Cracks in the global private credit market are unsettling investors, raising concerns that the tension could spill over into crypto markets.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that BlackRock’s $26 billion private credit fund has begun limiting withdrawals amid growing requests for redemption. The move follows similar stress at Blue Owl, which sold $1.4 billion in loans last month to deal with withdrawals and reportedly has exposure to a bankrupt U.K. property lender.
Shares of major asset managers including BlackRock (BLK), Apollo Global Management (APO), Ares Management (ARES) and KKR fell between 4% and 6% on Friday, extending their 2026 decline.
Read more: Blue Owl liquidity crisis has investors bracing for 2008-like fallout
If redemption pressure forces private credit funds to unwind positions, it could trigger broader deleveraging across asset classes that could hit digital assets, including bitcoin. warned Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at Swiss crypto bank AMINA Bank in an emailed note.
Credit stress meets energy shock
U.S. banks made nearly $300 billion in loans to private credit providers by mid-2025 and another $285 billion to private equity funds, Cobeljic wrote, carrying risks that credit problems could spread to the banking sector.
“In isolation, this would be manageable,” he said. “But emerging amid a broader global deleveraging event, coupled with an energy shock and the collapse of rate cut expectations, is a different conversation.”
“For risk assets, including cryptocurrencies, a disorderly sell-off here would represent a significant second-order shock that current prices do not reflect,” he said.
Contagion to tokenized asset markets
A second channel of credit risk could emerge directly on the blockchain rails.
Tokenized private credit products (loans and funds packaged and issued on public blockchains as tokens) have grown rapidly as part of the broader real-world assets (RWA) trend. According to data from rwa.xyz, the private on-chain credit market now stands at just under $5 billion. That figure is still small compared to the global private credit market of about $3.5 trillion in 2025, estimated by the Alternative Credit Council.
But the growing presence of these assets within decentralized finance (DeFi) means that stress on underlying lending could directly impact crypto markets.
“Institutions are getting into cryptocurrencies, but often with products that even degens and DeFi natives don’t fully understand,” said Teddy Pornprinya, co-founder of real-world asset protocol Plume.
Real-world credit products can carry complex risks that are not always obvious to crypto investors, he said, including volatile fluctuations in net asset value and core returns that do not fully reflect fees or credit risk.
A recent episode shows how off-chain credit stress can spill over into DeFi.
According to a report by risk advisory firm Chaos Labs, the 2025 bankruptcy of auto parts supplier First Brands Group affected a private credit strategy led by Fasanara Capital. A tokenized version of the strategy, mF-ONE, was issued on the Midas RWA platform and used as collateral for loans on the Morpho protocol.
When the underlying fund reduced bankruptcy-linked exposure, the token’s net asset value fell around 2%, pushing highly leveraged borrowers to the brink of liquidation and restricting liquidity on the platform. Lenders ultimately avoided losses, but the episode highlighted how tokenized private credit used as DeFi collateral can transmit traditional credit stress to on-chain markets.
