Centrifuge Brings on Key Strategic Partners With Latest Funding Round

Centrifuge, the first DeFi protocol to finance real-world assets (RWAs) on the blockchain, today announced a strategic funding round from prominent industry players, including Coinbase Ventures.

The $4 million funding round, comes as Centrifuge has seen tremendous momentum in recent months and overall growing attention to real-world assets across the financial industry and crypto. Earlier this year, crypto and blockchain investment firm BlockTower Capital announced a $3 million strategic partnership with Centrifuge, which has now financed more than $182 million of real-world assets.

“We’re building the credit market of the future and along with that we need to build out the financial ecosystem for institutions to transact on chain,” said Lucas Vogelsang, CEO and Co-Founder, Centrifuge. “Partners like Coinbase and BlockTower are essential in building critical parts of this infrastructure, as Centrifuge becomes the go-to platform for real-world assets and on chain secured credit.”

Covid-19 and the DeFi Summer of 2020 introduced many new investors, both individual and institutional, to crypto. But as crypto winter settled in during 2022, many of these investors are looking for products that provide real value and generate sustainable yield in safer asset classes. Centrifuge does precisely that by bringing off chain assets into DeFi, enabling a range of businesses to get access to financing without banks or other third party intermediaries. Centrifuge has become the key bridge connecting real-world assets to DeFi liquidity with their integrations into Maker and Aave.

“The intersection of DeFi and traditional credit, often dubbed Real World Assets within the digital asset space, is one of our highest conviction theses at BlockTower across our strategies,” said Thomas Klocanas, General Partner & Head of Venture at BlockTower Capital. “We’re extremely excited about continuing to support Centrifuge, who have been pioneering this use case since early days, in their journey to re-platform private credit markets at scale.”

With Centrifuge, businesses tokenize non-crypto assets such as mortgages, invoices and consumer credit, to create asset-backed pools. Once on chain, these assets are unlocked and transact directly with investors – and anyone is able to provide liquidity. Ultimately, Centrifuge aims to create a robust, decentralized credit ecosystem.

“Coinbase has a mission of increasing economic freedom globally through open financial systems. A feature of a vibrant crypto economy that serves all kinds of participants, investors, businesses, and institutions requires access to more asset classes like credit on-chain,” said Anthony Bassili, Head of Asset Allocators for Coinbase Institutional. “As institutional adoption of crypto continues to grow, real-world assets are a critical component for broad and diverse portfolio construction within the crypto economy.”

Centrifuge is steadfast in its vision to transform the existing financial system. The latest financing is yet another data point that strategic investment firms and crypto-forward Institutional investors will work alongside Centrifuge to retrench today’s broken financial rails, removing intermediaries to create an optimized infrastructure for securitization. Other participating investors included L1 Digital and Scytale.