On Tuesday, KOR Protocol, the creative asset clearinghouse built on the Base blockchain announced a $7.5 million Series A. Notably, the backers include 1kx, Blockchain Capital, and others at a $100 million valuation.
KOR Protocol set to foster creative asset clearinghouse
Besides the aforementioned financiers, KOR Protocol is backed by previous investors across crypto, entertainment, and emerging technology, including Republic Crypto, Sfermion, Alumni Ventures, SevenX, and others.
Notably, the Series A round is geared toward developing KOR’s upcoming phase of protocol development and ecosystem growth. The funds will also be used toward partner integrations and launch readiness, before the platform’s planned token launch.
Although AI has dramatically reduced the cost of creation, it has also vastly elevated the barriers to being discovered, distributed, and paid. The advent of AI means that while independent talent now has the tools to make professional work at its disposal, the coordinated system to transform that work into opportunity is lacking.
KOR is addressing this bottleneck by developing the clearinghouse for the market. KOR will not only enable creators to register their output but also leverage the AI agents to guide talent. Further, the platform will create a convergence between opportunities and the right labels, agencies, brands, curators, and other ecosystem players.
As a result, payments will move a lot faster and without any major opacity – alongside programmable splits across all the people and partners involved.
Entertainment has the highest upside
According to the KOR Protocol, starting with entertainment makes sense as it is here where the most mismatch is clearly visible. Entertainment space has the largest attention flows, and one of the clearest gaps between what gets consumed and who captures the value.
Appointed as the CEO in late 2025, Ritty Quin is slated to spearhead KOR’s next phase of product development, protocol adoption, and growth across the wider creator economy. Quin is a PhD holder and UCL alumnus, starting his career at ByteDance before moving into marketing roles in the Web3 space.
Quin is also a YouTube Partner and electronic music producer signed to Live Nation Asia, with more than 30 million impressions across social media. His music has appeared on Beatport’s Top 100 House Charts, BBC Radio 1 Dance, and he headlined Creamfields Asia in 2025. Commenting on the development, Quin said:
“AI has removed many of the barriers to creating professional work, but it has not fixed what happens next. As both an artist and an operator, I know how difficult it is to translate strong work and audience momentum into distribution, partnerships, and sustainable revenue. KOR is building the system that connects those pieces by helping talent get recognized earlier, reach the right opportunities, and build lasting careers.”
KOR metrics at a glance
Since its launch, KOR Protocol has seen over 1 million sign-ups, 400,000 connected wallets, and more than 1,000 partners. It has also generated over $2 million in gross revenue.
Deployed on Base, KOR Protocol leverages the network’s consumer-grade UX, native USDC liquidity, account abstraction infrastructure, and growing ecosystem of agent and payment standards.
Instead of building a new chain from scratch, the protocol is designed to compose with existing infrastructure, including asset standards, attestation systems, agent identity frameworks, HTTP-native payments, cross-chain intents, and stablecoin settlement.
Several applications are already being developed over the KOR Protocol, such as KORUS – a music remixing and creation tool that lets artists release official music packs for fans and creators to remix.
