April 17th, 2024 – Press Release

April 17, 2024 – Dubai – Centrifuge, the platform for onchain finance, announced it has raised $15M in Series A funding. This strategic investment will help fuel the company’s mission to drive widespread adoption of institutional DeFi.

The oversubscribed round was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Greenfield. Other investors include Arrington Capital, Bloccelerate, Borderless Capital, Circle Ventures, Edessa Capital, Gnosis, IOSG Ventures, Modular Capital, ProtoCap, Re7 Capital, Scytale Digital, Skynet Trading, Stake Capital, The Spartan Group, TRGC and Wintermute Ventures among others.

“We’re focused on building a fundamentally better financial system. DeFi has always been about accessibility, transparency and interoperability, making markets more open, fair and decentralized. We’re bringing these innovations to institutions in a compliant and safe way,” said Lucas Vogelsang, Centrifuge Co-founder. “We’re not recreating existing offchain processes onchain, we’re creating new, interesting opportunities never before possible.”

Since launching in 2017, Centrifuge has established itself as the industry leading real-world asset tokenization platform. Centrifuge has always provided the bridge between traditional and decentralized finance (DeFi) by building a secure, compliant, premium platform that is trusted by institutions; while also remaining decentralized and interconnected, which is attractive to the onchain community.

Ben Forman, Founder and Managing Partner at ParaFi said: “The apex opportunity of crypto is the migration of all existing and new assets onto a composable ledger — stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, collectibles, tickets, media, content, etc. The Centrifuge team is a leader in real-world asset tokenization, taking a deeply thoughtful approach to design decisions around legal, regulatory, and smart contract architecture. We believe we’re reaching an inflection point in institutional adoption and are excited to double down with the Centrifuge team.”

As an important step towards onchain utility, Centrifuge is planning an institutional-grade lending market for RWAs, built on Base (the Ethereum layer 2 incubated by Coinbase) and integrated with Coinbase Verification. These integrations will allow institutions to quickly and safely onboard to real-world assets. The real-world asset market gives instant liquidity and the ability to borrow against real-world asset holdings, all without sacrificing compliance or regulatory requirements.

Anthony Bassili, Head of Allocators & Tokenization at Coinbase said: “We continue to see significant interest from our institutional clients for easier access to tokenization solutions onchain. Centrifuge is a pioneer in real-world assets, and is now scaling using Coinbase Verifications and Base as the open source settlement layer. This is an important step in ensuring Institutional clients can build with Centrifuge in a safe and secure manner across the Coinbase ecosystem.”

Centrifuge will use this latest investment to:

• Drive Product Development: Develop the most efficient, comprehensive, and user friendly fund management platform and universal gateway to onchain liquidity.
• Create Onchain Utility: Leverage relationships to create a faster, more streamlined environment for trading, lending and borrowing within DeFi systems.
• Cultivate Ecosystem Growth: Build on the Tokenized Asset Coalition, of which Centrifuge was a founding member, along with its global RWA Summit, to continue to foster industry collaboration and a thriving DeFi ecosystem.
• Bring on New Talent: Make critical hires to accelerate innovation and adoption.

Felix Machart, Partner at Greenfield said: “In an era where the potential of public blockchains to revolutionize global capital markets is undeniable — enhancing efficiency, transparency, and accessibility while mitigating risks — various entities are going to gear up to seize substantial market shares from the traditional finance supply chain. We firmly believe that Centrifuge is poised to claim significant portions of this market. Having pioneered their category, the team demonstrates unwavering resilience through many years of commitment across several market cycles. Their expertise in navigating the intricacies of integrating real-world assets into decentralized finance is unparalleled.”

This investment comes on the heels of several noteworthy announcements from Centrifuge in recent months, as it launched an onchain asset management platform as well as its path to revenue generation.

About Centrifuge

Founded in 2017, Centrifuge is the platform for onchain finance. Notable firsts include minting MakerDAO’s first real-world asset, structuring the first onchain securitization, launching the RWA Market with Aave and bringing the first credit fund’s operations onchain with BlockTower. Centrifuge provides both the infrastructure and ecosystem to tokenize, manage, and invest into a complete, diversified portfolio of real-world assets.

Source : Centrifuge