By Devin Black, Product Marketing @ Centrifuge

2023 ended on an incredible high. Up until the very last day, our team was hard at work closing deals, launching products, and planning initiatives for 2024. Read on to hear some of the key updates from Q4 — and what to expect in the coming months!

Frax, Aave, and Web3 Foundation get behind real-world assets

After a successful run up in DeFi Summer, the treasuries of most DAOs and DeFi protocols have a portfolio consisting of native protocol tokens, ETH and BTC, and finally, stablecoins that serve as cash reserves. Treasury managers are realizing there is significant untapped potential to grow a protocol’s long-term self-sufficiency through exposure to real-world assets. Q4 saw strong movement across the DeFi ecosystem towards RWAs:

• Frax voted yes to move $20M of stablecoin collateral into RWAs on Centrifuge

• Web3 Foundation allocated $1M of their treasury to RWAs on Centrifuge

• They’re both joining Aave, who voted yes to allocate $1M of their treasury to RWAs on Centrifuge earlier this year.

All investments are into the Liquid Treasury Fund by Anemoy, focused on bringing low-risk Treasury yields to DeFi. Anemoy recently hit its $1M investment milestone and expects rapid growth in the coming months.

Liquidity Pools live on Arbitrum, Base, and Celo

When thinking about scaling RWA activity, we keep our core users in mind: issuers and investors. Issuers want the broadest distribution, and investors want a native experience. That’s why we launched our multi-chain strategy (Liquidity Pools) to bring Centrifuge everywhere.

• Investors can allocate seamlessly on their preferred chain.

• Issuers can manage investors, payments, and integrations across any chain within a single product.

• An unlimited number of chains can be enabled, supporting the industry’s first true multi-chain approach.

In Q4, we went live on Arbitrum, Base and Celo. In 2024, we plan to scale to all chains that have interest and demand for real-world assets.

Additionally, the Centrifuge App got a major update with beautiful new dashboard visualizations and data availability.

An RWA Summit Announcement

The Real-World Asset Summit returns in 2024.

In addition to hosting another flagship NYC event, we’re going worldwide, driving the RWA narrative across all corners of the globe. Keep an eye on the RWA Summit website and Centrifuge’s social channels to be the first to hear about where we’re bringing tokenization, credit, and crypto next!

Fixing Finance: Suits and Hoodies

At the Real-World Asset Summit, we saw a healthy mix of suits and hoodies: professionals coming from both sides of the decentralized and traditional finance spectrum to pool their wisdom and build new relationships.

Seeing this take place, we found it fitting to launch our Fixing Finance campaign to celebrate this symbiosis. Fixing Finance is all about how we can create a fairer, more efficient financial system by combining the innovative spirit of the Hoodies with the institutional wisdom of the Suits.

More Q4 Highlights

Ethereum Token Standards for Real-World Assets

Did you know that members of the Centrifuge team are contributing directly to Ethereum? In his blog post, The Importance of Token Standards for Real-World Asset Tokenization, Centrifuge CTO Jeroen explores why token standards (like the famed ERC20 standard) are important for real-world assets — and how we’ve built a new token standard for Ethereum as part of our work in bringing RWA to everyone, everywhere onchain.

Messari Names Centrifuge CEO Lucas Vogelsang Top Person of 2024

Each year, the cryptocurrency data and research platform Messari puts out a widely-read report of their outlook for the year to come. In their Crypto Theses for 2024, Messari named Centrifuge co-founder and CEO Lucas Vogelsang as one of their top 10 people to watch in 2024!

“Lucas’s Centrifuge has been an early leader in the RWA space, with the highest token market cap, highest market share by private loans outstanding, and lowest ratio of default to active loans out of the three leading RWA credit protocols”

Checking in on the Tokenized Asset Coalition

Centrifuge is a founding member of the Tokenized Asset Coalition (TAC): an industry group of leading companies who have demonstrated a commitment to the shared vision of bringing real-world assets onchain, in an institutional-ready and compliant manner.

Throughout Q4 2023, the TAC has been hard at work behind the scenes building relationships, creating content, and inviting new members. Read the TAC Check-in for a hint of what’s to come — and keep an eye out for the Coalition’s first report arriving this month!

Parchain lease extended

Centrifuge Chain, where our pools and tokenized assets live, is a parachain. In addition to giving us the power and flexibility to purpose-build our chain for real-world assets, we also gain the robust security of the Polkadot relay chain. We’re happy to say that we’ve self-funded a new 24-month parachain lease!

Read / Listen / Watch

Centrifuge in the news

Frax Votes To Move $20M Of Stablecoin Collateral Into Treasury Bills (The Defiant)

“Tokenized T-bills eat stablecoins” with Lucas Vogelsang (Axios Crypto)

A new EIP aims to revamp the tokenized vaults standard for RWAs (Blockworks)

Standardization coming for real-world assets: Q&A with Centrifuge CEO (Blockworks)

Reports and Alpha

Arbitrum Treasury Perspective (Centrifuge)

The Role of Securitization in Tokenized Assets (Crypto Adoption Curve)

The Spectrum of Tokenization Report (rwa.xyz)

Overview of On-Chain RWAs and the Forces Propelling their Growth (Galaxy)

Private Credit Rebounds in the Crypto Sector With a 55% Jump in 2023 (Bloomberg)

Asset Primer Overview - US Treasuries (Centrifuge Credit Group)

Podcasts and Video

DeFi Drip with Prashant Kher: EY and Tokenization in Asset Management (Centrifuge)

Real World Assets 101 with Cassidy Daly, co-founder of Centrifuge (Boys Club)

Bringing Real-World Assets to Arbitrum (Centrifuge & Arbitrum)