jumped this week. None of this means a fall is imminent. It means last week's calm isn't a guarantee for the next. Two things worth doing. Remember that nothing falling is not the same as being protected from falls. If you have been meaning to hedge, do it in a week like this one. Protection is cheap while falls are rare, and it never feels urgent until it is expensive. That's why we are building SMART Tokens like RiskON and RiskOFF so you can express your view on risk itself, and we are building the Risk Intelligence layer so you can measure that risk before you trade it. That is RiskFi. Making risk tokenizable, measurable, and tradable.

Yesterday the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023, but for much of the run-up, it was a toss-up whether it would raise or hold. Nobody could say for sure how BTC and ETH would react. A hike could have pushed them lower, a hold could have sent them higher, and you had to be positioned before you knew what was going to happen. This is the kind of period RiskOFF is built for. RiskOFF cannot lose more than 5% in an epoch, while its upside is capped near 6%, and between those strikes both RiskOFF and RiskON track the underlying. RiskON takes everything beyond the strikes at 2x leverage. Hold RiskOFF, and your loss on a bad decision stops at the floor. Now consider the other scenario: the Fed holds, and BTC and ETH run up. In RiskOFF, you are still in the trade, moving up with the underlying, and as the move climbs toward the cap, you can rotate into RiskON to take the rest of the move at 2x. Rotating between RiskOFF and RiskON gives you protection through the uncertain part and 2x leverage through the upswing. That is what RiskOFF and RiskON really are: a new way to express a view on the market, not just up or down, but how much of the move you want exposure to. They are the first two SMART Tokens, and we are building more. Another hike is expected this year, so get used to rotating between RiskOFF and RiskON on our testnet at before trading with real money on our mainnet. And while you are there, try out various simulations using our simulator on the dApp.

A new round of our Trading Competition is live on @Arbitrum. The last round saw tremendous growth in traders, as the prospect of an onchain marketplace for risk continues to resonate strongly across DeFi. Claim your free test BTC and ETH in the app, split them into RiskON and RiskOFF, swap between the two, and position for the market you expect. To qualify, you need $10,000 in testnet volume and should be active on at least three days. If you need Arbitrum Sepolia ETH for gas, the link is in the wallet dropdown on the dApp. You are scored 60% on P&L and 40% on Risk Control, so drawdowns count against you. A trader who made 20% with a 5% drawdown can rank above one who made 30% with a 25% drawdown. The top 100 earn RISK Points when the round closes on 14 October, and your rank determines how many. Every round you do well also adds to your Risk Championship total, the season-long standings that reward the top 10 traders who keep delivering round after round. Those still on the Championship table when the points program ends earn additional RISK Points on top of everything they collected along the way. For the thousands of you already in the competition, the new standings are out: see where you stand in the Risk Championship and who was promoted or relegated at the close of the last round.

For most of this year, holding BTC and ETH meant sitting through a slow bleed. BTC came off its October 2025 high of 125k and spent months grinding in the low sixties. ETH fell from about 4,700 to under 2,000 and stayed there. Nothing really moved, and it just wore people down. Then in the third week of August the market turned. In just days, BTC went from the mid-sixties to the high seventies, and ETH ran from just under 2,000 to above 2,500. Through all of that, the real question for HODLers was never whether to buy or sell. It was how much risk to hold while you waited, and crypto has never given us a clean way to answer that. RiskOFF is built for the grind. It is the defensive half of our RiskON/RiskOFF SMART Tokens, and it keeps you exposed to BTC or ETH while limiting your downside. What you give up is the upside beyond a cap, and everything above that cap flows to the other half. That cap is the signal. When a rally pushes RiskOFF toward its cap, the protection has done its job, and the cap is what holds you back. That is the moment to rotate into RiskON, the half that takes the leveraged upside above the cap, and it is one swap with no margin calls, no liquidation, and no funding to pay. So you wait out the storm in RiskOFF, then rotate into RiskON as the cap comes into view. You were forming a view on this market anyway. The only thing missing was an instrument that bounded your losses while you waited, then levered you up once the waiting was over.

The 'Risk Mode' Contest is LIVE 🤑 You have seen the ticker on our trading competition dashboard: every day it asks whether you are in RiskON or RiskOFF mode. You call whether BTC and ETH will go up or down tomorrow, see how the community voted, and find out the day after who read the market right. Those calls can now win you USDC 🤑 Go to connect your wallet, and make your pick. Predict daily for both BTC and ETH, because the contest comes down to one number: your longest win streak on either token. A streak is your run of consecutive winning calls; skipping an uncertain day does not break it, but a wrong call does. Just know that if you sit out too many, someone might out-streak you. 🥇 The longest streak takes $150 in USDC. Ties are settled by your streak on the other token. The contest runs until 14 September. Two more prizes below 👇

Since our Incentivized Testnet went live on @Arbitrum, plenty of new traders have joined. Welcome. You have joined the RiskFi movement. We have built a new primitive for tokenizing and trading risk: any asset, starting with BTC and ETH, can be split into RiskON for those who want more of its upside and RiskOFF for those who want downside protection without giving away all the upside—with no margin calls, no funding rates, and no liquidations. With RiskFi, risk becomes something you allocate, not something that happens to you. We believe this will unlock tremendous growth in crypto. For those new to The Risk Protocol, start with the litepaper in the thread below. It lays out the thesis behind our vision and walks through the finer mechanics of RiskON and RiskOFF. Glad to have you here.

We are growing rapidly on Arbitrum. Round 5 of our Trading Competition is only days old, and traders are joining at a faster rate than in any previous round. There are two ways to earn RISK Points from that growth. Trading in the round is one. Bringing your network with you is the other. How it works: generate your referral link at and share it. When someone joins through it and makes their first trade, the relationship locks in. Your referral gets 15% of their fees back. You earn 25% of what they pay. Refer 30 traders in a month, and your rate becomes 40%, forever. Lock in the referral relationship now, so the network you build now starts paying the day we reach mainnet. Mechanics:

The Risk Layer of crypto is coming to @Arbitrum 🔵 On the road to mainnet, we are deploying on Arbitrum Sepolia, and on 16 August, the next round of our Incentivized Testnet Trading Competition goes live there: 🧵

One of the most expensive line items in DeFi lending is the haircut. $AAVE advances about 73 cents against a dollar of WBTC and holds the rest back as a buffer against cascading liquidations if the market suffers a rout. Fundamentally, that buffer exists because BTC and ETH move too violently to be trusted at face value. Earlier I covered RiskON, the leveraged half of @TheRiskProtocol's split, and how it reaches ~2x without renting leverage. RiskOFF is the other half of that deposit, and it attacks the haircut directly. The pitch is simple to state and hard to build → hold $BTC or $ETH without holding the volatility that makes it expensive to use. Across last six years, which had two full cycles, 3 metrics tell the story: Annualised volatility (last six years): > RiskOFF BTC: 15.9% > RiskOFF ETH: 17.2% > Gold: 18.9% > S&P 500: 20.5% > Raw BTC: 62% / Raw ETH: 83% Worst 30 days: > RiskOFF BTC: −12.1% / RiskOFF ETH: -10.1% > Gold: -16% > S&P 500: -33% > Raw BTC: -52.7% / Raw ETH: -56% Upside foregone by RiskOFF, $1 held through the full window became: > RiskOFF BTC: $1.68 / RiskOFF ETH: $2.08 > Raw BTC: $8.69 / Raw ETH: $14.50 That gap is the trade, not a fee. Each epoch RiskOFF keeps gains up to a cap and passes everything beyond it to RiskON, the other half of the same deposit. Nothing leaks to an intermediary; one side buys calm, the other side gets paid in upside. A fair trade, and both sides chose it. It is also a better resting place than stablecoins, because RiskOFF still earns. $1 parked in a stablecoin is still $1 years later, while the same $1 in RiskOFF kept earning: up 68% on BTC and 108% on ETH. And USDC's worst day (88 cents, March 2023) was worse than any day either RiskOFF token had in the entire window. So who does this actually change the maths for? 2 main parties come to mind - protocol treasuries and borrowers. 1) A protocol treasury sitting on ETH > The only escape has been a bad binary - rotate into stables and give up every point of conviction, or hold and pray. > Using RiskOFF, part of the runway can stay in the asset the DAO believes in, and the worst month becomes -10.1% instead of -56%. 2) A borrower who needs lower volatility to avoid liquidation > The same deposit could unlock meaningfully more borrowing power, and it would get force-sold far less often into the exact falling market where liquidations cascade. > RiskOFF's daily beta on BTC is 0.20, which means when BTC moves by 10%, RiskOFF BTC moves by about 2%. That is the difference between collateral that feeds a crash and collateral that sits still through one. RiskON was the argument for concentrating risk when you have conviction. RiskOFF is the argument for what to do with the conviction you cannot afford to gamble. Most portfolios need both seats filled, and until now DeFi only sold one of them cleanly.

1987. 2008. 2020. Different crises, same ending: everything fell together. On paper, unrelated assets keep a portfolio safe; one falling is not supposed to drag the others. Then a real crisis arrives, and the correlations start to snap toward one. October 1987: markets in every major country crashed together in a single month. 2008: stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, and commodities fell together. March 2020: for a few days even gold and Treasuries fell with everything else. The reason is simple. In a crisis, assets stop being connected through their fundamentals and start being connected through their owners. Selling in calm periods is a choice; selling in stressed periods is often forced: margin calls, risk limits, redemptions. A forced seller sells whatever someone will still buy, so the pristine asset goes to cover the broken one, and a holding stays uncorrelated only until it shares an owner with something that is collapsing. Correlation, under enough stress, is a property of balance sheets: everyone's hedge turns into someone else's margin call. None of this makes diversification worthless. It is real, and it is worth having. But it is a statistical defense: it describes how assets have behaved, not how they will behave in the future, and in the moments when the whole market becomes one trade, the statistics loosen their grip. That is why protection written into the instrument itself matters. It is what RiskOFF is: a claim on BTC or ETH with a floor, paid for by giving up upside past a cap to RiskON. Its protection does not depend on correlation. It does not need bonds to zig when stocks zag. The floor comes from its structure alone, and structure does not get a margin call in a crisis.

The oldest option trade on record was placed over 2,500 years ago, by a philosopher, with pocket change, over olive oil. Aristotle tells it in the Politics. Thales of Miletus, tired of hearing that philosophy makes no money, read the winter sky and expected an unusually large olive harvest. He did not buy olives. He paid small deposits to reserve every olive press in Miletus and Chios for the coming season. If the harvest failed, he would lose only the small deposits. The harvest came in enormous, everyone needed presses at once, and Thales rented them out on his own terms. The story gets remembered as a forecasting win. The real invention was the structure. Thales capped his downside at the deposit and left his upside open. He was not predicting with more confidence than anyone else; he was shaping the payoff. That asymmetry, the right without the obligation, is the seed of every option product built in the two and a half millennia since. Twenty-five centuries later, we are building the risk layer of crypto, still the same business: turning risk from something you fear or avoid into something you exploit for alpha.

First a win at Paris Blockchain Week, now at @Arbitrum Founder House London. It is becoming clear: The Risk Layer is coming—a new primitive that turns risk from something to fear or avoid into something to harness for returns. And there is no better way to learn a new primitive than to trade it directly. RiskON and RiskOFF are live on Testnet: a BTC or ETH deposit split into two tokens with opposite jobs. RiskON is designed to deliver ~2X the asset's move, with no funding, no margin calls, no liquidations. RiskOFF gives up its upside beyond a certain point in exchange for a floor in the event of losses. Swap between them as the market turns: lean into the upside, step into calm, and learn the mechanics by trading them. Round 4 of our Trading Competition is now live. Finish in the Top 100 and earn protocol points.

BTC has spent the last 30 days or so inside one narrow band: $58,500 to $64,900. ETH has drifted the same way. Volatility on both is running far below its usual pace. Periods like this are where directional bets go to die quietly. Long gets chopped, short gets chopped, and waiting pays nothing. TradFi solved this decades ago. When markets go quiet, the desks do not go home—they trade the quiet itself. Covered calls, condors, carry: there is an instrument for every market environment, including the one where nothing happens. That is the range we are building into SMART Tokens: one split mechanism minting many shapes of risk—leverage, protection, yield strategies that earn while markets drift, and volatility itself, long or short—with no liquidations, no margin calls, no funding rate to manage. The future of DeFi is not more ways to bet on up. It is RiskFi—a way to earn in every environment.

Finance did not begin with chasing returns. It began with trading risk. London, 1686. Merchants in a coffee house paid underwriters to carry the risk of losing a ship at sea. One side paid to shed a risk it could not afford. The other side was paid to hold it. That trade predates the Bank of England by eight years. Chicago, 1848. Grain merchants opened an exchange, and within a few years a farmer could sell a crop he had not yet harvested and lock in the price today. Chicago again, 1973. An options exchange opened, and Black and Scholes published the formula to price optionality itself. Risk now had a market price of its own. The 1990s. Credit risk was cut away from the bonds that carried it and traded on its own. Three centuries, one direction: risk went from something you carried to something you could trade. As our manifesto puts it, every financial system that scales eventually becomes a system for managing risk rather than chasing returns. Crypto compressed most of that history into less than two decades. Spot markets, lending, derivatives—each rebuilt on-chain at astonishing speed. But the final layer, the one TradFi spent the longest building, got skipped. And even TradFi never finished the job: risk there is explicit in language but implicit in implementation, locked inside bilateral contracts, fund wrappers, and gatekeepers. Risk, in TradFi, is a prisoner of its own packaging. That is the opening. Crypto doesn't need to evolve over three centuries; we can go straight to the end state: risk as a first-class, on-chain primitive that can be isolated, priced, transferred, and composed. If tokenization freed the asset from its wrapper, RiskFi frees the risk from the asset. This is what we are building. Not the next product category. The next layer of finance. The RiskFi Manifesto:

Puts bleed premium. Perps bleed funding. There is a third door. Suppose there are two HODLers of BTC, but with opposite goals. One wants it with less risk, so they are willing to give up some upside in return for a floor on losses. The other wants amplified exposure and is willing to bear the extra risk to get it. Today, each pays a middleman. The first buys puts from an options desk and bleeds premium. The second opens a leveraged perp and feeds a funding meter that never stops, with a liquidation price waiting underneath. Notice that they both want exposure to BTC, but with different risk tolerances. So there is nothing to match, no trade to broker—the asset's own risk just needs to be divided. That is what a deposit in @TheRiskProtocol does. BTC or ETH goes in, and two SMART Tokens come out. RiskOFF is the calmer piece: for each 30-day epoch, it keeps a floor 5% below the starting price, and gives up the upside past a cap. RiskON is the leveraged part: the upside past that cap and the downside past that floor both land on it—which is exactly what makes it move at ~2X the underlying. Hold the piece that fits you. The cap is not picked; it is solved—set fresh each epoch at the level where the upside RiskOFF gives up is worth precisely what its floor costs. The pieces exactly offset, so no premium changes hands. In options language: a costless collar. And because both tokens are claims on the same pot, they always add back up to the underlying. The floor is not anyone's promise—it is enforced by how the deposit is divided. No funding meter, no margin calls, no liquidations, and no counterparty to trust. RiskON and RiskOFF are the first pair of SMART Tokens from The Risk Protocol. More are coming—each one a different way to hold exactly the risk you choose.