Mounting strain in the global private credit sector is beginning to worry investors, with analysts cautioning that turbulence in the market could eventually spill over into cryptocurrencies through both macro contagion and tokenized credit markets.
According to a report by Bloomberg, BlackRock has started restricting withdrawals from its $26 billion private credit fund after a rise in redemption requests. The development follows similar liquidity pressures at Blue Owl Capital, which reportedly sold roughly $1.4 billion in loans last month to satisfy investor withdrawals and is said to have exposure to a failed U.K. property lender.
The stress weighed on shares of large alternative asset managers. BlackRock, Apollo Global Management, Ares Management and KKR each fell between 4% and 6% on Friday, extending losses across the sector in 2026.
If redemption pressures continue to rise, private credit funds may be forced to unwind positions, potentially triggering broader deleveraging across financial markets. Such a process could ripple into digital assets including Bitcoin, according to Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at AMINA Bank.
Credit stress collides with macro pressures
Cobeljic noted that U.S. banks had extended close to $300 billion in loans to private credit providers by mid-2025, alongside another $285 billion in lending to private equity firms. That exposure raises the possibility that instability in private credit could eventually affect the broader banking system.
“In isolation this would be manageable,” Cobeljic said. “But appearing in the middle of a broader global deleveraging cycle — combined with an energy shock and fading expectations for interest-rate cuts — it becomes a much bigger issue.”
In that scenario, a disorderly unwind in private credit markets could represent a significant second-order shock for risk assets, including crypto, that may not yet be reflected in market pricing.
Tokenized credit adds a new transmission channel
Another pathway for potential contagion lies in the rapidly expanding market for tokenized private credit — traditional loans packaged as blockchain-based tokens and integrated into decentralized finance.
Data from rwa.xyz shows that the on-chain private credit market has grown to nearly $5 billion. While still small compared with the roughly $3.5 trillion global private credit market estimated for 2025 by the Alternative Credit Council, its growing role within DeFi means stress in underlying loans could directly affect crypto ecosystems.
“Institutional capital is entering crypto with increasingly complex financial products that even many DeFi-native participants may not fully understand,” said Teddy Pornprinya, co-founder of the real-world asset protocol Plume.
He noted that real-world credit products often carry hidden risks, including fluctuations in net asset value and headline yields that may not fully reflect fees or credit exposure.
A recent case illustrates how traditional credit problems can spill into DeFi. According to research by Chaos Labs, the 2025 bankruptcy of auto-parts manufacturer First Brands Group affected a private credit strategy managed by Fasanara Capital.
A tokenized version of that strategy, mF-ONE, had been issued through the Midas RWA platform and used as collateral for borrowing on the Morpho DeFi protocol.
When the underlying fund marked down its exposure tied to the bankruptcy, the token’s net asset value slipped about 2%. The drop pushed highly leveraged borrowers closer to liquidation and tightened liquidity on the platform.
Although lenders ultimately avoided losses, the episode demonstrated how tokenized private credit — when used as collateral within DeFi — can transmit traditional credit stress directly into on-chain markets.
