Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Hashed anchors a $300M credit fund that lends against crypto firms' cash flow
Thoro Capital Management is targeting $300 million for dollar loans that settle in stablecoins, underwritten on borrowers' financial statements and covenants, with Hashed as anchor investor and regional partner.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Hashed has agreed to anchor a private credit vehicle targeting $300 million, managed by Thoro Capital Management, the platform set up by Abu Dhabi-based investor Mohamed Hamdy.
- The fund is designed to extend US dollar loans that settle through stablecoins to companies and institutions tied to digital-asset markets rather than purely speculative trading desks.
- Most crypto lending still depends on pledged tokens or other digital collateral, which Thoro's managing partner has argued means lenders underwrite assets instead of companies.
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Why it matters
- capability Profitable, audited digital-asset infrastructure firms that now fund themselves with expensive, short-duration, over-collateralized loans get a route to credit priced off their own cash generation.
- constraint The model only pays for its extra diligence cost where borrower reporting is reliable and covenants can actually be enforced. The addressable borrower list therefore runs only to firms with audited accounts.
- decision Hashed is putting capital and regional expansion effort into a lending platform run by someone else. That capital and bandwidth is not going into its venture equity book.
- contradiction The sub-1% headroom argument rests on comparing cumulative on-chain origination with a standing $3 trillion market, so the true penetration is lower than 0.47% and the growth case is correspondingly less measured.
A loan against pledged tokens can be run by a margin engine. Mark the collateral and liquidate when the haircut is breached, and the lender never has to form a view about whether the borrower makes money. Thoro's version costs more to operate, because it means reading financial statements, cash flow, operating metrics and management quality, then writing covenants the borrower has to hold for the life of the loan [8]. Collateral does not disappear from that model. It sits behind the credit analysis [9].
The customers being described already have audited accounts and already pay for short-duration, over-collateralized money [11]. Hashed and Thoro put the cause on two things: bank capital rules that keep licensed lenders out, and crypto lenders who price around assets [10]. Hamdy has made the same point: digital-asset lenders underwrite the assets [12].
On scale, the source pairs two numbers that do not measure the same thing. Tokenized private credit is the largest real-world-asset category by cumulative on-chain origination, with more than $14 billion of loans recorded, against a traditional private credit market worth more than $3 trillion [14][15]. That ratio is under half a percent [20]. But cumulative origination counts every loan ever written, including the ones repaid, while the $3 trillion is a standing market, so the on-chain share of credit actually outstanding is below 0.47%. Against that origination figure, a $300 million target is about 2.1% [21]. Thoro said the target reflects its view of market demand and the practicality of executing the strategy [13].
Hashed's side of this is regional as much as financial. The firm obtained a financial-services permission from the Abu Dhabi Global Market and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office [16]. It has also agreed to help Thoro expand across regions [6]. The announcement does not say how much Hashed committed [22].
In my view the risk worth pricing here is correlation, not fraud in the accounts. Revenue at digital-asset infrastructure firms tracks activity in digital-asset markets, so a cash-flow lender to that sector is underwriting the same cycle the collateral lender was, one step removed. Thoro's own conditions concede the point: reporting has to be reliable, covenants have to be enforced, and borrowers have to service dollar obligations through crypto cycles [17]. The counter-argument is that a covenant lets a lender act months before a default while a token haircut acts only at the breach, which is how the post-2008 private credit managers this fund is modelled on built their books [19]. The first loan tape will settle it. If the loans arrive with collateral coverage well above 100% and tenors under a year, this is the existing collateral-heavy product with more paperwork, a downside the fund's backers acknowledge [18].
What to watch
- A first close, showing how much of the $300 million target is raised and which limited partners sit beside Hashed.
- Collateral coverage and tenor on the first loans, the two terms that separate cash-flow credit from the over-collateralized kind.
- Whether Hashed's Abu Dhabi Investment Office memorandum turns into co-investment alongside the fund.