Avalanche Summit: Kevin Miao makes the case for tokenization to reshape consumer lending

Consumer lending is one of the most intermediary-heavy corners of finance. Between the bank that originates a loan, the servicer that collects payments, and the securitizer that packages it all up for investors, a surprising amount of every dollar a borrower pays gets siphoned off before it reaches the people actually providing the capital. Kevin Miao thinks tokenization can fix that. Miao, co-founder and CEO of Tare, took the stage at the Avalanche Summit 2026 in New York City to argue that onchain infrastructure can strip out those middlemen and return more value directly to borrowers. From BlockTower to Tare: building the case onchain Miao previously founded BlockTower Credit, a private credit fund that grew to manage $1.9 billion in assets under management by leveraging blockchain technology to improve capital efficiency in lending operations. Tare is positioning itself as consumer lending infrastructure built natively on the Avalanche blockchain, designed to move the entire lending stack onchain rather than just tokenizing the final asset. Miao’s argument is that putting a digital wrapper on a traditional loan after it’s already been originated, serviced, and structured throug...