Cork Pilots: Protected Loops on Avantgarde

Protected Loops are going live soon on Avantgarde. By using Cork’s risk infrastructure, Avantgarde will alchemize real-world assets (RWA) to enable looping strategies that were previously impossible.

Cork is introducing pilots where new financial primitives aren’t just proven in theory but with real capital, real partners, and real constraints. Together with a set of trusted operators, Cork will deploy Phoenix primitives in production environments that tokenize risk for new market structures and prepare them for scale.

We’re excited to launch a Protected Loops pilot with Avantgarde in an important step forward for RWAs and onchain risk management.

Recap: Protected Loops

Protected Loops are designed to shift duration and liquidity risk away from vaults and their users and onto a market of underwriters who are explicitly compensated for taking that risk. Instead of forcing vaults to manage long redemption timelines or illiquid collateral internally, Protected Loops externalize that exposure into a Cork Pool.

For a deeper dive into the mechanics and design philosophy, revisit Protected Loops.

Avantgarde’s Role in RWAs

Avantgarde is the perfect partner to launch a pilot for Protected Loops. As vault curators, they design and manage vaults that give users exposure to sophisticated strategies with assets such as RWAs that make institutional-style exposure accessible onchain.

RWAs represent one of the largest opportunities in onchain finance being a roughly $600 trillion global asset class that is only beginning to be reflected onchain. As they become usable as collateral, they unlock entirely new yield avenues for vaults once the proper risk management is in place.

The Avantgarde team understands the nuances of RWA collateral, the expectations of capital allocators, and the operational realities of running vaults with real assets and real redemption constraints.

Why Protected Loops on Avantgarde Matter

By integrating Protected Loops, Avantgarde becomes the first curator to deploy this primitive in a live RWA context. This, in turn, provides Cork with exactly the kind of production feedback the Pilot Program is designed to surface.

Protected Loops are, in a sense, a form of alchemy, or RWAlchemy in this case. Cork operates as a risk transformation layer where any reference asset that has an associated Swap Token can inherit the liquidity profile of the collateral asset backing that pool. In practical terms, an illiquid or long-duration RWA can be transformed to behave more like a liquid stablecoin from a redemption and risk perspective.

This is powerful because it means that the economic qualities of an asset, such as its yield, credit exposure, or duration, can be decoupled from its liquidity constraints. For RWA vaults, this is a prerequisite for scale.

For Avantgarde specifically, Protected Loops enable the curation of RWA strategies that would otherwise be impractical onchain. Long-duration assets can be now used more confidently as collateral and liquidity risk is explicit and structured. Ultimately, this widens the design space for what Avantgarde can offer vault users.

More to Come

RWAlchemy is only the latest step in an ongoing journey to introduce Cork Phoenix primitives to the broader DeFi landscape. Cork is already providing on-demand liquidity to Katana through a partnership with Agglayer, demonstrating how other ways in which tokenized risk can benefit DeFi ecosystems.