Private credit funds offer high yields but are closed, illiquid, and rated by the same agencies that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Swedish startup Deploi wants to replace the fund model with tokenised loan assets on a transparent blockchain.
Grunnlegger og daglig leder Oskars Jepsis ble intervjuet av Leon Aleksander Solbakken og Morten Myrstad på Kaupr TV Live i slutten av april. De to møtte Jepsis første gang under European Blockchain Conference i Barcelona i fjor høst, da Deploi vant førstepremien i konferansens startup-konkurranse. I TV-intervjuet forteller de tre også om dette første møtet.
The article continues below the video.
Private credit – direct lending outside the banking system – has grown into one of the world's largest asset classes over the past decade, driven by yields that outpace public markets. But the structure belongs to another era: investors are locked in for seven to ten years, valuations are quarterly and lagged, and credit ratings are provided by agencies paid by the funds themselves – the same conflict of interest that underpinned the structured products behind the 2008 financial crisis. That is what Deploi, a six-person startup in Stockholm, is setting out to change.
The standard private credit fund structure sees a manager charge two percent of assets under management annually and twenty percent of returns – the so-called «2 and 20» model. Redemptions are capped at five percent of the total investment per quarter, and even that is not guaranteed. Valuations are not continuous but quarterly, making it difficult for investors to track what their portfolio is actually worth at any given moment.
On top of this sits the rating problem. Funds use Fitch or Moody's to assess portfolio quality – agencies they themselves pay. It is the same conflict of interest that lay behind structured products ahead of the financial crisis, and it has never been resolved.
Deploi tokenises the loan assets themselves – not a fund wrapping existing instruments, but the underlying loan directly. Each token represents a single asset with a legal and technological link to the real-world loan, both on and off the blockchain. The model targets family offices, fund managers, and insurance companies seeking exposure to private credit with better liquidity and transparency.
A central feature is what Deploi calls a secondary market with real-time pricing – investors can see the value of their position continuously, not just at quarter-end. The company says it is also working on daily yield, where capital resting in the market accrues interest and can be withdrawn the next business day.
One of Deploi's nearest deliverables is an open-source rating system for credit assessment of loan portfolios – free for any financial institution that wants to use or contribute to it. The idea is to remove the conflict of interest from the rating process by making the methodology transparent and collectively owned.
Jepsis says the rating system will be available within a month and that the secondary market will launch in the second quarter of 2026. Secondary trading will, according to Jepsis, take place via Canton Network.
Deploi currently has six employees and has kept a low profile while building its product. The company won the startup competition at the European Blockchain Conference in Barcelona last year and placed in the top 12 at Paris Blockchain Week.
The ambition is to scale globally from Stockholm – with institutional investors as the primary audience and retail as a possible second phase. The long-term vision Jepsis outlines is a system where AI and the blockchain automatically allocate capital to lending based on yield, risk, and need – without a fund structure and without intermediaries.
Sources: Oskars Jepsis / Deploi (interview, Kaupr TV Live, April 2026)
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