Centrifuge — Research by Cryp2Gem

Cryp2Gem
20 min readNov 29, 2020

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Decentralized Asset Finance

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PROJECT: Centrifuge

TICKER: RAD
FOUNDED: 2017, Berlin, Germany
WEB PAGE: https://centrifuge.io/
WHITEPAPER:
All the documentation can be found here.
FIELD OF INTEREST: DeFi & financial supply chain
SHORT DESCRIPTION: Centrifuge is a platform for the tokenisation and unlocking of illiquid real-world assets to become a new means of financial opportunities.
GOAL: »Financial systems rarely connect directly across company boundaries. Business networks compete for market share and thus, do not have incentives to share user profiles, build a robust and shareable reputation system within a network, or open their data silos to others. We believe that the time of incremental optimization of archaic processes has to come to an end. Only by collectively shaping an entirely new system for the global financial supply chain can we foster widespread economic opportunity. This new system can only be established by dismantling the existing financial supply chain infrastructure, stripping it down to its essential components, and reassembling it for the 21st century. That’s why we’re called Centrifuge. Our vision is that someday, every business uses Centrifuge OS to participate in the decentralized economy. Our mission, day in, day out, is to change the rules of global trade to foster economic opportunity everywhere.« (source)

There is a great interview article on DeFiPrime where Philip Stehlik, one of the co-founders and the CTO, explains what Centrifuge is all about and what they want to achieve.

CHAIN /TOKEN TYPE: blockchain on Parity Substrate powered by Radial (RAD) native token
CONSENSUS MECHANISM: Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NpoS)
LIVE MAINNET: Mainnet live since April 2020
DEV ACTIVITY (Github):
Lively activity with daily updates from 6 contributors. 75 repositories opened.
PRODUCTS:
*
Tinlake LIVE
*
Centrifuge Chain LIVE
*
Deep Tier Financing IN DEVELOPMENT

There are currently 11 Pools running with a Total Financing value of about 3,5 million DAI. Check the live pools here.

FortunaFi was the latest company to launch their pool on Tinlake. They have minted revenue-based financing assets with a yield of 10% APY for pool investors.

Least Authority has audited Tinlake smart contracts and Cent Chain.
»We found the code to be very well organized and easy to comprehend. The codebase also included considerable test coverage. The whitepaper is technically well written and the authors are transparent about currently unsolved problems within the consensus algorithm. Considering the current state of the industry is experimental, such transparency and analysis are commendable.« has concluded Least Authority.
EXISTING CUSTOMERS AND USERS: Pilot partners such as Paperchain, ConsolFreight, dexFreight, New Silver, FutureFin, ShuttleOne, FortunaFi and Harbor Trade Credit.
COMPETITORS:
*Persistence — Persistence bridges DeFi and traditional finance by facilitating borrowing of crypto assets using real-world assets as collateral via NFTs. Persistence was established in Q2 2019 and is building on Tendermint. They have just launched their incentivized testnet and are running a Stakedrop campaign. They have also launched a Comdex Testnet in Q3 2019 and completed USD 10 million worth of trades.
Tradeshift is tokenizing invoices to speed up the payment but not those tokens can’t be used as collaterals to allow borrowing from the DeFi.
There are several companies developing blockchain and smart contracts based on real-world assets tokenization platforms. Fluidity Factora focusing on real-estate and tokenized asset portfolios with the use of Maker’s DAI. Harbor and Polymath/Polymesh with digital securities platform. All of them are bringing illiquid assets on-chain. Major companies like Deloitte and Microsoft have been researching real-world asset tokenization in the last few years. This is not something new. Many are trying to develop protocols and platforms to unlock illiquid assets. Linklogis is building a deep-tier supply chain financing platform on a Tencent blockchain.
But there is no bridge with the DeFi.
Centrifuge and Persistence are doing just that, bridging the illiquid real-world assets with the DeFi through the use of NFT standards.

Other startups within the blockchain space are also bridging the real-world assets to DeFi. But it is hard to compare those with the Centrifuge as of the different underlying technology and approach. OpenDAO will tokenize several real-world assets including shares, invoices, and real estate. RiveX, an interoperable layer-2 startup, also wants to bridge the 2 worlds. But will they succeed? Centrifuge had much done already and quite some pilot testing behind them in the last 2 years of developing. More about that in the notes chapter.

We could on and on with giving examples of bringing the real-world assets on-chain and digitalising them. The above mentions show an ongoing trend and potential.

Lucas Vegelsand, a CEO, joined an online panel discussion named — Bridging Real-World Assets to DeFi where the representatives from Maker, EY, ConsenSys and Frankfurt School Blockchain Center join Centrifuge in an open discussion how real-world assets can be tokenized and used to scale DeFi.

TEAM:
Centrifuge’s core team is mostly from Berlin, Germany but worked mostly in the USA — Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area which is known as a pond of blockchain startups and Venture Capitalists. The co-founders behind Centrifuge have previously created an essential company with Taulia, a supply-chain financing company. It has raised over $150 million and moves billions of dollars per day. 97% of Fortune 100 companies use it to improve liquidity when it comes to accounts payable.

There are 19 people listed on a company LinkedIn profile.

*Co-Founders: Martin Quensel, Philip Stehlik, Marcus Ament and Lucas Vogelsang

*Chief Commercial Officer: Jason Jones

*Designer: Stas Leontyev

*Project Manager: Maya Byskov

*Office Manager: Lisa Plesiutschnig

*Product Partnerships: Lea Schmitt

*Product Manager: Dennis Wellmann

*Token Design and Research: Cassidy Daly

*Director of Operations: Aubry Kessel
*Senior Director of Marketing: Dylan Dedi

*Software Engineers: Alina Sinelnikova, Charleen Fei, Manuel Polzhofer, Miguel Hervás, Vedhayvas Singareddi

Lucas Vogelsang is a Cofounder and a CEO at Centrifuge. In the last decade, Lucas co-founded three companies together with Centrifuge which was established in 2017. He began his entrepreneur journey in 2010 when he co-founded the Swiss e-commerce startup DeinDeal and helped it grow as Head of Product and CTO to over 50M in revenue. In summer 2011 the company was acquired by Reiniger AG. Afterwards, Lucas helped Berlin startup KaufDA with their international expansion. His career leads him to Silicon Valley, the USA where he helped his former colleague from DeinDeal to establish an online communications startup. After the company got shut down he joined Taulia in San Francisco Bay Area as Engineer Manager where he worked for 2 years. In 2017 he Cofounded Centrifuge.
Philip Stehlik is a serial entrepreneur working in the startups since the beginning of the new millennium. He started and advised several companies since he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Philip has been involved with the distributed ledger technology since 2016 and most recently co-founder of Centrifuge.io where he works as a CTO. He is a Co-Organizer of ETHBerlin event which is one of the biggest Hackathons in Berlin with more than 500 hackers and 700 attendees. One of Philip’s career highlights, apart from cofounding Centrifuge, was co-establishment of Taulia supply-chain financing company where he met and worked with his closest current colleagues.
Marcus Ament aka Maex is a serial FinTech entrepreneur working in the space for the last two decades. His career has begun in SAP where he was developing and deploying payment and banking solutions. He Co-founded Ebydos AG which were eventually sold to ReadSoft in 2006. Maex then joined ReadSoft as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and served on the board of ReadSoft US, as well as ReadSoft’s SAP Labs, driving 70% revenue growth.
Maex is the co-founder of Taulia in San Franciso, where he spent 12 years and created a market-leading Financial Supply Chain company. Maex Cofounded Centrifuge but is also active as Vice Chairman of Product and Technology at Greensill Capital as well as an advisor of several FinTech startups and Venture Capitalist. He is also advising Inflection VC whose founder Alexander Lange is invested in Centrifuge.
Martin Quensel started his career back in the 90s as an architect in SAP where he developed SAP Financials, solutions in SAP’s eCommerce and eMarkets offerings, later included in the Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) solution of SAP. In 2006 he Cofounded Ebydos AG together with his current colleague at Centrifuge — Maex. In 2008 he Cofounded BayBrain with Philip Stehlik. Before joining and Cofounding Taulia in 2017, Martin served as chief technology officer (CTO) at ReadSoft’s Lab for Solutions. He was a CFO in Taulia for 8 years. Together with his colleagues, he Cofounded Centrifuge where he has an active position as a CFO and MD.
Jason Jones spent the last two decades as a technology-focused portfolio manager and entrepreneur. He was an analyst and portfolio manager in several companies including two years in Goldman Sachs & Co where he was a sell-side research analyst covering the Internet sector. In 2006 Jason started his entrepreneurial journey when he founded his first VC company HighStep Capital in New York where he worked as a CEO for 7 years. Afterwards, he Cofounded even and financial services innovation company Lendit Fintech where he spent the next 6 years as a CEO. He Cofounded multiple investment companies and is also a co-owner of an Academy for investors. For about one year and a half, Justin joined ConsenSys as a CEO of ConsenSys Capital Asset Management and Fund Foundry. He got onboard VIA Folio (Folio Financial division)investment platform as a CEO. Folio was later sold to Goldman Sachs. Jason has a full-time position as a COO in Centrifuge for over a year now.

Jason mentioned in his LinkedIn profile: »I believe that data is the core foundational element of the Internet and the fuel that feeds the global economy. Blockchain and AI are the Web3 infrastructure technologies that will help us communicate, organize, and operate far more efficiently.«

Couldn’t agree more with that statement.

Centrifuge is established by the German team who worked together for over a decade in several companies and their history of collaboration goes back to their beginnings in the SAP. They have built a multimillion supply-chain financing company from the ground up and they are certainly more than capable to repeat that success. Centrifuge has similarities with Taulia as it is also a supply-chain financing startup — but this time on a distributed ledger technology and crypto. Some of the founders have experience with blockchain as well but mostly they have a big team of experienced and capable people based on their LinkedIn profiles. There are 5 software engineers to be found on the LinkedIn and 6 contributors on the Github. Shortly — the team is impressive.


PARTNERS:
*
Piloting partners running Tinlake pools Paperchain, ConsolFreight, dexFreight, New Silver, FutureFin, ShuttleOne, FortunaFi and Harbor Trade Credit. You can read more about the Tinlake pilot partners and the pools in the »Notes«and »Products« sections of this article.
*MakerDAO
The partnership is based on the goal to improve the liquidity and short term financing goals. Maker CDPs can be used to borrow DAI against the short term loans.

Check the video from the DeFi Summit London took place on September 10th 2019 at Imperial College. Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge and Chief of Business Development of MakerDAO Gustav Arentoft speak about the collaboration between both companies.
*Securitize
The solution offered by the Centrifuge team is to shield the complexity of managing wallets and holding tokens through a custodian model. Centrifuge will use Securitize service for investor onboarding and sensible data management. Securitize will help with the KYC and AML process and verify users information and whitelist their ETH addresses and help to create a fully compliant and integrated DeFi product. This way the wallets of the Tinlake participants will be associated with Securitize ID and the wallet address owner’s ID known.
*Aave
Centrifuge added the first diversified Real-World Asset (RWA) money market on Aave. Aave users can provide liquidity to the market by depositing DAI and earn interest from a balanced collateral portfolio of different RWAs. Centrifuge was also the first to introduce RWA as collateral for Maker.
*Lendflo
is building a product to support UK businesses with fast and affordable single invoice financing and make finance more affordable and accessible to all. Centrifuge will help them to prevent double funding, provide better transparency and allow instant financing for single invoices.
*Vertalo
Vertalo is aa ecosystem for real-world assets digitalization. Centrifuge is working with Vertalo on their solutions for blockchain, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Check the video where Vertalo CEO Dave Hendricks and VP Finance Blake Richman talk to Martin Quensel, Managing Director at Centrifuge about DeFi, NFTs and blockchain.
*Boson Protocol is a connecting smart contract with real-world commerce and its data and building dCommerce solutions with the use of the Non-fungible token vouchers (NFTVs).
Justin Banon, a founder and a CEO of Boson, was a COO of dexFreight and currently their active strategic advisor. dexFreight, Centrifuge, and the Maker Foundation (MakerDAO) have tokenized freight invoices to use them as collateral for accessing liquidity and filling short term financing gaps for trucking companies. The pilot, conducted on top of dexFreight’s network platform, connects logistics collateral to the lower cost liquidity available in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a new financial ecosystem based on decentralized networks and open-source software. Boson will use Tinlake to finance Boson NFT vouchers.
dexFreight is a partner of Ocean Protocol and so is Boson. They are all connected with the Outlier Ventures, a European early-stage accelerating hub and venture firm dedicated to blockchain technology. Outlier helps the startups joining their incubation with advising and collaboration amongst each other and other companies that are working with them or were part of their incubation program in the past. As was Ocean with its founder Trent McConaghy which collaborates and advocates Outlier’s Base Camp participants.
Representatives from MakerDAO, Aave, Outlier Ventures and Centrifuge have often appeared on the same events. One of those is Blockchain Week Berlin 2019
*Joined the Celo Alliance of Prosperity along with 72 other members with a common goal to shape the future of open finance.
*Added Chorus One, a Swiss corporation, to the Centrifuge Council for governance. Chorus is a validator for Proof-of-Stake networks. Their mission is to increase freedom and autonomy for people by helping them have more control over their assets and activities. Together with Chorus One, the Centrifuge Chain Council comprises a body of 7 elected members who gain prioritized voting rights over other RAD holders.
*Using TheGraph quarrying a subgraph for Tinlake to index data about asset pools. (source)

Martin Quensel, Co-founder of Centrifuge and Fabian Vogelsteller, Founder of Lukso Network joined the virtual BlockBeers event to talk about what they are working on as both startups bring real-world assets and items on-chain via NFTs.

TOKEN USE CASE AND REVENUES:
The chain is powered by the Radial token, which empowers its holder with governance and provides the incentive for validators to operate it. There are currently 10 validators securing the chain. Radial tokens will be used to obtain liquidity in the Tinlake pools as well as the governance for the holders and the insurance provided by the DAO that has the RAD tokens staked. RAD holders participate in the governance of the Centrifuge Chain with the on-chain voting. Transaction fees are paid in RAD by users for anchors, NFT minting, Tinlake financing transactions. In the future, the RAD will be used for shielded transactions and data validations (using zero-knowledge) or, Deep Tier Finance — an innovative financing solution for locked-up working capital in supply chains.
Radial tokens are used to reward Liquidity Mining for Tinlake pools. Users pay tx fees in RAD. Some of those fees are also used for Polkadot relay chain security providing.

You can check the gross merchandise volume (GMV) or total borrowing volume on Centrifuge here. Past 30-day GMV was above USD 1million where the biggest pool comes from the New Silver, following by ConsolFreight.

Total borrowing money on Centrifuge/Tinlake

We can see there are companies already using Centrifuge’s products. It is not possible to know what the revenues are at this point but it is important to see there are demand and adoption already at this early stage.

There is currently an ongoing Liquidity Mining Program for Asset Originators and Investors in the Tinlake pools. You can get RAD rewards for locking DAI into Tinlake.
The earliest participants will receive the highest rewards, with a Dapp available to claim rewards on-chain. DAI and assets must be locked for a minimum of 60 days to participate in the RAD Reward Program. The first DAI locked for the minimum 60 day period will receive around 0.25 RAD, while the first DAI of asset value locked will receive around 0.1 RAD. Rewards will follow a declining curve that is subject to Chain Council review after 60 days from the first DAI invested in this rewards program [edit: the first DAI has been invested on October 16, 2020]. Furthermore, as RAD token holders you can put your RAD to work by staking towards Validators to help secure Centrifuge Chain, as well as participating in on-chain governance for future chain upgrades. (source)

TOKEN METRICS:
FULLY DILUTED MARKET CAP: unknown price of the token
INITIAL MARKET CAP: unknown
TOTAL TOKEN SUPPLY: 416M RAD
INITIAL CIRCULATING SUPPLY [%]: unknown

The initial Radial Token Generation Event (TGE) was performed by the Centrifuge Network Foundation and 400 million RAD tokens were created. They were distributed to the Foundation and initial contributors, including; the core team, investors, and validators. Since genesis, 16 million additional tokens have been minted as rewards for adoption. There are currently 416 million tokens.

FUNDS RAISING INFO:
Centrifuge had 2 Venture Rounds. In March 2018 BlueYard Capital invested USD 3,8 million together with Mosaic Ventures and Semantic Ventures.
Additional USD 3,7M were raised in October 2019 by Crane Ventures Partners, Atlantic Labs (also from Berlin), Inflection Capital, Compound’s Robert Leshner, and Fabric Ventures. Their existing investors Mosaic Ventures, BlueYard Capital and Semantic have also participated.

Just before the second venture round Centrifuge received support from Berlin and the EU and got awarded with a EUR 400k grant and a EUR 1 Million subsidized loan.

There are some rumours that the third funding round will take place before Centrifuge lists their RAD token on the first exchange.

TOKEN DISTRIBUTION:

The initial distribution of 400 million RAD tokens:
*48,5% Team and Investors

*48,8% Foundation
*2,4% Validators, Worklock & Rewards

After the next decade, there will be 800 million RAD tokens distributed altogether. Two times more as of genesis TGE.

Target distribution of a total of 800 million RAD in 2030:
*50% Initial distribution (400 million RAD)
*40% Rewards
*6% Chain Security Rewards
*4% Dev Fund

It will be interesting to see a further token distribution breakdown. There are no details about the investor’s tokens and the token release schedule. At this point, it is not known how many tokens will be allocated to the Centrifuge’s team members. Additional info about the RAD token, its utility and distribution are available in the Centrifuge Radial Token Executive Summary.

ROADMAP: not available as such

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Twitter 4,7k followers
Slack
Medium


NOTES

»Asset tokenization is among the most promising use cases for blockchain, with the upper bound of its growth potentially encompassing nearly all of the human economic activity — a dollar number estimated to be worth well over a hundred trillion annually. Perhaps more impressive than the long-term promise of this use case are the strides towards adoption already being made today. In the past year alone, major enterprises such as Deloitte, BNY Mellon, and EY have studied asset tokenization and concluded that it possesses the capacity to disrupt multiple industries, specifically the 9 trillion-dollar annual global securities industry and the 9.6 trillion-dollar global real estate industry. Additionally, Microsoft, Vanguard, and Sotheby’s have announced or gone live with projects tokenizing industrial assets, securities, and real estate, respectively. By these metrics, asset tokenization is already among the most popular blockchain use cases currently achieving real-world enterprise adoption.

At the heart of both the current success of asset tokenization and its long-term potential is the remarkable number of advantages and additional utility that comes with tokenized assets relative to non-tokenized ones. Tokenization can allow for increased liquidity of traditionally illiquid assets; greater accessibility and ease-of-access for otherwise cloistered investment opportunities; greater transparency regarding ownership and ownership history; and a reduction in administrative costs associated with the trading of these assets, including management, issuance, and transactional intermediaries. Finally, tokenization allows for assets which previously could not access the DeFi ecosystem a path towards doing so, unlocking a whole new realm of potential through asset-backed composability.«(source)

Centrifuge in its core is a protocol and a bridge for FinTech and real-world assets to become tokenized and available on-chain. It is also a decentralised asset financing protocol.
Centrifuge is building an open-source protocol that uses the Ethereum blockchain and its whole vast ecosystem as well as Parity’s Substrate.

In their Centrifuge Stack document, they have nicely highlighted their goals and the issues of the B2B documents and other real-world assets exchange: »The Centrifuge mission is to change the rules of global trade to foster economic opportunity everywhere. Global B2B spend (a.k.a. sent invoices) amounts to roughly $180 Trillion. With payment terms at an average of 60 days, businesses, and especially SMEs, need financing to bridge the gap. It is one of the main reasons that sustainable growth is so much harder for SMEs than for larger corporates. Existing solutions today, such as factoring and reverse factoring, only address a small portion of that need. This is why we built Centrifuge OS — to allow businesses to exchange business documents (such as invoices) and tokenize those assets to have greater access to financing — thereby unlocking value that has previously been inaccessible.«

We need to understand the Centrifuge’s underlying tech to be able to see the solutions they bring. The Centrifuge stack architecture is comprised of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which has two layers built on Ethereum and Substrate. The public blockchains are used for business identities, committing document status and minting business NFTs while a P2P network enables private and secure, off-chain transactions for documents traffic.

Centrifuge Ecosystem Architecture

Centrifuge Chain is a permissionless and open-source Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain built on Substrate. Centrifuge uses Substrate as a single source of truth for document anchoring. Using Centrifuge Chain and dApps from the Centrifuge ecosystem, users can tokenize documents and use them as collateral to access financing. This is where their first DApp comes in. Tinlake is an asset-backed lending DApp that is built on Ethereum so it can integrate easily into the DeFi coming from the Ethereum Ecosystem and use its non-fungible token standards that are used as collateral for loans. By using these tokenized assets businesses get extra access to financing with unlocking previously illiquid assets such as invoices. Tinlake makes that possible with the use of Ethereum’s smart contracts and NFT standards. The dApp uses a subgraph to serve data from Centrifuge smart contracts to the lending application. The Tinlake subgraph captures data about asset pools, including their size, yield (APR), number of loans and aggregate debt.

Tinlake’s Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) Architecture

The Centrifuge Chain is currently operated and governed by a total of 28 validator nodes with a total stake of above 100k RAD tokens. More nodes are about to join. If you are interested in running a node of Centrifuge you can read all about the requirements here.

An essential part of Centrifuge project is interoperability and interaction with Ethereum Ecosystem and its DeFi space. The way to achieve that is through the non-fungible token standards (NFTs).

Centrifuge and Tinlake use privacy-enabled NFTs that have smart contracts verifying the ownership and other essential data of the private documents. Anchor Repository links the NFT to an off-chain document. Asset originators can collateralize invoices, royalties, and other real-world assets which are tokenized in a form of NFTs. When an NFT is created there is also a fungible token issued — an interest bearing token that is offered in a pool. These fungible tokens can be locked in DeFi lending protocols on Ethereum or transferred to investors. When liquidity is injected into Tinlake tokens are minted.

In this way, businesses can use Centrifuge to bring their illiquid assets into DeFi and unlock new financial opportunities. Once the assets are tokenized on the Centrifuge Chain, the pool is made in the Tinlake for those assets. The issuer can use this pool to borrow money with various supported DeFi protocols. On the other hand, Tinlake’s pools are also a means of investment. One can lend against tokenized collateral assets and redeem after repayment to earn yield.

Some tryouts were already performed with Centrifuge’s pilot partners. dexFreight, Centrifuge, and the Maker Foundation have tokenized freight invoices to use them as collateral for accessing liquidity with the first supply chain financing pilot of Centrifuge.

“This is the first step towards a transformation of the logistics industry, and we could not have realized such a milestone without our partners' Centrifuge and the Maker Foundation. We can now reduce friction, extend instant credit lines, and offer highly competitive rates to dexFreight platform participants,” said Justin Banon, ex dexFreight COO.
Justin Banon also founded Boson Protocol, dCommerce startup, which is another partner of Centrifuge.
They have also tested a mortgage portfolio pilot with a non-bank loan originator New Silver and a pilot with FutureFin. Using Tinlake they tested the issuance and origination costs reduction and data transfer with the creation of a standardized mortgage token. It is worth to add that the Tinlake platform can be used with Centrifuge NFTs or any other NFT following the ERC721 standard. This extended the use cases.

“In traditional finance, to borrow against real-world assets, you need the likes of Goldman Sachs, huge volumes, and the costs and overhead are massive to conduct such transactions. Yesterday, we tokenized and financed mortgages in 30 minutes, with fees of less than a dollar at competitive rates, presenting an alternative to the status quo that is cheaper, faster, more transparent and inclusive. Welcome to the new world.” said Maex Ament, CEO and Co-Founder of Centrifuge.

Paperchain, also a piloting partner, financed royalties as synthetic assets via Tinlake and Centrifuge. USD 60k worth of royalties were financed in less then half an hour at a USD 3 cost of the transaction fee. Normally it takes months for the artists to get paid by the record labels. Currently, there is live testing of Papercahin’s tokenized music streaming invoices. Another testing s performed with the ConsolFreight’s freight invoices.

Another example of the Centrifuge’s usability is the ShuttleOne’s loaning of capital to another merchant HappyFresh by the use of guaranteed payments via invoices as collateral.

Those are all very concrete examples from the everyday real-world business cases that will have a new door opened to the DeFi space which has a Total Value Locked (USD)(TVL) in DeFi in the Ethereum Ecosystem is just below USD 15 billion at the time of writing. The most assets are locked in Maker (USD 2,5 billion) who is also a partner of Centrifuge. All the piloting transactions were made with Maker’s DAI. Centrifuge will bridge illiquid CeFi with liquid DeFi. It is assumed that about USD 30 trillion is locked up in invoices and other non-liquid assets. That presents a lot of demand for Centrifuge’s service as well as the possible increase of the TVL long term.

At the Ethereum Community Conference Lucas Vogelsang from Centrifuge and Gustav Arentoft from Maker have a presentation about Centrifuge, its pilot use cases and talking about opening up the DeFi to users in the real world.

Centrifuge is one of the most active teams in the Polkadot ecosystem. They have been building on Substrate for more than a year now. They are becoming essential partners of the Polkadot ecosystem and have just recently submitted their candidacy to join the Polkadot Council.

They have been awarded by the Web3 Foundation with two grants — for the Go Substrate RPC Client Implementation and Ethereum Bridge Development. They have also built the custom pallets for a multi-sig as well as for NFTs.

»With a council seat, we aim to foster an active DeFi community on Polkadot and encourage collaboration between chains through cross-chain communication. We want to promote the research of privacy-preserving technologies and advancement of other interests for projects building on Substrate.« said Cassidy Daly, a Researcher and in charge of Token Design of Centrifuge.

They have also been accepted into Web3 Foundation’s Builder’s Program, which allows them to get extra help from the Web3.

Centrifuge will play an important role for DeFi and Ethereum Ecosystem but also for the Polkadot and a generally great addition to the open finance and financial supply chain.

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