Centrifuge raises $15 million in Series A funding for institutional DeFi adoption

Real-world asset lending protocol Centrifuge has announced the completion of a $15 million Series A financing round.

The company plans to build an institutional-grade, decentralized finance lending market for RWAs, built on Coinbase's Base layer 2 and integrated with Coinbase Verification. 

"DeFi has always been about accessibility, transparency and interoperability, making markets more open, fair and decentralized, and we’re bringing these innovations to institutions in a compliant and safe way," Centrifuge co-founder Lucas Vogelsang said.

RWA lending market built on Base

According to a Wednesday press release, the integrations with Coinbase will allow institutions to quickly and safely access tokenized real-world assets.

"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," Coinbase Head of Allocators and Tokenization Anthony Bassili said.

The company aims to use the funding to drive its product development and position itself as the bridge between traditional and decentralized finance by building a compliant platform for institutional Defi adoption.

The Series A round was oversubscribed and included investment from Circle Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Arrington Capital, the Spartan Group and Wintermute Ventures.

Institutional adoption of RWA tokenization

Centrifuge is a real-world asset tokenization protocol with an aim to securitize and integrate structured credit markets on the blockchain, allowing for the representation and trading of RWAs as tokens. This enables greater liquidity, efficiency and accessibility in traditionally illiquid markets.

According to ParaFi Founder and Managing Partner Ben Forman, the institutional adoption of real-world asset tokenization now stands as the most valuable opportunity within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

He added that this involves "the migration of all existing and new assets onto a composable ledger, stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, collectibles, tickets, media, content, etc."