Litigation Finance Is Not Something Your Average Influencer Is Using to Hit That Like Button

But if you miss private credit, you might as well buy an NFT, join a Discord, and never get out of your parents’ basement.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

I want to talk about something nobody in your feed is talking about.

Not because it’s obscure for the sake of being obscure. Not because I enjoy being contrarian. But because I’ve been tracking capital movement in this space since 2019, and the pattern is always the same — the money moves first, the narrative catches up later, and by the time your favorite influencer is posting about it, you’re already late.

So let me tell you about litigation finance.

You’ve Never Heard of This Asset Class. That’s the Point.

Litigation finance is exactly what it sounds like. A third party funds a lawsuit — covers the legal costs, the expert witnesses, the years of proceedings — in exchange for a share of the settlement or judgment if the case wins. If the case loses, the funder loses everything they put in. No recourse. No refund.

It sounds niche. It is niche. That’s why the returns have historically been extraordinary.

This is private credit. Not the direct lending kind your financial advisor is starting to mention. Not the mortgage-backed securitization kind. The kind that operates entirely outside public markets, entirely outside the visibility of retail investors, and entirely inside the portfolios of the most sophisticated institutional allocators on the planet.

Pension funds know about this. Sovereign wealth funds know about this. Hedge funds know about this. Your average crypto influencer hitting record on their iPhone does not.

And here’s what matters right now: this asset class — along with the broader private credit ecosystem it lives inside — is going on-chain. Quietly. Systematically. With institutional infrastructure most retail crypto participants have never looked up.

Private Credit Is Already a $2 Trillion Market. No One Told You.

While the crypto space has been consumed by price action, memes, and the endless cycle of narratives, private credit crossed $2 trillion in assets under management in 2025. It’s projected to hit $4.5 trillion by 2030.

To put that in context: the entire crypto market cap has spent most of its existence fighting to stay above $2 trillion. Private credit is already there — and it barely registers in the conversation.

The growth isn’t random. Banks pulled back from corporate lending after the 2008 financial crisis and never really came back. The regulatory environment post-Dodd-Frank made direct lending structurally unattractive for deposit-funded institutions. Private credit funds stepped into that void and haven’t looked back. Bank lending as a share of U.S. GDP dropped from 59% in 2008 to 44% by early 2025. Something had to fill that gap.

Private credit filled it.

And now private credit is being tokenized. And the institutions doing the tokenizing are not building on the chains you’ve heard of.

The Settlement Layer Most People Don’t Know Exists

There’s a blockchain called the Canton Network.

It’s not trending. There’s no token to ape into. There’s no influencer shilling it. But Goldman Sachs built its digital asset platform on it. Broadridge runs its entire Distributed Ledger Repo platform through it, processing over $350 billion in daily repo transactions. JPMorgan is rolling out JPM Coin onto it throughout 2026. DTCC is tokenizing U.S. Treasury securities on it with SEC approval already secured.

Over $6 trillion in tokenized real-world assets sit across the Canton Network right now. Over 700,000 transactions process through it daily. More than 50 institutional members — including HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Euroclear — are building on it.

This is not a pilot. This is not a proof of concept. This is operating infrastructure.

And the reason it matters for the private credit conversation is this: the asset classes that are hardest to tokenize — illiquid, complex, long-duration, compliance-heavy — need exactly the kind of settlement layer Canton was built to provide. Privacy between counterparties. Compliance controls baked into the protocol. Interoperability across institutional applications without exposing position data to competitors on the same network.

Litigation finance fits that description perfectly. So does most of private credit.

Where Value Actually Goes

I’ve been running a framework called the Value Capture Triangle for a long time now. The short version: value in on-chain markets concentrates at the intersection of capital, infrastructure, and liquidity settlement. Not at the edges. Not in the noise. At the intersection.

Private credit going on-chain isn’t a price catalyst. It’s a structural shift. The capital is real — $2 trillion and growing. The infrastructure is real — settlement rails are live and processing institutional volume right now. The liquidity layer is being built on top of it.

That’s the triangle forming.

And the game has changed because of it.

This isn’t the crypto of 2017 or 2021. It’s not a casino dressed up as a movement anymore. TradFi is here. The adults are in the room. Goldman Sachs doesn’t build production infrastructure on a blockchain as a joke. Broadridge doesn’t settle $350 billion a day as an experiment. DTCC doesn’t tokenize U.S. Treasuries to see what happens.

They do it because the new economy is forming — and they intend to be inside it when it does.

That means the rules have changed too. You can’t just show up on game day and expect to participate. There are no participation awards in a market where institutional capital is establishing position while most of the retail crowd is still debating which chain is going to win. The question stopped being theoretical. The infrastructure is live. The capital is moving. The settlement layer exists.

What’s left is understanding where value actually concentrates inside all of it — and positioning before it becomes obvious.

The protocols sitting at the intersection of institutional rails and complex real-world asset classes like private credit — the ones building inside this layer, not around it — those are where value is going. Not the tokens chasing attention. The infrastructure absorbing capital.

Crypto is a legitimate asset class now. It’s time to treat it like one.

Only about 5% of crypto is in or near value capture. Find out where you stand — Ask ALEN

Chip Mahoney is the founder of Token Trust Advisors and host of The Chip Mahoney Show. He has been studying capital movement in crypto since 2019 and is certified in DeFi and Blockchain through the Blockchain Council. He is personally invested in tokens featured in the Token Trust Signals watchlist. Start Here if you need a watchlist, too.