In my April article, Why Liquidity is Still the Missing Piece in Revenue-Based Financing, I wrote about how informal syndication, recycled capital, and opaque performance data hold the revenue-based finance market back — and how tokenization can address those bottlenecks by making receivables transparent, transferable, and easier to syndicate in real time.
Tokenization solves for speed and access. But speed alone doesn’t bring the kind of stable, large-scale capital the sector needs to truly scale. Capital doesn’t follow hype — it follows frameworks. If tokenization got us in the door, standardization is what will get us on the shelves.
Tokenization Alone Isn’t Enough
You can tokenize a bad deal just as easily as a good one. The blockchain doesn’t care — but the buyer does.
Without enforceable structure, rating mechanisms, and comparability across deals, a token is just a faster email. Liquidity without structure is volatility with prettier packaging. A trustless environment still needs trustable assets — assets an institutional investor can underwrite, rate, and slot into a portfolio with confidence.
What Traditional Securitization Teaches Us
Mortgage-backed securities (MBS), asset-backed securities (ABS), and similar markets didn’t scale because of new tech. They scaled because of standardization.
Mortgages became investable when loans were pooled, structured, and guaranteed under uniform guidelines. Auto finance and floorplan lines became bankable when deals followed repeatable formats with predictable cashflows.
The difference between a local lender and a global market? Tranches, waterfalls, and disclosure standards. Tokens speed up the rails; securitization builds the bridges. As Paul Volcker once said, “The function of capital markets is not to invent risk, but to standardize and price it.”
We’ve already seen securitization make inroads into revenue-based financing and merchant cash advance portfolios — but only for a handful of large, established players. In 2018, Kapitus completed a $105 million ABS backed by MCA receivables. OnDeck has issued multiple MCA-backed securitizations, including a single deal exceeding $300 million, and Fundbox has tapped the ABS market to finance its small business receivables. Even Credibly has placed rated ABS transactions in recent years.
These transactions prove the asset class can meet institutional standards — but they’ve been limited to originators with the scale, data consistency, and servicing infrastructure to satisfy banks and rating agencies. For the vast majority of funders, the operational and structural lift required has kept securitization out of reach.
That’s the gap Receivabull is positioning to close — by creating a shared, standardized framework that allows any conforming deal, regardless of originator size, to flow into rating-ready portfolios.
The Fannie Mae Parallel
Fannie Mae didn’t originate a single mortgage. It created liquidity by buying paper everyone could trust — loans that conformed to an accepted standard. That consistency allowed for a deep, liquid secondary market, which in turn built the modern U.S. housing finance system.
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In revenue-based finance, the opportunity is similar. A buyer of standardized, rating-ready paper can open the door to institutional capital at scale. As Larry Fink put it: “Create the infrastructure and the capital will come. Capital is always looking for yield — but only when it understands the risk.”
The Synergy Between Tokenization and Securitization
Tokenization and securitization aren’t competing approaches — they’re complementary.
- Tokenization provides transparency, traceability, and efficient transfer of assets.
- Securitization packages those assets into investment-grade, rating-ready products that fit into institutional mandates.
When you add standardization to the mix — uniform docs, consistent servicing protocols, common scoring — you get a market that is faster, more transparent, and institutionally consumable. Imagine tokenized receivables flowing into a programmatic cashflow waterfall, with investor payouts triggered automatically based on merchant remittances.
What the Future Revenue-Based Finance Ecosystem Could Look Like
- Uniform deal structures and underwriting rails across participating funders.
- Instant access to performance history, scoring, and cashflow health for every asset in the pool.
- Investor dashboards showing real-time portfolio data, with the ability to buy or sell fractional positions in seconds.
- Tokenized remittance streams that feed into rating-ready SPV portfolios built for QIBs and institutional allocators.
Not every deal should be a phone call. Not every syndicate should be a group text. In a standardized, tokenized, securitized RBF ecosystem, funders and institutions can operate on equal footing — trusted, liquid, and scalable.
From Illiquidity to Infrastructure
We’re not here to reinvent credit. We’re here to make it programmable, portable, and trusted — at scale.
Tokenization got us in the door. Standardization gets us on the shelves. Securitization gets us to scale.
As I said recently, “In every market, infrastructure always wins. It doesn’t shout, it doesn’t hype — it just moves the capital.” And in revenue-based finance, building that infrastructure is how we get from a fragmented, relationship-driven market to one with true institutional reach.
Scott Goldman, CEO
Receivabull Inc.
