Tokenized Private Credit in 2026: DeFi’s $18B Breakout Moment The received wisdom about DeFi is that it is a speculative sideshow where retail traders chase yields on memecoins. The data from Q1 2026 tells a different story. While Blackstone’s $82 billion BCRED fund gated $3.7 billion in redemption requests and had its board backstop the remaining gap with executive capital, one corner of DeFi quietly grew 180% year-over-year to $18.9 billion in active loans. That corner is tokenized private credit, and it ...