Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, Founder and CEO of Cap – Interview Series

Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, Founder and CEO of Cap, is an entrepreneur and finance professional with a background spanning stablecoins, institutional banking, and blockchain infrastructure. Prior to launching Cap in 2024, he spent more than three years working in the stablecoin sector in stealth mode, focusing on the evolving intersection of digital assets and financial systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at Citi as a Corporate & Investment Banking Analyst within the Global Power and Utilities group, following a prior summer analyst role at the firm. He also served as Finance Lead at Hashing Systems, where he contributed to blockchain-focused projects including wrapped digital assets, developer infrastructure, web-based wallets, and decentralized naming systems built around the Hedera ecosystem.

Cap is a fintech and stablecoin-focused startup building infrastructure designed to bridge traditional financial systems with the emerging digital asset economy. Led by Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, the company is focused on simplifying access to stablecoin-based financial products while addressing the growing demand for faster, more programmable global payments and treasury systems. Positioned at the intersection of crypto infrastructure and institutional finance, Cap reflects a broader industry shift toward integrating stablecoins into mainstream financial operations, where efficiency, transparency, and cross-border interoperability are becoming increasingly important.

You scaled QiDao from zero to roughly $400M in total value locked and then transitioned from traditional finance at Citi into building Cap. What specific gaps did you see in both DeFi and TradFi that convinced you Cap needed to exist?

Crypto yield today is a very circular economy because it’s tethered to Bitcoin markets, so if Bitcoin is doing well, there’s a lot of yield. If Bitcoin’s not doing well, most products have a hard time beating U.S. treasuries’ yield, which is not ideal.

Most new yield platforms focus on how to create wrappers on top of DeFi to manage risk better. This is a valid train of thought, but the only way to really scale crypto-native markets is by connecting to the productive economy; connecting capital markets onchain with off-chain opportunities. This is why we built Cap.

From the TradFi perspective, the future has to be decentralized finance. It’s transparent, automatic, and verifiable by default, making it superior to what existed before it. It also doesn’t rely on people and because of that lowers trust assumptions for users. So, the future will be onchain, but we need to build something that’s useful for TradFi parties in order for that transition to take place.

Cap is positioned as an onchain credit platform backed by financial guarantees. How do you think about risk pricing differently compared to both traditional private credit markets and DeFi lending protocols?

We rely on the market to price risk at Cap. Every actor within our marketplace through their actions can price their opportunity costs. Underwriters get to name what spread they charge borrowers to underwrite their loans while depositors signal whether the yield is acceptable for them or not. The big difference is that it’s not a team making these decisions, which is how legacy private credit platforms work. At Cap, we rely on the market to price risk.

Stablecoins have evolved from simple dollar pegs into yield-bearing instruments. How do you see the market structure shifting over the next 3 to 5 years, and where does Cap fit within that evolution?

There are definitely a lot of dollar peg yield instruments, which does increase access. If you have a dollar-pegged, yield-bearing instrument, you can seek leverage elsewhere. You even see a lot of DeFi projects also starting to make their own tokenized dollars. I foresee more and more of different types of yield sources being tokenized like this.

Cap separates itself by being an evergreen yield product where the underlying yield source is market-set, enabling it to adapt to external conditions much faster than if it relied on manual input.

One of the biggest criticisms of DeFi is opaque risk. How does Cap’s model attempt to separate yield generation from underlying risk exposure in a way that institutions can actually trust?

The rest of DeFi focuses heavily on what strategies are being used to generate yield. At Cap, we realized that this doesn’t matter so much as ensuring that the dollar depositors are not exposed to that risk. With our platform, they are only exposed to the risk of the guaranteed collateral that’s backing the risk of that loan. This means you only really need to track the quality of the collateral being used to underwrite risk, which is very transparent because you can see all the collateral being placed.

Franklin Templeton’s backing signals growing institutional interest. What do large asset managers still misunderstand about onchain credit markets today?

These large asset managers understand onchain credit markets better than most people in crypto, because they’re experts in finance. What I would say is that they’re still waiting for more regulatory clarity because they have their hands tied from a compliance standpoint and cannot move as fast as crypto-native institutions.

Private credit has been one of the fastest-growing asset classes in traditional finance. How does bringing it onchain fundamentally change access, liquidity, or transparency?

Bringing private credit onchain dramatically enhances access. Anybody can access these products now. Tokenizing private credit doesn’t really solve liquidity or transparency because they’re still as liquid and they’re still as opaque as in traditional markets.

But what Cap is doing is rebuilding private credit completely onchain, which does increase liquidity because now the system acts like a vending machine—all automated. Withdrawing from or depositing into that product is much faster than it would be in a legacy system that requires humans to work. It’s also much more transparent because all of the code of how loans are underwritten and what loans are outstanding is onchain.

Many DeFi protocols struggled with sustainability during market downturns. How have your experiences from QiDAO influenced how you design Cap to withstand volatility cycles?

The number-one thing I’ve learned from experience in DeFi in general is that you can’t trust anybody. You have to assume that any actors that are interacting with your platform are malicious. If you use that as your guiding principle for creating your market or your platform, it will be very anti-fragile and won’t have any issues with market downturns.

There is increasing convergence between TradFi and crypto. Do you see the future as crypto-native platforms adapting to institutional standards, or institutions adapting to crypto rails?

It’s a mix because the end consumer prefers crypto rails. Crypto products are set up much better than traditional systems, especially because there is more liquidity and greater accessibility. However, in order to get big institutions to use crypto platforms, we need to adopt some of their standards as well.

Even at Cap, we’ve had to change a lot of things to make it easier for traditional players to interact with us. For example, we have fully KYC’d loans. So, if an institution wants to borrow dollars from us, but they need to make sure every single one of those dollars are KYC’d, we have that option now.

Cap introduces a model where institutions can borrow against user-deposited collateral. How do you ensure alignment between retail participants and institutional borrowers in this structure?

At Cap, we only allow institutions to underwrite institutions. So, the collateral that’s being deposited to underwrite loans is from companies that have the ability to come into terms and defend legal agreements versus institutions.

Retail is reserved only for dollar deposits because we’ve identified that side of the market as a type of user we need to maximally protect since they have the lowest level of resources. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a retail user to be able to defend a legal agreement against KKR. So, we do not put them in that position.

Looking ahead, what needs to happen technologically, regulatorily, or structurally for onchain credit markets to compete directly with traditional fixed income markets at scale?

From a technology perspective, we need to crack the problem of fixed-rate loans. Right now, most lending in crypto is variable lending, and that’s very bad for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, because they need to be able to plan ahead.

Term loans are another challenge. You not only need to have fixed-rate loans, you need those fixed rates to last a certain amount of time so that CFOs in traditional companies feel comfortable with that source of credit.

On the regulatory side, we need more clarity. Right now, there are no laws governing loans from crypto companies to traditional players, and that’s kept a lot of people from getting loans from crypto who otherwise would benefit greatly from such access.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Cap.