By Colin Cunningham, Head of Growth, Centrifuge

In September, Centrifuge launched the Tokenized Asset Coalition (TAC) in partnership with Aave, Circle, Coinbase, RWA.xyz, Credix, Goldfinch, and Base to bring the next trillion dollars of assets onchain through real-world asset tokenization education, advocacy, and infrastructure.

We got the chance to commemorate the launch in person with the first of many TAC think tanks at the Real-World Asset Summit.

Since launch, we’ve gotten overwhelming demand from fellow builders and institutions, across TradFi and DeFi, who want to join the Coalition and contribute to its aim to:

Unite the traditional and crypto financial systems around a single purpose: accelerate the institutional adoption of tokenizing the world’s assets on the blockchain

We didn’t expect the coalition to capture people’s attention the way it has. The inception of the TAC dates back to September 2022, when it was discussed in the two places crypto people like to hang out the most: Telegram and the dinner table.

Amid yet another crypto bear market, Aaron Collett and I were analyzing the journey of real-world assets, acknowledging how far we had come and – how much further we had to go.

Of course, we called it a Consortium back then.

And in the shadows of the Digital Asset Summit 2022, in a small NYC restaurant over one-too-many Negronis – Centrifuge, Coinbase, Goldfinch, and Credix led an “RWA Convening” dinner to discuss the future of onchain finance, how we will build for institutions, and agreed that we are building something bigger than each of our own businesses.

Whether it was the consorting or the convening, those bear market moments led to the creation of the TAC.

The group formally took shape in January 2023, and it took nearly nine months to bring this idea, and founding group, to fruition.

I recently spoke about the TAC’s mission during my recent discussion with Peter Gaffney and Herwig Konings at Security Token Market’s TokenizeThis online event where I asked “How do we build the right frameworks and the right institutional practices in crypto and around this tokenized asset movement to really scale it?”

And that is exactly where the TAC is now: ready to build, ready to scale.

Before 2023 is out, we’re focused on activating two key pillars of the Coalition:

1. Content: Creating content that shapes the narrative around the most important portions of the tokenized asset industry. The TAC will create articles, webinars, and reports that will become the backbone of our content strategy going forward. First up, the newest report “The Spectrum of Tokenization – A novel framework for understanding tokenized asset finance” released by RWA.xyz.

2. Membership: The TAC is actively reviewing all of the great applications for memberships based on who can help us scale our mission. With a healthy mix of TradFi and DeFi, we’ll announce our first wave of new members in Q4. We’re also working hard to establish partnerships with other associations and media organizations, and building a roster of select advisors from across the financial services industry to inform our growth and direction.

The success of the TAC will depend on its ability to get the right people in the room, to talk about and build the right things.

Interested in joining the Tokenized Asset Coalition? Apply using this form.