Why Private Credit Is Moving Onchain — And What DeFi Gets Right and Wrong About It

How I see this is, especially for private credit, not every private credit asset belongs on-chain. If you tokenize something highly liquid and offer daily liquidity, you're just creating a new form of mismatch. So, the way we think about it is: What is compatible on-chain and solves a need for the on-chain ecosystem, particularly within DeFi or what we're talking about here?

Especially with a lot of the yield that comes from DeFi, it's cyclical. It's incentive-driven, there's leverage, and there's trading. Those are useful, but they're not very stable. With private credit, we're looking at a new source of yield—income from the real economy and cash flows. We're also looking at durable yield that is uncorrelated. And how I frame this is composability, programmability, and accessibility. These are the key things that I look at. What will be different from here?

Nothing said on the Edge podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice.

Welcome to the Edge podcast. I'm DeFi Dad here with Nomadic. Today's show features a roundtable discussion on private credit tokenized on-chain. We're joined by David Vatchev, head of tokenization at Fasanara, Arpan Gautam, founder of Noon, and Rob Montgomery, co-founder of Infinify. Guys, thanks for joining us. Nomadic, I'm going to pass it over to you so we can get started.

Yeah, guys, thanks for being here. It's always funny acting like we haven't been talking for 15 minutes before the podcast, but I want to set up why we wanted to have this conversation. So, in the TradFi world, we've been hearing about a lot of cracks forming among big, notable names in private credit. They've had to resort to capping redemptions as people have tried to pull out of these funds. We're talking about names like Blue Owl, BlackRock, and Apollo.

I think many in the crypto community are seeing this, and they don't want it to spill over into our little on-chain world. So, we're going to talk through all of this today. We want to get into why not all private credit is the same and where the real risks still live, why private credit is moving on-chain to begin with, and how Fasanara structures short-duration, asset-backed credit for DeFi allocators.

1. How Fasanara thinks about private credit in DeFi

Then we've got Rob from Infinify and Arpan from Noon. They're going to talk about their own diligence process and how they both independently came to allocating a lot of money and funds to Fasanara products, and then just what tokenized private credit needs to get right before it becomes a big DeFi yield layer.

So, why don't we just start with David? I think it would be good if we got a baseline of what Fasanara is, how you think about private credit, what makes your approach different, and why it naturally led toward tokenization in crypto?

Yeah, lovely to be here. Thank you very much for having me. I'm a follower of the show, so it's a real pleasure. This is a super interesting topic to discuss and very much top of mind for everyone.

Just for context, Fasanara is an alternative asset manager, and our main focus is within the asset-backed lending side of private credit. I'll go into it in a bit more detail, but the important distinction is that we don't just view private credit as a homogeneous category. We effectively finance real-world cash flows. A business sells goods or services, an invoice is created, and capital is advanced against the receivable. Repayment comes from the collection of that receivable.

Importantly, you're not simply making a long-term loan or a bet on enterprise value, but financing contractual cash flow. These are short-duration, self-liquidating assets. This is really what's so exciting about this, and we can go into a bit more about how that fits into DeFi.

Importantly, and quite uniquely with Fasanara, we're an FCA-regulated asset manager that also has an in-house crypto hedge fund in Fasanara Digital. We have both a role in RWA issuance and in generating yield from contractual cash flows, but at the same time, we deploy capital on-chain constantly. Our view is: What can we do to merge the two together? How can we get the benefits of the consistency of yield from the real world and marry that with what we would do as a crypto-native hedge fund in terms of deploying capital?

My role as head of tokenization really sits at the intersection of that. We're constantly coming up with new constructs and new ideas to make sure that what we have from a TradFi sense can also fit and be valuable on-chain.

2. What is infiniFi building?

So, part of the reason we first learned about Fasanara—at least I was introduced to the name—is because of Arpan and Rob. Arpan, you're building Noon, and Rob, you're building Infinify. I think it would be great to remind the audience about what you have been building, respectively, so that we can better understand why you've ultimately been allocating through your respective protocols to Fasanara. Rob, do you want to kick off first? Tell us a bit more about Infinify.

I'm happy to get into it. So, what we're doing with Infinify is basically taking a classic borrow-short, lend-long structure, which is what you see a lot of in traditional banking. We're using two different types of depositors—duration depositors and liquid depositors—to autonomously ladder a portfolio.

We then take the capital that we get from these different sets of depositors and deploy it into a bunch of duration assets according to that ladder. Which is basically: How much do we have in 4-week assets? How much do we have in 1-week assets? How much do we have in up to 13-week assets?

Because of the way we do this, a lot of our liquid depositors still have instant liquidity available most of the time while they're making a higher rate of return than they would on corresponding liquid assets. Our duration depositors are able to get a higher rate of return than they would in the corresponding duration asset.

For example, if you were to go into the longest-term LYUSD, the 13-week tranche, you're going to be making a higher return than you would by just sitting in M Global, which is the tokenized receivables fund that we anchored with Fasanara and Midas.

Now, why we got interested in this, why this makes sense to us, is that we've seen over the past year that crypto-native duration yields have compressed significantly. I'll say there's a little bit of a resurgence in some of them, but the biggest scale is coming from these off-chain yields. We see that becoming more and more the pattern.

On-chain sources of duration capital, things like Pendle and Ethena, have seen their yields compress. Where the future lies is in getting yield from off-chain and bringing that on-chain. When we were looking for that, we were looking for a nice, very diversified portfolio. M Global perfectly fits that, having around 700,000 different assets in its backing.

We were looking for something that had relatively fast redemption. M Global fits that bill; I believe it's a 5-week redemption asset. We were also looking for something that had an already proven track record of good returns and safety. We knew the guys at Fasanara, and we knew some of what they had.

We brought our needs to David and said, “Hey, we've heard of this fund. Is it possible that we could get it tokenized and brought on-chain?” After some back and forth, we became the anchor investor in M Global. It's now live via Midas, and there's a lot of really exciting stuff in the pipeline for that asset. We've got a $30 million position in it. It's providing about 7.25% currently, and we're excited to see it grow.

3. What is Noon building?

And Arpan, can you tee up what you're doing at Noon as well?

Yeah, for sure. We set out Noon with a very simple mission: We wanted to be the set-it-and-forget-it asset for everyone around the world. What that means is that, through the cycle, we wanted to offer the highest low-risk yields for people. Initially, people could use that composably cross-chain. Eventually, we wanted everyone to be able to use that composably and liquidly, any way they wanted to.

In order to deliver that, we started off with pretty traditional deployment strategies: T-bills, funding-rate arbitrage, and a few others in DeFi and TradFi. But very quickly, especially in down cycles like the one that we've been in for the last little while, it becomes hard to keep consistently outperforming the market with cyclical yield.

So, we had to go out into the market and try to buy into counter-cyclical strategies, or at least strategies that perform well when markets may not be performing as well or when yields are not naturally printing as high. I think that's when David and Fasanara came to our attention.

We decided to go down a slightly different path. For various similar reasons, we've basically decided that we did not want a tokenized asset because we didn't want to add another layer of smart contract risk. So, we directly deployed into one of Fasanara's funds, the Tactical Credit Fund.

The reasons were very similar: the short duration, the fact that it's asset-backed, and the fact that it's extremely diversified. We structured redemptions, not just with Fasanara but with a series of our counterparties, to offer very quick, kind of T+5 unwinding of our entire position across all of our CDL.

We thought that would be a critical part of our suite of deployment strategies to make sure that we are delivering on our promise to deliver that highest through-cycle yield.

4. The opportunity for tokenization is huge!

So, guys, one of the biggest names in the world and one of the most reputable names to really lean into tokenization has been BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. He called Ethereum, I believe, the toll road to tokenization. David, you're head of tokenization at Fasanara. I'm wondering how you think about the opportunity of tokenization, and I'm also wondering how you explain that to your own investors.

It's a talking point that's showing up in mainstream news, and it wasn't the talking point I thought would translate to the mainstream media. Tokenization is an abstract concept for a lot of people, but it seems to have caught on. I would love to get your take on that.

In DeFi, yield shouldn't come from chasing dashboards or timing markets. KPK runs non-custodial vaults and on-chain funds built for stable, risk-adjusted returns. Capital is allocated across curated strategies and managed by automated agents that act within seconds under predefined controls. No custody, no manual intervention, just disciplined execution on-chain. If you're allocating capital and want sustainable yield with stronger controls, visit kpk.io.

DeFi investors are demanding better yield and Apex is delivering. Apex is the first dividend-backed stablecoin protocol bringing enhanced public market yield on-chain backed by Strategies Perpetual Preferred Stock Stretch. With APYUSD, anyone can earn dividend-driven real yield fully on-chain live on Ethereum. To learn more, go to apyx.fi.

Meet Altura, the vault where stablecoins earn real yield backed by hedged strategies like funding rate arbitrage, market making, and RWA gold with trusted partners like Pendle, Merkel, and Turtle. Deposits are now live across six EVM chains. Start earning at altura.trade.

It's super interesting. And yes, as part of the day job, it's something I think about all day long. Really, as Arpan and Rob have been stating, it involves product, partnership, distribution, and structuring. There are quite a few elements to this.

What is super interesting, from the comments that were just made here, is why people are drawn to private credit tokenization, particularly now. Why did money market funds or tokenized instruments pick up at the time when they did? It was a case where interest rates in TradFi terms were way higher than DeFi terms. This was post-Terra Luna, after interest rates spiked, and immediately all these on-chain allocators just needed something—the cash equivalent, the easiest thing to understand—so there was immediate product-market fit.

Now, here we are again in a similar scenario. The ecosystem has evolved, but yields are effectively compressed. So people are starting to look at something that was mentioned earlier as a common theme around this: it's uncorrelated, diversified, granular, minimum-volatility, and, importantly, completely uncorrelated from public markets as well as crypto. And that's the key thing.

I can offer you, within various funds that we have here, something that is way higher-yielding. I can add leverage onto it. I can go into perps. I can give you that, but that's not what DeFi wants at the moment.

To bring this back to your question of what the tokenization opportunity is: it's huge. At the moment, something like 0.25% of all real-world assets and financial securities have been tokenized. The opportunity is huge, but I don't really look at it this way. Rather than how big it is, I look at what actually makes sense to be on-chain.

Why this is now being taken more seriously is that people are looking at some of the key benefits here: obviously the settlement, the operational friction, and the like, but really, beyond the operations and the cost efficiencies, the capital efficiencies and the collateral mobility. It's a combination of the cost as well as the new distribution and business models, and that's why it's coming together.

How I see this is that, especially for private credit, not every private credit asset belongs on-chain. If you tokenize something highly liquid and offer daily liquidity, you're just creating a new form of mismatch. The way we think about it is: what is compatible on-chain and solves a need for the on-chain ecosystem, particularly within DeFi or what we're talking about here?

Especially with a lot of the yield that comes from DeFi, it's cyclical, incentive-driven, and there's leverage and trading. Those are useful, but they're not very stable. With private credit, we're looking at a new source of yield. We're looking at income from the real economy and cash flows. We're also looking at durable yield, which is uncorrelated.

How I frame this is composability, programmability, and accessibility. These are the key things that I look at. What will be different from here? The final thing, which was added in some super-important comments that both Arpan and Rob made, would be a new construct, whether it be redemptions and the like.

These are very different from the TradFi fund. I haven't simply taken it and transposed it on-chain. We've made several accommodations, working back and forth with various curators within DeFi and working with Arpan and Rob hand in hand to understand what the right product is, and then deliver it where it's needed.

5. What are valid vs overstated concerns about private credit onchain?

Yeah, and David, we were talking offline. I was under the assumption that Fasanara was creating products and then they were being brought on-chain, but now you're intentionally building things for the on-chain world, not just transposing what you already have into this on-chain world.

I want to talk a bit more about some of the fear that's been out there in the ecosystem and dig into that a bit more. I think both Arpan and Rob have touched on a lot of these issues and why some of the solutions that we've talked about, or are going to talk about more, allay some of those concerns.

What we're seeing out there are these things called gates, illiquidity in these private credit funds, and opaque marks, so people may not actually understand how the NAV is calculated. Maybe it's quarterly, maybe it's monthly, but there are periods of time when people don't really know how much of something they hold.

So I guess, from Fasanara's perspective, what do people get wrong when they paint this whole sector with a broad brush? And where are these concerns actually valid?

These concerns are valid, and it comes down to something similar to what we're discussing here with a TradFi fund fitting on-chain. We're effectively taking something that is inherently illiquid by design and packaging it in a construct—especially when sold to retail—under the assumption that it's liquid, and that's the mismatch.

If you think about how private markets are typically distributed to retail off-chain, I'm talking about, it isn't really through your Robinhood or a platform where you just buy your NVIDIA or Tesla. It's typically through these wealth channels. So that tells you where we are in the industry. Typically, there isn't that understanding of the underlying, and it requires a lot from an RIA or a wealth channel to be able to explain this. Typically, it isn't a full allocation; it's simply a percentage depending on people's risk profile.

For all of our investors—or the bulk of them—we have no direct-to-retail exposure. It's insurance funds and pension funds. They understand the asset-liability mismatch, and they're there for the long term.

With these gates, what's happened is that you have to look at this as gates being there for a reason. But the reason for this is that everybody will have to pay the price if this is sold indiscriminately at the wrong price. In private markets, there isn't really an actual market price. If I was to turn the book upside down and give a value for it, it's very much, “What will somebody pay me?” This is the inherent nature: there isn't a listed market.

As a result of that, you have this illiquidity premium, which gives the yield that Arpan and Rob were talking about, but part of that is structural, and that gives you the independent alpha. What's certainly important in how we look at it from a Fasanara perspective is that we don't want any single-name concentration risk, especially in corporate lending or direct lending.

What's happened here is that you've had single-name exposure. Somebody's given a direct loan, as an example. I'll just walk you through one scenario: if you apply an EV-to-EBITDA multiple in the future to an overleveraged company, all of a sudden Claude releases a new model and all AI sales reps are wondering what to do. The multiple of that company just completely compresses.

If you have 1 loan or 2 or 3 loans within your book, you can see how the compression immediately happens. Everybody runs for the gates. These are multi-year term loans; they can't exit. Then you have this complete follow-on effect as one sees somebody exit.

So how we look at this is that we're looking at short-duration receivables. One, they're asset-backed. Two, they're diversified. Three, they naturally are short-duration—30-, 60-, and 90-day invoices. That matters because the shorter assets naturally convert back into cash quickly.

The portfolio being granular removes the reliance on 1 borrower. Finally, the yield comes from specific real economic activities that are asset-backed, rather than hopes for the future depending on some multiple. The combination of that allows what we do to be diversified and uncorrelated, but also to withstand the test of time.

6. Why Noon tokenized yield deployed directly into Fasanara

What Rob was saying—that trend, as I said, is in our flagship credit fund—we've never had a down month since inception as a result of that.

I think one thing to emphasize there is that a lot of the guys you've seen in the press who have hit these redemption gates, where redemptions have been paused or something like that, had 2 things going on. As David mentioned, a lot of these guys were giving out loans in longer durations.

7. How Noon manages liquidity demands with Fasanara exposure

Again, private credit covers a huge spectrum, right? A lot of private credit can be loans based on corporate balance sheets and things like that, but with 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, and sometimes even 7-year terms. These kinds of funds find it extremely difficult to honor instant redemptions or rapid redemptions beyond a certain date that they planned for.

That's one thing that happened, which Fasanara, I think, when we did our due diligence on it, was very different because Fasanara, I believe—David, correct me if I'm wrong—but your average loan duration is something closer to 4 months than 4 years, right?

Yeah, even less than that, to some extent—probably nearer to 100 days or so.

Exactly. The second thing that's actually different, and which we were very happy with when we did our due diligence, is that a lot of these funds are getting into a little bit of trouble because markets go up. They have a bunch of retail investors whom they've explicitly marketed to, who are saying, “Yep, this looks like a great product. Let me get in.”

But when the market goes down, these same retail investors, as David was saying, get on Robinhood or whichever app they're using and quickly try to sell. That kind of volume volatility, or buying and redemption volatility, is very difficult for these private credit funds—especially ones with longer-duration loans—to account for.

What Fasanara has done, and they've been very pragmatic and disciplined, is that they haven't gone down the retail route. They don't have a bunch of retail customers who are looking at the first sign of market turmoil and trying to exit. That's why I believe, David—and I don't think you guys had significant exits at the same time as the BlackRocks, the Blue Owls, and so on—which meant that you didn't have to panic or have these sorts of forced policies around your redemptions. That allowed you guys to have a stress-free existence, right?

Arpan, by the way, even with the shorter-duration assets that underpin Fasanara Yield, I'm still wondering if you can talk about how you designed—how does Noon design—a product like sUSN to be backed by that shorter-duration asset, which is still very long compared to the kind of liquidity that your customers demand?

I mean, with Noon sUSN, you can instantly sell it through a DEX, but I believe—and correct me if I'm wrong—you can unstake your sUSN within 7 days. I thought it was only 24 hours if you wanted to redeem for USDC or USDT if you have USN. Anyway, those are very short timelines compared to the kind of yield exposure you have through Fasanara.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. Even though Fasanara has all these benefits within the private credit space, we wanted to find private credit, and Fasanara was our best option. But even with all of these benefits and advantages, we still needed to make sure that we had more aggressive liquidity targets.

For us, internally—and we published this publicly as well—our liquidity targets are T+0: 20% of our TVL liquid within 24 hours; T+3: 60%; and T+5: 100%. What we actually had to do, with Fasanara in mind and frankly with every single deployment strategy we have in mind, was create a liquidity management strategy and framework that allows for this.

We are under NDAs, so we can't talk about every single last element of this. But what we were able to construct, with a number of partners, was a multiparty agreement or set of agreements that gave us the latitude that, even if some of our deployments, like Fasanara, were a little longer-tenure and therefore we wouldn't be able to exit them entirely ourselves, counterparties could step in and basically bear that risk for the duration of the exit period without impacting our return and without any haircuts that we would need to transfer to the users or absorb ourselves.

That's something that we spent a long time working out exactly how to build, and it's something that's very unique to what we at Noon did.

Yeah, well said. I'm going to kick it over here to Rob in a second. I want to get an InfiniFi angle here, but before I do, a couple of other things.

We mentioned an example where some people in private credit issue a loan to one software company, but a differentiated aspect of Fasanara is that you're in—and I only know this because you guys wrote a guest post in our newsletter about this—there are 300,000 different positions across 45 different countries, and the average size is 0.03 basis points of NAV.

What that means is that this is not a single-point-of-failure type of structure, right? You've got massive diversification, not only geographically but also in having a ton of positions. There are 300,000 different positions, and that really stood out to me because, as somebody who didn't know as much about this coming in, I was like, “Wow, I had no idea that some of these funds could be that diversified.”

8. Why infiniFi chose to deploy into mGLOBAL on Midas

But I want to kick this over to Rob because you said something about how you structured—I believe it's the M Global fund, but correct me if I'm wrong—and we can get into that. You've kind of tokenized this more, whereas Noon has just deployed into the underlying fund. Maybe talk to us about what made you want to go that route and that methodology, and why it fit better for the InfiniFi structure that you're building.

Yeah. We started off actually with a direct deployment into M Global, into the underlying fund. The angle there was, “Okay, we've done our diligence. We know that we want to allocate to this asset, and we have most of the legal structuring that we need to be able to directly allocate to this asset.”

Outside of a tokenizer, becoming truly bankruptcy-remote and being able to fully offset it requires a lot of effort. Honestly, from our perspective, it's a bit of a conflict of interest if you're managing the tokenization yourself. We've looked into other methodologies to facilitate that in the future, but what we came to was that the legal complexity, the operational complexity, the potential introduction of a conflict of interest, and the inability to benefit from the secondary trading of the asset—especially that last piece—pointed us toward wanting to go a more tokenized route.

By running a tokenization on top of the underlying Midas Global fund—and let me explain what we did before I get into that a little bit more—what we did is we directly deployed into and held a note. Then, as Midas Global finished up its legal structuring, we transitioned that direct deployment into M Global tokens entirely seamlessly. It was quite the operation, I'll say, but the long and short of it is that now we have access to secondary liquidity should we want to use it.

We have the ability to operate as a dealer on the Midas Global asset. As part of our anchoring, we negotiated a right of first refusal on secondary-market pricing, which means that we can perform these secondary-market sales—these liquidations on exchanges, I'm sorry, on money markets. We can tap into all these secondary opportunities that we wouldn't have had access to if we had gone with just a straight-line direct deployment.

It means we get access to Midas's liquidity sleeve if we need it. It basically gives us all these secondary benefits for a relatively small cut given to the tokenizer. It also gives us the advantage that, when we're dealing with curators, the legal structuring is something that they've already, by and large, underwritten, since they're familiar with how Midas does these things.

That last component, as InfiniFi, is important because we're all over the place. siUSD is on Morpho, it's got an integration with Odyssey, we're trying to get integrations with a number of other markets, and we have Euler. Underwriting is a big part of those integrations.

When we have these direct deployments—we still do have a smaller one through Genesis Alpha, actually, which is also a fantastic little fund; we can talk about that more in a bit—especially when they're larger than our junior tranche, all that becomes, “Okay, now we need to take a closer look at this. Now we need to do a lot more diligence on how you structured this,” because it represents a direct exposure that's larger than your junior tranche.

Therefore, if we're underwriting your senior tranche, now we need to actually understand exactly how you've set things up. But if it's going through a tokenizer and they're very well acquainted with that tokenizer, it really greases the rails with those integrations. They know what they're dealing with. They know what the liquidity profile looks like. They know what the backstops are. They know where the secondary liquidity is available and who's already interested in buying.

I won't get too deep in the weeds on the other things that are unlocking from Global by having secondary sales there. We're very excited about Centrifuge, and we've been able to position ourselves quite well in that regard.

9. The First Brands stress test on Fasanara and DeFi’s exposure

I want to shift gears to what I think was one of the most important real-world stress tests for the still very small world of private credit on-chain. I believe it was in September 2025 that First Brands Group, or FBG, filed for bankruptcy. David, can you talk about what happened there? What exactly did this test as it relates to Fasanara?

Again, I think this was an example that kept being brought to our attention when Nomadic and I would talk with founders about getting exposure to private credit in DeFi, or private credit on-chain. This was an example they would point out and say, “Well, hey, what’s going to be the fallout from this? Is there going to be any major loss? Is this why maybe DeFi investors aren’t ready for private credit on-chain?”

The way I would frame it is: definitely use this as a reminder that credit risk is real. In private credit, the objective isn’t to pretend that events never happen. It’s effectively to structure portfolios so that they’re durable when these events happen.

For some of your listeners who have not followed it, First Brands is a U.S. automotive parts company, and it filed for Chapter 11 in September 2025. It became one of the major private-credit, asset-backed-credit, and trade-finance stress tests because it involved complex financial structures. There were alleged fraudulent invoices, accusations of double-pledging, fabricated receivables, missing funds, and the like. So now there are disputes between credit groups as they try to effectively get the collateral back.

This is really the type of situation that people worry about in private credit, for obvious reasons: transparency, valuation, collateral loss and risk, servicing, and indeed liquidity. The way we looked at it, at a high level, is that it tested underwriting and monitoring, as well as concentration limits. If, for example, we have one direct loan or one sponsor to one entity—which is First Brands—and this happens, it’s lights out. Whereas, if you have a diversified, short-duration, granular portfolio, as we have with both the funds we’ve discussed and multiple others that we manage, the incremental impact is basis points of NAV. These kinds of things can be managed, and this is really what it’s about.

The lesson for DeFi isn’t that you’re going to avoid these things or that you should try to run away from them. They’re inherent in this. As much as people can mitigate risk and monitor, fraudulent practices are still there. It’s more about the quality of the structure that will guarantee you, to the best it can, the yield that’s being promised. Effectively, how can you stress-test the yield that’s on show? It takes events like this to be able to do that.

These kinds of events happen, and well-structured portfolios can mitigate them. Going beyond this, from our perspective, because of the nature of our diversification and our granularity, we were able to weather this. Just as Rob was saying, a lot of the investors were happy, especially in the flagship M Global Fund, even through COVID, various wars, and various interest-rate shocks. It stood the test of time.

We were able to prepare for these kinds of events rather than run away from them, because there’s going to be another First Brands Group around the corner. It’s really a case of making sure that your portfolio is durable for that, rather than trying to pretend it’s not going to happen and hiding.

I could quickly add to that, because this was actually a really interesting stress test for our deployment into Fasanara at the time. I believe our first deployment was in August 2025, and this happened literally the next month. Obviously, we had done our due diligence. We knew what to expect, but seeing it up close immediately was really important for us to make sure that the things we had heard about, talked about, and done our due diligence on were actually coming to pass.

David, please correct me if I’m wrong, but a situation like First Brands Group was almost the perfect storm—the ultimate stress test—for a fund, specifically the Fasanara loan fund, right? Because it’s a receivables fund. It’s asset-backed. Guess what? A lot of times, that asset backing disappears in the case of fraud.

To give some context, I come from the banking world. The 2 most important numbers from a lending perspective that banks look at are probability of default and loss given default. Probability of default is how likely a loan is to go bad. Loss given default is how much of your money you actually make back, or how much of the money you lose, when things go bad.

They’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but for a fund like Fasanara, which is asset-backed, the probability of default probably doesn’t change too much from other similar types of lending. What really changes is your loss given default. The industry-average loss given default is probably somewhere around 200, 250, or 300 basis points. I believe Fasanara’s—at least the Fintech Fund that we’re deploying to—loss given default is literally a fraction of that. It is less than 10 basis points.

The reason this was such an important stress test is that a lot of the reason that number is so low is because you have receivables backing the loan, and you can recover a large chunk of your loan value. The moment fraud comes into the picture, you lose that receivables backing. There’s a large chance that your loss given default is a lot larger.

The other reason this was a major stress is that this was one of Fasanara’s larger concentrations in its loan book. You put it all together, and despite all of that, because of the diversification and the protections that we’ve talked about with Fasanara, I believe that the amount that actually hit our numbers was still not really significant. The fund that we deployed into still did not have a negative month.

Something Arpan just said is super important here because ultimately we’ve talked about M Global, and we’ve talked about F-TAC. Just for your listeners to understand, ultimately it’s still stable, short-duration, receivables-backed yield. M Global and F-TAC just slightly add a tactical element and add leverage, so they take on a slightly higher risk profile, even though they have the same credit engine, to target high yields.

What’s super important in that, just as Arpan is saying, is that there is a cost to that yield. With M Global, FBG wasn’t meaningful. It wasn’t a large position in a large fund, and it’s not the type of risk we take on. With F-TAC, it is a tactical decision. If we keep having the most conservative positions, we’re never going to be able to achieve that yield. So it’s constantly this balance that we’re trying to play.

If you have the right structure in place, we’ve mentioned the granularity, which is a super important point. But another important point that wasn’t really mentioned here is that we have multiple layers even beyond that. Our advance rate is 80%, so we have first-loss fees, and there’s credit insurance involved with that. There are various enhancements within the structure that typically originators would have to pay.

All of those would also buffer that. Even if we get to the worst-case scenarios we did hear about, the granularity and the diversification would save us. So even when we get to the absolute worst case, there are multiple layers of protection that investors should feel comfortable with in order to ensure that the structure is appropriate.

So, to us, what happened with First Brands Group obviously would have been much better for our returns had it not happened. But, in a strange way, the silver lining was that we kind of saw what the perfect storm looked like. It gave us not just more confidence in Fasanara, but, at the same time, because this was the first time we deployed in something like private credit, it gave us a ton of confidence in our risk assessment and due diligence process because pretty much exactly what we wanted to happen happened, right? One of our 3 things was no down days, and it didn't result in losses in the month, which was perfect.

10. What DeFi must get right in the next phase of tokenized private credit

We did all of our underwriting in the wake of First Brands Group. For us, once we were able to understand, okay, here's how this was segmented away from M Global, here's how these had no impact whatsoever on the return profile, and here's how that really isn't able to happen outside of significant systemic issues, that was very impressive to us. I want to kick this one over to David. I'd say what's been happening on chain is more than just a testing phase. It's more meaningful than that, but I want to know from you what this next iteration of tokenized private credit on chain looks like. Afterwards, I'd love to hear from Arpan and Rob—are you guys doubling down on this space particularly? So maybe start with David and this next phase of tokenized credit.

Yeah. The way we see this is that it's moving away from just tokenized access or funds toward the full infrastructure, integration, and actual viable use cases. What seems to be happening within the tokenized space is you're almost getting this sort of barbell, where highly volatile stocks and commodities—the accessibility and the 24/7 tradeability—are becoming super relevant, and so that's finding product-market fit within DeFi. Then you're getting the other side, where you're having these stable NAVs, sort of fixed collateral, that are valuable within DeFi, and that's obviously the segment we operate in. Then you've got a few funds all stuck in the middle.

So, where we see this again is just like how we started: what can the asset do on chain? Can it be used in a vault? Can it support a stablecoin? Can it become collateral? Can it be integrated within a lending market and used for treasury management? What we're really looking for is to actually become a broader part of the on-chain allocation stack and be helpful and useful there. The next phase is to move beyond just tokenization and look to liquidity, lending markets, and secondary trading.

As Rob said, a hugely important point is curating a vault on Symbiotic. Part of what I was saying is fascinating: having both the RWA as well as the crypto side of things means we can be involved in both sides. Importantly, it's going to be a lot more about liquidity design now. We look at this in multiple layers: the underlying assets, which we've discussed in quite a lot of detail here; the fund-level liquidity from the actual cash flows; and the token-level liquidity, which is super important. Within our tokens, we have multiple layers of atomic liquidity as well as structured liquidity within Midas, secondary liquidity, and an OTC facility. We've added almost 4 layers of that.

The final part is the liquidity within actual on-chain markets and the distribution. Those are the lenses we're looking through, and the ones that fit those needs and can be leveraged are the ones that we expect to see having more and more product-market fit and more growth in the coming years.

And then, to the second part of that question, maybe Arpan, start with you. Is this a space that you're doubling down on?

I think we're always going to look at every single part of the market. At Noon, we'll always continue to look at TradFi, CeFi, DeFi, and so on for these high-yield, lower-risk, stable-return profiles. I think we're always going to be evaluating private credit in as broad a form as it comes, but in the way that we have with Fasanara. Diversified, low-volatility, lots of short-duration, asset-backed assets—that kind of thing is always something we're going to be looking at.

I think what's going to be really important to us, and I think this is something that David just touched on, is how we can tokenize not just, in the world of crypto, the receipt token or the shares of the funds, but whether there's a way that we can maybe not tokenize, but at least have visibility over the more downstream elements of private credit. That's a question that we often get asked because private credit is obviously a great product, and we love being able to bring private credit on chain through Noon.

Some of the weaknesses are that, on chain, people do expect radical transparency. That's something where one of its biggest strengths becomes a significant weakness: it's very hard to get transparency over 300,000 positions. That requires an entirely new infrastructure stack built from the ground up. Some of that, I think, will be really interesting to see if we can bring it on chain to actually have that full transparency about positions.

11. Real-time verification and transparency onchain can improve TradFi

I want to give Rob a chance to give his take on this, too, but while we're on that transparency angle, I do want to call out that Noon has been a leader by example in terms of using Accountable and showing real-time verification of what's backing staked USN. This is one of the great examples, I think, of how DeFi can actually improve the state of TradFi. We can talk about composability, real-time settlement, permissionless access, and self-custodial ownership, but the real-time verification benefit really caught me by surprise. I honestly didn't understand whether we'd ever get to that with TradFi.

I'm wondering, Arpan, is that an unlock for a protocol like Noon to be able to allocate that much more to, let's say, private credit, but also other TradFi instruments that will be tokenized? To me, as a DeFi-native investor, that's my hang-up. I get worried about what I don't know in between quarterly reporting and what I don't know if someone's reporting once a month or once a week. Anything can happen at any moment, and I want to be alerted in real time.

No, that's exactly it. In crypto, especially on all your DeFi assets, it's very easy to go to a wallet, go to a protocol, and make sure that the asset they claim is there is actually there. The moment you start going off chain, that link breaks.

So, yes, we'd definitely be working with parties, in particular Accountable, to give them access directly to our custodian balances for all of our off-chain assets, to make sure that it's not us saying, "Trust me, bro. I have this, and I have it sitting off chain somewhere." It's not even me giving my data to a third party like Accountable and saying, "Hey, Accountable, also trust us, so you should trust us as well." Rather, it's Accountable going directly to the custodian and, without our interference at all, verifying all of the assets. The custodian is verifying that, okay, what Noon is saying is true.

I think that level of transparency certainly needs to become a standard the moment you start talking about holding off-chain assets on chain.

I would tend to agree with that, just from a general thesis. Having more insight into what's actually going on under the hood is very much what we'd like to see as well. Especially when it can be done through a ZK setup where you don't need to know exactly what this is, but it would be wonderful to know how many originators there are, how much capital is allocated to each originator, and what the maximum level of risk is, so you can basically make worst-case-scenario assumptions.

Yeah, I echo all those comments. In fact, something that links with the broader on-chain asset management—not just the RWA side—is that we're exploring native on-chain origination now. Just to the points we've discussed, what happens when you get a first tranche or so? You have 700,000 to 4 million positions. If I'm going to move those on chain, it's going to be a process, right? Some of these are not amenable, so you have to start somewhere.

We're now experimenting with some originators that do this on chain, but we still have to go through the same credit-underwriting processes. Just because someone's originating on chain, I'm not going to give up the rigor that we normally apply. It's a multi-month, if not a year-long, process for us to onboard an originator because we really want to make sure that the credit underwriting is strong.

We have to do the same thing, but we are trying now to source and start that process. Hopefully, this time next year or the year after, more and more will be, exactly as Rob said, a very clear dashboard. We've tried this before, by the way, if you've seen iterations on private credit. This was a great first iteration and a great first start to the process. Why it blew up—and many people might remember the growth of private credit during 2022—is that you didn't have the right asset managers who could credit-underwrite these.

12. How infiniFi is betting more on private credit yield onchain

You had very competent platforms that were able to originate on-chain, but nobody who could actually do the due diligence properly on risk, and that causes problems. So, it's almost a false economy. You can see everything, but you can also see everything blowing up. I don't think that's what people want.

Actually, Rob, we didn't give you a chance to explain whether this is something that you're doubling down on. I want to give you a bit of airtime just to talk more about how you're seeing the future of private credit internally at InfiniFi.

Yeah. We very much view this sector as something we intend to double down on. It's clearly where the returns are going to be sourced for the future of on-chain yield, at least in our minds. Getting things like direct origination spun up would ultimately be the gold standard, but at the moment, the people who know how to do that are the people running these credit funds.

Being able to offer their existing products on-chain is what's going to happen first. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You're not going to get the entire PayFi supply chain on-chain before you get the funds that are able to underwrite those things in the first place on-chain.

Where we see ourselves doubling down is a combination of increased diversification across this deck and deploying more capital into different types of assets. We've got the receivables here. We're looking at some of the other facets of our funds, some of the HELOC activity that's going on elsewhere, and some of the reinsurance activity that's going on elsewhere.

I would say there's another really exciting side to what we're doing, specifically in these tokenized private credit assets. We're looking into the fact that there's going to be a lot of secondary markets for these. We expect to see significant loops, and we're uniquely positioned as somebody who holds a balance sheet in these assets to perform operations at scale in a way that really no one else can.

That's a consequence of the way InfiniFi is structured, which is a bit different from how you guys are structured, Arpan, with Noya. What we're doing is coming in here and not actually placing duration requirements on these assets. We don't have to get truly liquid within 3 to 7 days. Our expectation is that the stable will just trade off-peg.

We're able to do that because we're sourcing a duration ladder. We're getting people's input on, "I want this much—60% in one-week assets, 30% in four-week assets, and 10% in 13-week assets." So, we get an understanding of what public demand for duration is, and then we can deploy about 75% of our liquid depositors' capital into those assets.

Now, if everyone comes in and starts redeeming en masse, there is a predictable price here. It'll trade below peg, very similar—actually identical—to how stETH works during high withdrawal demand on Lido. It just trades below peg. People buy it at the arbitrage, put it into the redemption queue, and off they go.

The way this works for us is that we're able to do secondary-market operations because we can hold these things to redemption. Somebody might be trying to exit a large M Global position because they have to. Maybe their fund is getting redemptions called, or maybe their position has become unhealthy. Who knows what it is? But now we can show up and provide that secondary-market liquidity.

We can be the market maker on these assets because we're willing to hold them on our books. Because we're willing to hold them in bulk, we can also use leverage to offer lower spreads. That means we can basically offer the best price out of anyone, capturing nearly 100% of the volume on these assets.

Other people can't do this because they aren't holding a $30 million position. What we end up doing looks very similar to a conventional dealer in many regards. We're holding both cash and the asset on our balance sheet and performing market-making operations back and forth with them.

We see a lot of leverage demand for this sort of thing. People really want to get in there. They want to lever M Global. I'm sure you have similar things going on on your side. People just want to run money-market leverage loops, and being able to unwind those loops rapidly is impossible if there's a redemption period on them.

But if there's secondary-market liquidity like ours, we fulfill that goal and capture the volume. That creates a new and very aggressive source of returns for InfiniFi. So, we're absolutely looking to double down on this. We're really excited to be able to take on the role of secondary liquidity provider, and we've got big things planned.

13. What shouldn't work well onchain

Yeah, and I know there's massive appetite for looping this stuff. There's a company that we invested in, 3F Labs, that has just started its private beta, and I'm really keen to see where that goes and what other products they expand to. Some of the numbers are just really ridiculous. But anyway, guys, I want to wrap here.

David, I want to kick this over to you with an inverse question from what we've been talking about. We've been talking about what sorts of things Fasanara is doing and what sorts of things work to come on-chain, but could you outline a few of the obvious things that don't work? What do we not want to bring on-chain? Maybe highlight some of those. In part, that allows listeners to be more aware of certain products that you don't think are a good fit for DeFi.

Yeah, and it's a super important question, actually, because just because you happen to have a fund or a protocol offering, it doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense to move it on-chain. It may well do, and I alluded to this: it seems like there's a barbell effect where highly volatile instruments like stocks are forming one use case, and stable, low-volatility instruments—especially with the looping use case, because of the stability of NAV and the consistency of yield—are forming another use case. But then almost all the asset classes stuck in the middle are sort of falling by the wayside.

The way we look at it is really: what does tokenization actually improve? What does going on-chain improve? Does it help settlement, transparency, or transferability? Does it make it useful as collateral? Is there a new investor base through accessibility? If the answer is no, you may just be wrapping an effectively illiquid product into a digital format.

The way I look at it is that the asset has to be suitable for on-chain finance; tokenization won't do it. Once a credit asset is effectively programmable, it can potentially become collateral, sit inside vaults, support stablecoin strategies, and interact with a lot of liquidity facilities, secondary markets, and risk engines.

In TradFi, settlement, custody, clearing, enforcement, and reporting are usually separate layers. If I wanted to have my fund in a TradFi setting, I can't just plug it into a DeFi exchange and get USDC flooded to me because of that. It's a very complex process. Many of these unlocks are huge, but only if the asset fits.

The way we look at it is not just, "Can we tokenize it? We can tokenize really anything." The question is whether it actually adds any new incremental benefit for you as the fund and asset issuer, but also for the on-chain community, and what the specific use case is.

Within that, you can then look at specific asset classes, but it's not specifically about calling some out. As we've discussed here, our traditional fund is quarterly plus notice. We've brought this down with M Global, as an example, to 35 days, and that's not even enough. We've had to add in other elements.

So, it isn't just a simple case of saying it's not going to work. It's about what designs you make to ensure it works, and how much of that is actually by design and structural versus an irregular mismatch that could cause problems.

14. What’s next on product roadmaps for infiniFi and Noon?

Guys, we're coming to the end of this roundtable discussion, so I do want to start to wrap up. But before we do, I want to get a final word from you, Rob, and you, Arpan, on what else DeFi investors can look forward to in terms of the products that you offer that are allocating to private credit on-chain, like Fasanara's products. So, Rob, any final thoughts for us?

Yeah. I would say the most immediate thing is going to be the secondary-market liquidity module that we're in the process of building. That'll be coming out fairly shortly, and you should see some very high returns if you have that thing once it starts operating.

A little further out, there will be additional deployments to private-credit-like vehicles, specifically asset-backed finance, that we're currently in the process of underwriting. So, you should be seeing InfiniFi's yields go up in the fairly near future.

Arpan, can you remind us, as you give us your final thoughts, what percentage of staked USN is allocated to private credit?

It won't be just staked USN, but it will be the entire Noon protocol, because staked USN is basically just for people who want the yield first, to deploy to the rewards. Of the entire protocol, I think we have something around 60% right now in ATAT. And again, that's just a function of where the market is, right? There aren't that many things that are countercyclical, low-volatility, low-risk, and high-yielding.

But right now, private credit is one of the few things that actually fits all of those criteria in the current market. But to answer your question in terms of what's next and what we're really focusing on, I think there's always going to be a focus that our team has around diversification of yield sources. We're going to continue to do that. We'll see a few new yield sources being discussed in our community forums and voted on by our community members over the course of the next few weeks and months.

15. Closing

After that, I think a lot of the back end of this year is going to be focused on how we can truly bring this sort of stable, high-yield, low-risk engine that we've built to as broad a distribution channel as possible. So we're launching with a few new partners who are staying very far away from the traditional crypto users and are trying to actually bring, in some way, shape, or form, yields in a differentiated product offering to the mass market. What we see is a really interesting opportunity serving as a yield layer to that, so that they and their users don't really have to worry about that entire piece. They can leave that to us, and we can put them in the best possible position to succeed.

It's really interesting to see the 2 sides coming together here. I mean, Fasanara, again, is closer to traditional finance for me, even though you guys clearly represent more of a hybrid approach, and then there's the DeFi-native side. We, on the DeFi-native side, want access to better, more stable yields. I would argue that we want better risk management. I still don't think a lot of DeFi-native products have historically taken that seriously, even though, again, I think we have great representations here with InfiniFi and Noon, who really take that risk management seriously. But I think historically it's been pretty bad in DeFi.

So I just love the 2 worlds actually coming together with private credit. I want permissionless access. I want composability. I want instant liquidity. I want radical transparency on-chain. I want real-time verification through something like Accountable. Those benefits are fantastic, but, again, it doesn't mean a whole lot if I'm not getting access to better yields. And, again, I would argue better risk management through the lens of someone like Fasanara.

This is a powerful example. Hopefully folks listening are waking up to the fact that it's happening. It's been 5 or 6+ years of DeFi maturing, and we're on the cusp of, I think, trillions coming on-chain as the 2 worlds collide. This is a great place for us to start wrapping up. So I want to remind our listeners they should learn more about Fasanara by going to fasanara.com. They should follow Fasanara Capital on Twitter. You should learn more about Noon by going to noon.capital. Follow Arpan's personal account at AG_Noon. And then learn about Infinify by going to infinify.xyz and you can follow Rob at RobAnon on Twitter. Put that all into the show notes. Guys, thank you everyone for taking the time to spend with us today. Again, just really, really interesting to get your expertise on how private credit can grow on-chain and how private credit can really take advantage of the rails that are DeFi. Thanks everyone for tuning in. To stay up-to-date with future episodes, plus get expert tips, strategies, and exclusive content, subscribe to our free newsletter at the-edge.xyz.