Franklin Templeton Digital Assets warns AI could pressure private credit and DeFi ecosystems, with insights from Roger Bayston on shifting financial conditions

$500B in private credit loans to SaaS firms — up from $8B in 2015 — and BIS data shows a third of private credit funds are exposed. Software stocks already down ~30% since October. Franklin Templeton is sitting on $100B in private credit while simultaneously pushing Benji onto Solana and Arbitrum for tokenized fund access. If AI compresses SaaS margins hard enough to spike defaults in that $500B pool, every protocol tokenizing private credit exposure (Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch) inherits the same risk — except on-chain you get real-time repricing instead of the quarterly NAV fiction that lets tradfi pretend everything's fine. Jenny Johnson saying "AI disruption takes decades" is the exact copium you'd expect from someone managing a $100B book that needs borrowers to keep paying.

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