Every professional asset class will eventually be tokenized. Which one first? Onchain private credit leads the race.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 5 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

Gnosis Chain activates Pectra:

Gnosis Chain successfully activated the Pectra hard fork at epoch 1337856 on April 30 at 10:03 pm ET (2:03 pm UTC), achieving finality for the first slot with 86% validator participation. As shown in the chart, participation stabilized above 80% in the immediate epochs post-upgrade, with no major disruptions.

Continuing a tradition of implementing hard forks a week before Ethereum, the upgrade makes Gnosis the first Ethereum sidechain to adopt the full Pectra feature set — excluding only blob scheduling. All four Gnosis-supported consensus clients supported the fork, with validators justifying and finalizing blocks normally, according to a livestream of the event.

Pectra introduces significant improvements, including account abstraction (EIP-7702), staking enhancements via MaxEB (EIP-7251), and gas fee sponsorship — designed to boost both usability and validator efficiency. Validator staking caps rose from 1 to 64 GNO, enabling higher rewards through auto-compounding. Gnosis acts a bit like the canary in the coal mine, adding confidence to Ethereum’s own upgrade on May 7.

— Macauley Peterson

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The Permissionless IV Hackathon kicks off before the first mic check. No distractions. Just 36 hours to ship something — onchain, open source, in the wild.

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The state of onchain private credit

Every traditional asset will eventually be tokenized. 

Here’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink making the case in his latest 2025 investor letter:

“Every stock, every bond, every fund — every asset — can be tokenized. If they are, it will revolutionize investing. Markets wouldn't need to close. Transactions that currently take days would clear in seconds. And billions of dollars currently immobilized by settlement delays could be reinvested immediately back into the economy, generating more growth.”

Which asset is winning that race? It’s private credit, with about $12.9b onchain, as of today. For context, tokenized T-bills are currently $6.2b, commodities are $1.4b and equities are $484m.

Private credit markets involve businesses borrowing from institutional lenders like private equity funds and asset managers, rather than banks. 

It’s a booming ~$2 trillion market globally today, with potential growth to $3 trillion by 2028, by Moody’s estimates.

Now, here are the problems:

1. Lender access to traditional private credit is limited — only accredited investors get to participate (due to regulatory laws).

2. Traditional private credit is illiquid and not easily tradable. Due to its private lender-borrower relationship structure, the asset class lacks a public market where loan values can be easily benchmarked. This lack of standardized pricing along with its multi-year maturity is why private credit yields are typically higher (8-12%) so as to compensate for that risk.

These problems — inaccessibility, illiquidity and non-transparency — are ameliorated by blockchains to an extent.

It’s a $2 trillion market for the taking, and crypto companies are seizing the opportunity.

A snapshot of DeFi onchain credit

Each company’s model varies, but the idea is generally the same. 

Offchain loan originators offer loans to lenders issued as an ERC-20 token or ERC-721 non-fungible token governed by smart contracts. Lenders deposit stablecoins or crypto asset collateral, entitling them to the token which represents a legal claim on future interest payments.

DeFi private credit is dominated today by Figure, with about $9.9b in active loans today.

Figure tokenizes its private credit assets on Provenance, an L1 blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK. While the chain is publicly usable, smart contracts require governance approval, presumably to limit the chain’s use for RWA tokenization. The majority of Figure’s loans are “Home Equity Lines of Credit” (HELOC) — revolving credit products offered to everyday homeowners. For a deep dive on Provenance, see Marc-Thomas Arjoon’s Blockworks Research report.

Tradable, on the other hand, has tokenized ~$1.8b in more than 30 institutional-grade private credit positions on the ZKsync L2 chain. Tokenized assets on Tradable vary from fintech senior secured loans and legal receivables to music royalties.

Maple Finance is another prominent player in the onchain private credit space. Maple uses a pooled model where pools are overseen by “pool delegates” who determine creditworthiness and loan terms. Its Syrup platform is one of the few DeFi opportunities where retail investors can access yields from the private credit market.

Private credit assets are still largely perceived as securities. For that reason, most of the aforementioned platforms still largely employ geofences and KYC/AML restrictions that exclude the average retail investor from participation.

Yet, onchain private credit can still benefit from liquidity and transparency improvements by offering real-time visibility and verification.

In a recent report, Keyrock estimates a gradual growth of onchain private credit to $15-17.5b by 2026.

— Donovan Choy

The end of IST

The Agoric community and affiliated Decentralized Cooperation Foundation's (DCF) is voting to sunset Inter Protocol — and the Cosmos-native stable token IST. Although a vote is ongoing, the result is already clear: With quorum reached and a strong majority in favor, IST is at EOL.

Launched in 2022 with the ambition of becoming Cosmos’ MakerDAO, Inter Protocol offered a thoughtfully engineered, overcollateralized stablecoin backed by ATOM, OSMO, TIA and their liquid staking versions. Inter featured responsive governance via an elected economic committee and received Hydro liquidity allocations as recently as February.

But good design wasn’t enough. This week, the DCF proposed a strategic winding down, citing low adoption, high maintenance costs and shifting priorities toward Agoric’s native BLD token. The rise of Noble-issued USDC and the Agoric–Noble “Fast USDC” initiative — promising near-instant cross-chain transfers — likely rendered IST’s role redundant before it could scale or get integrated in DeFi.

The vote closes May 1, but is largely pro forma. DCF made it clear: Even a “no” wouldn’t guarantee continued funding. In its view, IST isn’t “worth the expense [and DCF] won’t be influenced by the outcome of the vote.”

IST wasn’t a failure — technically, it worked quite well. It was just a casualty of a rapidly changing ecosystem. Cosmos chains didn’t want a decentralized stablecoin; they wanted a better USDC. Agoric is doubling down on “orchestration.” The stablecoin experiment, for now, is over.

— Macauley Peterson