Cracks in global private credit markets have unnerved investors, raising concerns that the stress could spread to cryptocurrency markets.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that BlackRock’s $26 billion private credit fund has begun limiting withdrawals due to rising redemption requests. It comes after Blue Owl faced similar pressure after it sold $1.4 billion in loans last month to meet withdrawal requirements and reportedly approached a failed British property lender.
Shares of major asset managers including BlackRock (BLK), Apollo Global Management (APO), Ares Management (ARES) and KKR fell 4%-6% on Friday, extending a 2026 decline.
Read more: Blue Owl liquidity crisis has investors bracing for 2008-like fallout
If redemption pressures force private credit funds to liquidate their positions, it could trigger a broader deleveraging across asset classes, spreading to digital assets including Bitcoin Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at Swiss cryptocurrency bank AMINA Bank, warned in an email.
Credit stress hits energy shock
U.S. banks have lent nearly $300 billion to private credit providers and another $285 billion to private equity funds through mid-2025, Cobeljic writes, raising the risk that the credit crisis could spread to the banking sector
“In isolation, this is manageable,” he said. “But emerging from a broader global deleveraging event, with energy shocks and a collapse in rate cut expectations, that’s a different conversation.”
“For risk assets, including cryptocurrencies, disorderly unwinding would represent a significant second-order shock that is not reflected in current pricing,” he said.
Spreading into tokenized asset markets
A second channel of credit risk may arise directly on the blockchain track.
Tokenized private credit products – tokenized loans and funds packaged and issued on public blockchains – are growing rapidly as part of the broader real-world asset (RWA) trend. According to rwa.xyz, the on-chain private credit market is currently just under $5 billion. This figure is still small compared with the size of the global private credit market of approximately $3.5 trillion in 2025, according to estimates by the Alternative Credit Council.
But the growing presence of these assets in decentralized finance (DeFi) means pressure on underlying lending could ripple directly into the cryptocurrency market.
Teddy Pornprinya, co-founder of real-world asset protocol Plume, said: “Institutions are entering the cryptocurrency space, but often using products that even degens and DeFi natives cannot fully grasp.”
He said real-world credit products can carry complex risks that are not always obvious to cryptocurrency investors, including erratic net asset value fluctuations and overall yields that do not fully reflect fees or credit risk.
A recent episode showed how off-chain credit stress can spread to DeFi.
The bankruptcy of auto parts supplier First Brands Group in 2025 affected the private credit strategy operated by Fasanara Capital, according to a report by risk advisory firm Chaos Labs. A tokenized version of the strategy, mF-ONE, has been issued on the Midas RWA platform and used as collateral for borrowing on the Morpho protocol.
The token’s net asset value fell by about 2% as the underlying fund reduced its bankruptcy-related exposure, bringing highly leveraged borrowers closer to liquidation and tightening liquidity on the platform. The lender ultimately avoided losses, but the incident highlights how tokenized private credit used as collateral in DeFi can transmit traditional credit stress to on-chain markets.
I’m really enjoying the design and layout of your site. It’s a very
easy on the eyes which makes it much more pleasant for me to comme here and visit more often. Did you hire
out a designer to create your theme? Fantastic work!