Robert Alcorn, CEO, Clearpool

In this installment of The Scoop, The Block's podcast, host Frank Chaparro speaks with Robert Alcorn, co-founder and CEO of Clearpool, a decentralized capital markets platform built to bring institutional credit and lending onchain.

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The conversation centers on the state of the crypto credit market in the aftermath of 2022's cascading blowups among centralized lenders such as Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi, and Alcorn walks through why he believes those failures were rooted less in blockchain technology itself than in the opaque, off-chain risk practices those firms relied on. He argues that a properly regulated, transparent onchain credit market, one where loan terms, collateral, and counterparty exposure are visible on a public ledger, offers a structural fix to the trust and disclosure problems that plagued crypto lending during the bear market.

Alcorn details how Clearpool's model works in practice, letting institutional borrowers access uncollateralized or under-collateralized liquidity pools while lenders can assess borrower risk directly rather than depending on a centralized intermediary to manage that exposure behind closed doors. He also discusses what he sees as the missing regulatory scaffolding needed for the credit market to mature, touching on licensing, disclosure standards, and the kind of oversight traditional fixed-income markets have relied on for decades, and how those frameworks might be adapted for a blockchain-based lending environment.

The episode explores the broader rebuilding process underway across crypto credit markets following the 2022 shakeout, including how institutional demand for onchain lending has evolved as larger players look for yield-generating opportunities with better risk transparency than the failed centralized platforms offered. Alcorn's perspective, shaped by years spent building infrastructure for institutional digital-asset trading before founding Clearpool, gives listeners a grounded view of how decentralized finance protocols are trying to professionalize and win back trust from an institutional audience still wary after a painful year of lender collapses, while also addressing where DeFi credit markets still fall short of standards traditional finance would expect.

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This episode is brought to you by our sponsors PayPal and CleanSpark.

About CleanSpark

CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) is America’s Bitcoin Miner™. Visit cleanspark.com/theblock to learn more about the CleanSpark way.