Tokenizing private credit won’t fix who bears the losses

Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, CEO of Cap, argues that while tokenization improves settlement speed and transparency in private credit, it fails to address fundamental underwriting flaws and misaligned incentives. Despite tokenized real-world assets reaching $33 billion and private credit accounting for over $18 billion of that total, the sector faces rising default rates and significant liquidity backlogs. Fitch Ratings reported a 5.8% default rate in U.S. private credit as of January 2026, with investors facing $9.7 billion in unmet redemption requests by the second quarter of 2026. Tokenization currently acts as a distribution channel rather than a structural fix, often leaving investors exposed to the same principal-agent risks found in traditional finance. Peillard proposes a shift toward on-chain models where originators must stake their own capital as collateral to ensure accountability. By using smart contracts to enforce these guarantees, the system can ensure that losses are absorbed by the underwriters rather than passive capital providers. This approach leverages blockchain for objective enforcement while maintaining the necessity of human expertise in credit assessment.