Cap Expands Onchain Credit Marketplace Into Film and Media Financing

Cap provides financing for upcoming feature film Wake, demonstrating how its underwriting model can support specialized credit markets without requiring real-world assets to be tokenized.

New York, NY, Nov. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cap, an onchain credit marketplace backed by financial guarantees, is expanding into film and media financing, marking a new step in bringing traditional credit markets onto blockchain infrastructure. The expansion includes financing for Wake, an upcoming comedy-drama directed by Devon Michaels and starring Cole Sprouse, Riki Lindhome, Penelope Ann Miller, and Chris Parnell.

Left to right: Cole Sprouse, Penelope Ann Miller, and Chris Parnell

The financing is structured as an advance against anticipated film production tax credits, allowing the production to access capital ahead of receiving those proceeds. While tax credit financing is a well-established practice in the entertainment industry, the transaction demonstrates how Cap's underwriting model can extend onchain lending to borrowers and industries that have historically operated outside crypto markets.

Rather than requiring film productions to tokenize their underlying assets, Cap enables specialized underwriters to evaluate offchain credit risk and provide onchain collateral to guarantee loans. The approach is designed to make new categories of real-world credit accessible through blockchain infrastructure without requiring borrowers to restructure the assets traditionally used to secure financing.

Expanding Credit Beyond Crypto-Native Borrowers

Since the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto lending has largely revolved around a relatively narrow borrower base, primarily institutions and large holders borrowing against Bitcoin, Ethereum and other liquid digital assets. Despite years of innovation in lending infrastructure, the underlying borrower base has remained largely concentrated within the digital asset ecosystem. For onchain lending to compete with traditional credit markets, it must be capable of serving businesses that do not hold crypto assets or operate on blockchain infrastructure.

One of the primary challenges is collateral. Many assets used in traditional lending, including film production tax credits, have unique legal structures, jurisdictional considerations and limited secondary market liquidity. Tokenizing these assets can introduce additional complexity without necessarily improving their economic value. Cap addresses this challenge by separating the assets securing a loan from the collateral guaranteeing its repayment.

Through its marketplace, independent underwriters evaluate borrowers and assume the risk associated with offchain collateral in exchange for a premium. These underwriters escrow their own onchain collateral to guarantee individual loans, allowing lenders to access credit opportunities without requiring the underlying assets to be tokenized. The structure draws on principles found in traditional financial guarantees and risk transfer arrangements, where specialized institutions assume defined credit risks in exchange for compensation.

“For onchain lending to become a meaningful part of the global credit market, it needs to serve more than crypto-native borrowers,” said Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, Founder and CEO of Cap. “Film financing is a good example of a market where specialized underwriting matters, but tokenizing the underlying collateral doesn't necessarily make sense. Our model allows underwriters to bring that expertise onchain and put their own capital behind their credit decisions, opening the door to entirely new categories of borrowers.”

Scaling Through Specialized Underwriting

Cap's expansion into film financing also demonstrates how its marketplace can support lending across industries that require specialized knowledge and underwriting expertise. Traditional lenders typically need to build dedicated credit teams with industry-specific experience before entering new markets, making expansion into niche sectors costly and difficult to scale. Cap instead operates through a distributed marketplace of 16 independent underwriters, each bringing their own expertise, relationships and ability to evaluate specialized collateral.

Underwriters are compensated for assuming risks they understand, creating an incentive to identify and evaluate credit opportunities where their knowledge provides an advantage. The model also allows underwriters to use assets with lower financing costs than the US dollar to guarantee dollar-denominated loans, potentially creating opportunities to earn premiums on credit risk while deploying capital with a lower cost of funding.

Together, specialized underwriting expertise and differences in funding costs can enable Cap to access credit opportunities that may be difficult for traditional lenders to serve efficiently. For lenders, these specialized markets can offer attractive risk-adjusted returns, particularly where the expertise required to evaluate borrowers creates barriers to entry. By distributing underwriting across independent specialists, Cap can expand into new credit markets without building a dedicated internal underwriting team for every industry.

Bringing the Real Economy Onchain

The expansion into film and media financing reflects Cap's broader effort to connect onchain capital with credit opportunities across the real economy. While much of DeFi lending has historically focused on crypto-native borrowers and collateral, traditional credit markets encompass a far wider range of businesses, assets and financing needs.

Cap's underwriting model is designed to bridge that gap by allowing borrowers to access onchain capital while retaining the offchain collateral structures already used in their respective industries. The financing of Wake provides an example of how this approach can support new categories of borrowers without requiring every underlying asset to exist onchain.

As Cap continues to expand its marketplace, the company aims to make specialized credit markets accessible through blockchain infrastructure, supported by independent underwriting, transparent collateral and enforceable financial guarantees. The goal is not to tokenize every asset, but to make a broader range of credit markets accessible onchain.

View Wake on Cap

About Cap

Cap is a private credit platform that uses blockchain technology to address the core problems facing legacy private credit systems. Cap’s novel automated credit marketplace ensures every loan is backed by onchain principal protection. Each loan has a dedicated underwriter who puts their own capital behind the decision, making honest underwriting the dominant strategy. Dollar depositors then earn a secured yield that’s insured by underwriters. This innovative approach to private credit mitigates the issues of scalability, incentive alignment, fraud, and illiquidity facing traditional markets. Cap’s investors include Franklin Templeton, Susquehanna, IMC Trading, and other legacy financial institutions. Today, the platform has $4B+ in cumulative volume, over $400M in deposits, and 5–7% annualized yield on dollar deposits.

Learn more at cap.app.

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