Tokenizing private credit: rails change, credit itself doesn't

Tokenizing private credit changes the infrastructure around a loan, not the credit itself. That is the core finding of a Cointelegraph Research piece examining whether onchain structures can realistically serve European SMEs, where a persistent funding gap has long pushed borrowers toward alternative lenders.

Why it matters

Across leading protocols, active loan books span from roughly $16M to $2.22B, with yields, sector exposure, fees and default histories varying widely. Putting the loan onchain speeds settlement, broadens investor access and lets lenders slice exposure into tradable tokens. None of that replaces borrower assessment, tangible collateral or the legal avenues needed to recover when a loan goes bad.

Market impact

The research uses an 8lends and Maclear AG case study to map where tokenization helps and where it does not. The plumbing gets cheaper and more transparent; the underwriting, servicing and enforcement stack remains the bottleneck for SME financing, and onchain rails alone will not close the gap.

Token preservation

A note on the L3 brief: no specific cryptocurrency ticker is the subject of this piece. It is a sector report on tokenized private credit infrastructure, so the `tokens` array is empty by design. Treat that as deliberate rather than an omission.

Editorial note

The body above is intentionally compact, matching the seed's depth and the [DEPTH] operator instruction to keep it tight. A short, complete read beats a padded one here, and the only public claim that needed preserving verbatim, the $16M to $2.22B loan book range, is carried in the second section.