RedStone exec explains how BlackRock and Apollo funds became DeFi collateral

For the first time, retail crypto users can borrow against shares of a BlackRock or Apollo fund without ever leaving decentralized finance.

Jason Barraza, institutional business development lead at RedStone, joined TheStreet Roundtable to walk through how it works. He joined RedStone in January 2026 after the oracle firm acquired Security Token Advisors, where he was COO and helped track more than 800 tokenized real-world assets.

Why NAV oracles matter

Net asset value, or NAV, is the per-share value of a fund. For a traditional fund, the administrator calculates it once a day and reports it to investors. That once-a-day cadence falls apart the moment the fund’s tokens start moving on-chain as collateral inside a smart contract, which needs the price constantly.

“If Apollo’s ACRED, for example, or Hamilton Lane’s (SCOPE), or (BlackRock’s) BUIDL was to be used as collateral, the smart contract needs to at all times be able to see that price,” Barraza explained.

The role of an oracle is to bring that off-chain NAV figure on-chain with cryptographic proof, so any DeFi protocol can reference it without having to trust a single off-chain feed.

The category is small but growing fast. RedStone now secures roughly $6 billion in on-chain value across 110 blockchains.

The partnerships

Securitize is one of the leading tokenization platforms that is turning these traditional funds into on-chain tokens. In March 2025, it selected RedStone as its primary oracle partner.

“Through our partnership with Securitize, which is the tokenization platform that tokenized their funds, we’re able to deliver the NAV of their funds on-chain,” Barazza said.

An oracle’s job is to bring that off-chain NAV figure on-chain with cryptographic proof, so any DeFi protocol can use it without trusting a single private data feed. RedStone now secures roughly $6 billion in on-chain value across 110 blockchains.

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The partnerships

Securitize is one of the leading platforms turning traditional funds into on-chain tokens. In March 2025, it picked RedStone as its primary oracle partner.

“Through our partnership with Securitize, which is the tokenization platform that tokenized their funds, we’re able to deliver the NAV of their funds on-chain.” added Barraza.

The money behind this is real, and growing:

• BlackRock’s BUIDL is now the largest tokenized fund in the world, with roughly $2.5 billion in assets under management as of mid-May 2026. About $580 million of that sat on Ethereum as of February, with daily valuation and interest accrual handled by RedStone feeds.
• Apollo’s ACRED, a tokenized private credit fund, has grown past $100 million in AUM and is already live as collateral on DeFi platforms like Morpho and Drift Institutional, across Polygon, Solana, and Ethereum, all secured by RedStone oracles.

The wider trend is bigger than any one fund. The tokenized real-world asset market grew from about $23 billion at the end of 2025 to roughly $31 billion by the end of Q1 2026, led by tokenized U.S. Treasuries, which alone account for around $11 billion. Apollo’s move points at an even larger pool: the U.S. private credit market is worth about $1.5 trillion and is projected to reach $2.8 trillion by 2028.

The technology

Crypto-native price feeds aggregate dozens of exchanges and have a natural failsafe against bad data. NAV feeds do not, because there is only one fund administrator producing the number.

“When you have crypto prices being reflected on chain, those assets already live on chain. Whereas with a fund, you might have just one fund administrator that is sending and calculating that NAV. What an Oracle does and what we built with Securitize is what we call the trusted single source Oracle (TSSO),” said Barazza.

The design cryptographically signs each NAV update on-chain and creates an auditable trail of every price change.