Cantor8 Co-founder Reni Achkar on Why Private Credit Could be The Real Tokenization Opportunity

Private credit has grown into one of the largest and fastest-expanding segments of global finance, yet much of it remains illiquid and difficult to access for most investors. Amid the broader rush to tokenize assets, questions are emerging about whether the industry is focusing on the right things. Olayimika Oyebanji recently sat down with Cantor8 Co-founder and CMO Reni Achkar to explore what is being tokenized today, why private credit represents a major opportunity , and the practical realities of building meaningful on-chain markets. Let’s dive in. Hello Reni, can you briefly tell us about yourself and your route to blockchain? I grew up in Dubai, which shapes everything about how I see this. I have always looked at finance from the emerging-markets side of the table rather than Wall Street's. My background is in growth and distribution, not engineering. I spent years building go-to-market for technology and Web3 companies, helping products actually reach people, and moved steadily from the storytelling side into strategy and building. Today, I am co-founder and CMO of Cantor8. My route in was through users and distribution, not the protocol layer. In an industry obsessed with technology, understanding who actually uses the thing, and why, turns out to be the rarer and more valuable skill. From your perspective, what are the most common misconceptions about tokenization that founders and investors hold in 2026? The biggest is the belief that tokenizing an asset makes it liquid. It does not. A token is a wrapper, and a wrapper does not create a buyer on the other side of your trade. Liquidity comes from demand, market makers, and distribution, none of which a smart contract gives you for free. The second, closely related, is that the technology is the hard part. It almost never is. Issuing a token is a solved problem. The hard work is origination, compliance, custody, and finding real buyers, and none of that fits neatly in a pitch deck. The third is that being early to tokenize something already liquid, like Treasuries, is a win. Mostly it is a demo. The real prize is the assets that barely function today, where the wrapper removes friction that is actually costing people money. What characteristics make an asset or cash flow particularly well-suited for meaningful tokenization, as opposed to simply putting an existing instrument on-chain? Ask one question first: what friction does the token actually remove? If the honest answer is none, you are decorating, not building. The assets worth tokenizing share a few traits. They are painful to access or move today, so putting them on-chain genuinely widens who can hold them. They have cash flows you can model and verify, which is why credit works so well, since a loan has a coupon and a maturity and a daily on-chain value is therefore honest rather than a guess. They carry heavy operational overhead, all the paperwork and cross-border friction that code can automate. And they benefit from transparency, where an on-chain record of reserves or performance beats a quarterly PDF. Treasuries fail this test not because they are bad but because they already work. My rule is simple: if the token removes no friction, you have not built a product, you have built a demo. How important is secondary market liquidity in determining whether a tokenization effort actually creates value, and what are the main barriers to achieving it? It is close to the whole game, with one caveat. Some tokenization creates real value with no deep secondary market, purely through cheaper operations, wider access, or using the token as collateral. But if the pitch is liquidity, and it usually is, then secondary trading is the test, and most projects fail it. The barriers are stubborn. Most of these tokens are permissioned, so transfers are restricted to whitelisted wallets, which fragments the buyer pool before you begin. Regulation differs in every jurisdiction, so a token that trades in one place is stranded in another. Market makers will not warehouse risk in something they cannot easily hedge or exit. And underneath all of it, a token cannot be more liquid than the market's willingness to own what is inside it. Solve the plumbing and you still have to solve demand. Demand is the hard one. What do you mean when you say “everyone’s tokenizing the wrong thing,” and which asset classes or use cases do you believe are currently receiving disproportionate attention? I mean attention is following what is easy to measure, not what is worth doing. Tokenized Treasuries and money-market funds get the headlines because they are simple, safe, and come with brand names and clean round numbers. BlackRock's fund crossing a few billion is an easy story to tell. But those instruments already work. They are liquid, cheap to trade, and settle fine, so tokenizing them shaves a small cost and produces a great press release. We are pouring the most engineering into the assets that needed it least. The categories that deserve the attention are private credit and private markets more broadly, where access is genuinely broken, and real emerging-market use cases like cross-border credit and payments, where friction is not a rounding error but the entire cost of doing business. That is where I spend my time, because that is where tokenization changes an outcome rather than a settlement window. Real-world assets like Treasuries have seen significant activity. What lessons from those efforts apply — or don’t apply — to other categories? The transferable lessons are real. Treasury tokenization proved institutions will participate when the structure is clean: regulated wrappers, proper custody, KYC at the token level, daily reporting, and a credible issuer. That template, wrap a regulated fund and give it native on-chain redemption, carries directly into credit and beyond. What does not carry over is the part everyone forgets was easy. Treasuries are the most liquid asset on earth, so tokenized Treasuries inherited liquidity they never had to build. Private credit and real estate inherit nothing. Their valuation is hard, so suddenly you need oracles, servicers, and appraisals a Treasury never required, and they are bespoke rather than fungible, so you cannot copy-paste one deal to the next. Treasuries taught us how to wrap an asset. They taught us very little about how to make an illiquid one actually trade, and that second problem is the whole job. What role do regulatory clarity, custody solutions, and oracle infrastructure play in determining which tokenization projects succeed or fail? They are the difference between a demo and a business. Regulatory clarity decides who is legally allowed to hold the asset and where, which directly sets the size of your market. This year is a turning point, with the United States finally operating a stablecoin framework under the GENIUS Act and Europe's MiCA regime moving from transition into enforcement. Clarity is arriving, just unevenly, and products will scale wherever it lands first. It's crucial to put real effort into the regulated side of this because a compliant token with a large addressable market beats a clever one almost nobody can legally buy. Custody is table stakes; institutions will not participate without qualified custody, full stop. And oracles are the under-rated make-or-break, because a tokenized loan is only as honest as the data feed and servicer reporting its performance. Get that wrong and your pristine on-chain record is just well-formatted fiction. What are the biggest technical or operational challenges that arise when trying to tokenize less standardized or more complex underlying assets? Minting the token is the easy ten percent. The other ninety is where projects break. Start with valuation and data: a complex asset has no clean market price, so you depend on servicers, appraisals, and oracles, and if any of them lie, the on-chain record inherits the lie. Then legal enforceability, which people badly underestimate. A token has to confer a claim on the underlying that survives a real court and a real default, which means SPVs, bankruptcy-remote structures, and lawyers, not just Solidity. Then lifecycle management, because these assets are not mint-and-forget. Coupons, amortization, defaults, restructurings, and corporate actions all have to be handled continuously, and most are bespoke. And every one of these is a reconciliation problem between off-chain reality and an on-chain record that must always agree. The hard part here is organizational and legal at least as much as technical. Looking at current market activity, where do you see the biggest gap between hype around tokenization and actual value creation or risk transfer? The widest gap is between assets tokenized and assets actually doing anything. Much of the headline value is parked in a wrapper, not trading, not reaching new investors, not transferring risk to anyone new. Total value locked is a vanity metric. Turnover is the honest one, and turnover in most of these markets is thin. The second gap is measurement itself. Depending on who is counting, on-chain private credit is worth five billion dollars, or eight, or eighteen. When an industry cannot size a category within a factor of three, you should discount every triumphant headline it produces. And on risk transfer specifically, many of these products do not move risk to new holders at all, they repackage it for the same institutions that already owned it. Real value is being created, in operations and in access, but it is narrower and less glamorous than the marketing. The gap is honesty about which is which. Any parting words? Only that the opportunity is real, which is exactly why it deserves honesty rather than hype. The next few years of tokenization will not be won by whoever tokenizes the safest asset fastest. They will be won by the teams willing to do the boring, hard work on the assets and markets that actually need it: private credit, emerging markets, the places where moving money is still slow and expensive. That work does not trend on Crypto Twitter. It just compounds into something that matters. If you take one thing from this, stop asking what can be tokenized and start asking what should be. The answer is usually the harder, less obvious one.