🚪 Wall Street Just Entered the Solana Casino, and Brought $4B in Debt With It

Figure 1: Creation by FarmingLegendX

So, here’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be writing this soon:

Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, just tokenized a $4 billion credit fund and ported it into DeFi.

On Solana. Yeah, Solana...

The chain once memed to death for outages, and now suddenly the new darling of Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization.

It’s not just an experiment. The token’s live. It’s called ACRED, and it’s now active collateral in Solana’s DeFi ecosystem thanks to Kamino, Securitize, and Steakhouse Financial. You can deposit it into a Vault, to Yield Aggregator, or borrow against it like a degen trying to loop their way to early retirement.

We’ve gone from food tokens to leveraged TradFi debt, in like three years. Progress?

🤔 Why is this happening now?

Two reasons: interest rates and liquidity.

Traditional finance is full of juicy fixed income products right now, think credit funds with 8%+ APR, which looks pretty tasty to anyone holding stablecoins earning nothing in a random DEX pool. At the same time, DeFi has a hunger for high quality collateral. And no, I’m not talking about meme coins with thin liquidity pools, and promises of future utility. I mean actual debt instruments, yielding real cash flows off chain.

ACRED is exactly that. A tokenized exposure to a fund managed by Apollo, with backing by Securitize, a security token issuer fully regulated in the U.S. That means it’s compliant, boring, and probably not going to zero overnight.

Perfect. DeFi needs that energy right now.

🧱 Why Solana?

Good question. I’d have guessed Ethereum, or some appchain built just for RWAs. But nope, Solana snagged this one.

Why you ask?

Because Solana is a Layer 1, that’s fast, cheap, and actually feels like a working product now. Its design is monolithic, not modular. That means it handles consensus, execution, and data availability all in one place. No fragmented UX. And Kamino, built natively on Solana, acts like a DeFi Swiss army knife, offering automated yield strategies without having to jump chains or manage 12 wallets.

The speed and simplicity matters here, especially for TradFi APR. Players dipping their toes into DeFi. Solana’s starting to feel like the Apple of blockchains, fewer options, but everything “just works.”

🌉 TradFi meets DeFi, this is more than just another token

Don’t think of ACRED as a one off.

This is part of a larger trend where DeFi protocols are turning into Actively Validated Services (AVS), meaning they’re not just posting blocks or finalizing transactions. They’re offering real services on top of blockchains, from restaked security, to collateralized borrowing on tokenized real world assets.

It’s like DeFi stopped trying to fight TradFi and just decided to quietly eat it instead.

Also, the idea of using something like Apollo’s credit fund as base layer collateral for DeFi lending protocols is game changing. If it scales, it shifts the entire conversation around what “trustless finance” can actually do. Suddenly, you’re not looping ETH into stETH into crvUSD, you’re looping into something with off chain, stable cashflows.

🎯 Don’t sleep on the details

A few under the hood things that matter:

Vaults, like Kamino’s, aren’t just static pools, they use Automated Market Maker (AMM) logic and optimization to rebalance exposure. This isn’t set it and forget it yield farming. It’s algorithmic.
Since ACRED is tokenized via Securitize, it will operate under some sort of Lock-Up Period, at least for some investors. So don’t expect instant liquidity or ape worthy degenerate loops.
The big money is watching this. If it works, we’ll see other funds tokenize exposure to private debt, treasuries, or even cross chain yield products. And once that door is open, it won’t close.

Apollo Diversified Credit Securitize Fund by @apolloglobal ($733B AUM) just went multichain

Already hold $ACRED elsewhere? You can transfer it to Ink today

Tokenization by @Securitize
Interoperability by @Wormhole
Adopted by ink ✍️

🧵 pic.twitter.com/3KgkFqmCsX
— ink (@inkonchain) March 27, 2025

🤖 "Isn’t this just CeFi in a shiny wrapper?"

Yeah. Kinda.

ACRED is a custodial asset in some ways, you’re trusting Securitize to manage the link between on chain token and off chain fund. It’s not fully decentralized. And it won’t be available to everyone (due to KYC and securities laws).

But that’s okay. Programmable liquidity doesn’t always mean fully trustless. Sometimes it just means flexible and usable. And if protocols like Kamino can make it so I can borrow against high quality debt on chain without needing to fill out ten TradFi forms… I’ll take that win.

Final thoughts

For you and me

What we’re seeing isn’t the start of RWA hype. That’s already here. This is different, the infrastructure phase. ACRED isn’t trying to pump your bags, it’s trying to become boring, reliable, and scalable. Which, ironically, is what DeFi desperately needs right now.

If this thing holds up, if Solana doesn’t faceplant and users actually engage, it could mark the beginning of a new kind of DeFi. One where “yield farming” actually involves farming yield from somewhere real.