Centrifuge's Mission and History
Mission
In traditional finance, asset financing requires many intermediaries to function. For example, the shortlist of parties involved in a securitization can include a lead manager, managers, lawyers, paying agents, fiscal agents, auditors, registrars, transfer agents, calculation agents, listing agents, rating agents, process agents. All of these intermediaries add to the upfront and ongoing costs, increasing the barriers for small and medium enterprises compared to large corporations.
Centrifuge brings finance onchain and allows multiple parties to achieve agreement on shared information without a trusted intermediary. Furthermore, reliance on intermediaries can be greatly reduced, leading to a more open, transparent, and efficient access to finance.
Representing real-world assets (RWAs) onchain is known as tokenization. Tokenization brings more efficiency and lower costs — these lower costs reflect the power of automation and blockchain-enabled efficiencies, in contrast to the high labor and operational costs of traditional finance.
Looking ahead: we're building Centrifuge to be a comprehensive platform to take these initial benefits of tokenization and build powerful, automated infrastructure for accessibility, liquidity, and interoperability of digital assets. Users will be able to access onchain capital markets on a global scale, and developers will be able to build cohesive, customized financial infrastructure tailored to their specific use cases.
History
Pioneering real-world assets in decentralized finance
Centrifuge was founded in 2017 with the mission to solve inefficiencies in the financial system with blockchain technology. The first iteration of our platform, built on Ethereum, was called Tinlake. With Tinlake, we pioneered multiple tranches and revolving pools that financed assets in the real world — both firsts for decentralized finance.
In mid-2021, Centrifuge integrated the first real-world asset pool with MakerDAO. This was the first loan to use MakerDAO as a credit facility as well as the first instance of a stablecoin (DAI) being backed by real-world assets. Later in 2021, we launched the RWA Market, making use of the Aave protocol to bring liquidity to RWAs on Centrifuge.
Bringing the first credit fund onchain
In 2022, BlockTower Credit became the first institutional credit fund to bring their collateralized lending operations onchain by funding $220M of real-world assets through Centrifuge — with MakerDAO providing $150M of senior capital to BlockTower's Centrifuge pools. This marked the largest onchain investment in real-world assets.
Building the RWA Ecosystem
In 2023, Centrifuge launched Centrifuge Prime: our product that helps DeFi-native organizations, like DAOs, stablecoins, and protocols, onboard and scale a portfolio of real-world assets. Customers include Frax and Gnosis.
Also in 2023, Centrifuge held the first Real-World Asset Summit, where we brought together leaders from both traditional and decentralized finance to accelerate the future of the tokenized asset industry.
Additionally, Centrifuge was one of the founding members of the Tokenized Asset Coalition alongside industry leaders like Circle, Coinbase, and more, with the mission of working together to bring the next trillion dollars of assets onchain.
Cross-chain expansion and looking ahead
Alongside launching pools on Centrifuge Chain in late-2023, Centrifuge also released Liquidity Pools: smart contracts that can be deployed on any EVM-based chain that allow users on these chains to invest in pools on Centrifuge. We're building Centrifuge to be the best place for onchain capital to allocate to real-world assets — and for the best protocol for institutional issuers and investors to take advantage of the benefits of onchain finance.
