BlackRock has begun limiting withdrawals from a $26 billion private credit fund, adding to growing strain across the global private credit market. Bloomberg reported Friday that the fund moved as redemption requests increased. The development came after similar pressure at Blue Owl, which sold $1.4 billion in loans last month to meet withdrawals and was also reported to have exposure to a collapsed U.K. property lender.
The market reaction was immediate. Shares of major asset managers including BlackRock, Apollo Global Management, Ares Management and KKR fell 4% to 6% on Friday, extending their losses in 2026. The concern is not limited to credit funds themselves: if managers are forced to unwind positions to meet redemptions, deleveraging could spread across risk assets, with digital assets caught in that move.
Private credit stress adds to broader deleveraging fears
Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at Swiss crypto bank AMINA Bank, said in an emailed note that redemption pressure in private credit could trigger wider deleveraging across asset classes and hit digital assets including bitcoin. The article listed bitcoin at $64,168.87.
Cobeljic wrote that U.S. banks had extended nearly $300 billion in loans to private credit providers as of mid-2025, along with another $285 billion to private equity funds. In his view, that leaves open the possibility that credit stress will not remain isolated inside funds and could reach the banking sector. He said the issue might be manageable on its own, but the picture changes when it appears during a broader global deleveraging event, alongside an energy shock and fading expectations for rate cuts.
He also warned that, for risk assets including crypto, a disorderly unwind in private credit would amount to a significant second-order shock that current market pricing does not reflect.
Tokenized credit products create a direct on-chain channel
There is also a second path through which pressure could reach crypto markets. Tokenized private credit products — loans and funds issued as tokens on public blockchains — have expanded quickly as part of the real-world asset, or RWA, trade.
Data from rwa.xyz shows the on-chain private credit market now stands at just under $5 billion. That is still small compared with the roughly $3.5 trillion global private credit market in 2025 estimated by the Alternative Credit Council. Even so, these products are becoming more embedded in DeFi. If stress emerges in the underlying loans, that pressure can move directly into blockchain-based markets.
Teddy Pornprinya, co-founder of real-world asset protocol Plume, said institutions are entering crypto through products that even degens and DeFi-native users may not fully understand. He said real-world credit products can carry layered risks that are not always obvious to crypto investors, including swings in net asset value and headline yields that may not fully account for fees or credit risk.