The $2.3 Billion Lesson: Why Private Credit Belongs on a Public Ledger

$2.3 Billion “Simply Vanished”

In early October, Raistone — a major private credit lender — requested an independent examiner in the First Brands bankruptcy, alleging that as much as $2.3 billion in factored receivables had “simply vanished.”

Court filings revealed:

• $0 held in so-called “segregated” lender accounts

• $1.9 billion in borrower receipts that could not be traced or confirmed

• Duplicate pledging of assets across facilities

This was not a one-off accounting error. It was a systemic failure of trust-based lending infrastructure that underpins trillions in private credit globally.

The Core Problem: Private Credit Still Runs on PDFs and Promises

Billions did not “vanish.” They were never verifiable in the first place.

How Hashfire Solves Private Credit’s Structural Weakness

Hashfire was built to ensure that every receivable is born authenticated, continuously verified, and settled through deterministic code, not legal guesswork or delayed enforcement.

1. Receivables Become Verifiable Digital Assets

Every invoice is converted into a Hashfire-verified asset with:

• Canonical source record

• Obligor and supplier signatures

• Immutable hash anchored on-chain

No more falsified PDFs or double-pledged receivables.

2. Live Proof of Payment Routing and Segregated Funds

Each asset maintains:

• Real-time remittance ledger

• Automated segregation-balance attestations

If funds divert or stall, lenders see it immediately, not months later through litigation. Importantly, our drag and drop smart contracts route capital precisely where they’re intended to arrive, making it impossible for bad actors to intercede and divert funds.

3. Canonical Document Integrity and Live Contract State

Every receivable or agreement on Hashfire maintains a single canonical source of truth — not a folder of scattered PDFs, emails, and redlines. Instead of losing track of revisions or renegotiations, Hashfire tracks every amendment, assignment, payment, and counterparty acknowledgment as part of the same document object.

• Version changes are cryptographically anchored, not overwritten

• All updates become append-only events, preserving full provenance

• Each document lives at a dedicated Contract Explorer URL, showing its current state and full lineage at any moment in time

Whether a contract is pending, assigned, paid down, refinanced, or in dispute, its status is not inferred — it is visible.

4. Every Asset Maintains a Complete Verification Record

For each financed receivable or agreement, Hashfire preserves a full, chronological evidence set including:

• Origination details

• Purchase or assignment records

• Notice of transfer or acknowledgment from the obligor

• Payment routing instructions

• Bank-level confirmation of remittances

• Payoff or residual reconciliation

This record is not assembled retrospectively. It is built in real time as part of the transaction flow. There is no need for forensic reconstruction. The truth is precompiled, auditable, and reproducible on demand.

Private Credit. Public Ledger.

The First Brands collapse is not an anomaly. It is a preview of what happens when opaque capital structures operate at scale without cryptographic accountability.

Hashfire replaces:

• Manual trust with mathematical proof

• Periodic reporting with continuous verification

• Post-hoc legal enforcement with deterministic execution

The Future of Asset-Based Lending Infrastructure

Hashfire provides the standardized rails for authenticated private credit across:

• Invoice factoring and supply chain finance

• Structured lending facilities and warehouse lines

• Receivable-backed stablecoins

• Syndication, assignment, refinancing and liquidation without re-papering

Every capital flow — from origination to repayment to resale — lives on a Contract Explorer, a dedicated URL proving who owes what, to whom, under what authority, in real time.

Get Started

If you are a lender, investor, or enterprise finance leader asking how to make sure another First Brands never happens again, the answer is straightforward:

Receivables must be cryptographically verifiable from day zero.

That is the world Hashfire is building.

For a private conversation or platform demonstration, contact hello@hashfire.xyz