Scaling Tokenized Real World Assets with Centrifuge

Today we’re joined by Bhaji Illuminati and Jürgen Blumberg.

Bhaji is CEO of Centrifuge, one of the original players in the RWA space. Jürgen is a former Goldman ETF exec and, as of recently, COO of Centrifuge and CIO of Anemoy, it’s asset management arm.

In this conversation, Bhaji, Jürgen and Will Beeson dive into the evolution of investment management toward an on-chain markets future. We discuss the early growth of the tokenized financial asset market, similarities with the early days of ETFs, current on-chain investment capital pools and investor demands, the interplay between stablecoin growth and tokenized assets, use cases and distribution strategies for assets across the risk curve, the relationship between DeFi and TradFi, future market expectations, and much more.

Will:

Really great to connect with you both.

Jürgen, this is the first time we’ve met. You’re new in your role at Centrifuge Anemoy, and I’m looking forward to diving into that. You’ve got a storied background in the ETF space, and I’d love to hear what motivated your transition.

Bhaji, you and I have known each other for a while. It’s great to finally have this conversation on the record.

Bhaji:

Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Will:

So maybe to dive right in: you guys at Centrifuge, Bhaji, have been firing on all cylinders lately—with a number of product launches and key hires. It seems to me that your recent success and positioning mirror the broader development of the RWA, or tokenized asset, space.

I wonder if you’d frame some of your recent work in the context of the broader evolution of the space.

Bhaji:

Happy to. Many of your listeners are probably familiar with Centrifuge. We were founded in 2017—an early project focused on RWAs. Over the years, we’ve evolved across multiple dimensions: the types of assets we tokenize and bring on-chain, the work we’ve done on distribution and DeFi, and the technology and team required to support growth at each stage of the industry.

When we started, our focus was on more esoteric assets—like invoice financing, which was the founding team’s background. The idea was to use tokenization as a way to open access to alternative asset classes not readily available in traditional markets. We still believe that’s the ultimate goal, but we realized the market wasn’t ready for that yet.

That’s why much of our evolution has shifted toward more traditional, highly liquid financial products. Everyone is familiar with the explosive growth of tokenized T-bills, their use cases, and how they’ve integrated into DeFi. More recently, we’ve been working on the fixed income side. We just launched a fund with Janus Henderson for CLOs and have started exploring enhanced cash alternatives—liquid products that can serve as a baseline yield floor for stablecoins and RWA protocols, and that are attractive for looping strategies in lending markets.

I wanted to give that context because I think it’s important for this conversation. Jurgen and I wanted to share both the history of how Centrifuge has engaged with DeFi and RWAs over the years, and, more importantly, where the industry stands today. We’re seeing real sophistication and institutionalization, broader adoption and awareness among asset managers and major institutions, and, crucially, traditional finance executives joining RWA platforms.

The fact that someone like Jurgen—who lived and breathed the ETF markets, and helped build them out—has recognized the transformative potential of tokenization and joined us to help shape the next phase of growth is powerful. It reflects not just Centrifuge’s evolution, but also the broader industry’s, as we move closer to true adoption, scale, and recognition of the potential of this technology.

Will:

Yeah. I wonder how you think about, based on what you've seen at centrifuge over years now. I guess the pros and cons of focus on tokenizing alts, meaning maybe traditionally less accessible, less liquid assets like private credit, private equity, real estate, versus more liquid, more vanilla.

Products, especially maybe on the more conservative side of the risk curve. My personal view over developed over a few years at this point is that I guess there are a few benefits for tokenizing alts and a few benefits for tokenizing traditional assets. I think some of the benefits that are often pointed to around tokenizing alts is better access.

You know, maybe you can get into a private equity strategy, private credit strategy with a lower minimum investment. Maybe you can tokenize a position in one of those funds on a secondary basis. And distribute it more broadly. Maybe you can achieve like a borrow lend against a position, which is traditionally locked up for an extended period of time.

So you can kind of like build transferability. Also, you know, rather than, than holding a position for many years, maybe you can sell it. You can build a secondary market around it on the liquid kind of vanilla product side. Tokenized money market funds, for instance. Perfect example. In my mind, it has a lot to do with, these are homogenous assets, that there's a big market, there's a, at least on an institutional scale, maybe even a relatively smaller number of participants, but every product looks the same.

Every institution knows what they're getting. There's actually existing market structure built around how these products are managed. You know, maybe like a treasury repo market comes to mind. If you can basically make these products available in token form, now they can be transacted and settled atomically rather than with a sort of post-trade reconciliation process.

And it can happen instantly and it can potentially happen 24 7. And so that focus on where markets are already liquid and being able to basically. Overlay some of the technical benefits that are inherent in tokenization versus trying to solve problems in fundamentally less liquid alternative investments.

I wonder, Bhaji and uh, Jurgen to follow how you think about that. Is it a spectrum? Do you agree, disagree with the way I think about things? And how do you expect things to evolve over time?

Bhaji:

Yeah, so I think ultimately there are clear and proven benefits on the issuance side and on the sell side. There’s a big push across asset classes and managers to tokenize. The biggest barrier to growth and adoption has always been—and still is—the buy side.

There are interesting use cases around real estate and tokenizing LP shares. There’s huge potential once the technology and adoption curve play out. But tokenizing an asset doesn’t automatically create demand for it. That’s the mismatch we saw when we were building many of these products in the early days: neither we nor the issuers were able to use blockchain as a reliable way to raise money for funds.

What’s changed with T-bills is the emergence of a new buyer and a new use case: stablecoin reserves. As stablecoins grew massively, money market funds managing those reserves grew alongside them. The same dynamic applies with CLOs and other highly liquid products where investors can access 4–6% yields with daily liquidity. That liquidity makes them composable with stablecoins and other yield products now reaching new on-chain audiences. That’s why we’ve seen much stronger adoption for liquid products.

There’s still major potential for alternatives. It depends on who the buyer is and what they’re looking for. When crypto and DeFi yields are high, both retail and institutional investors shift away from RWAs, because they can capture higher returns in crypto markets. When that inverts, and off-chain rates look more favorable, investors become more open to tolerating liquidity constraints and different risk-return profiles for tokenized assets.

So to summarize before passing to Jürgen: it’s all about buy-side demand. We’ve found a very clear buyer for T-bills, a clear buyer for CLOs, and now clear buyers for single stocks and other assets we’re bringing on-chain. The key is to be intentional—understand what drives adoption from on-chain capital, and build specifically for that user.

Jürgen:

From my point of view, I fully agree with Bhaji. And I want to reiterate some of the points you made as well, Will. There are clear advantages to tokenization. It starts with the ability to trade fractional shares easily. Then there’s 24/7 trading, which is especially valuable in volatile markets when investors want to express their views at any time. Settlement cycles are also much faster, which is in the interest of investors. In traditional finance, settlement systems are fragmented globally, and delays are a constant pain point.

Of course, there are disadvantages too. But applying tokenization to real-world assets opens a huge opportunity. The immediate addressable market is DeFi, which is roughly $4 trillion. But the far larger market is traditional finance—more than a hundred times that size. Our goal, and the goal of many others in this space, is to create products that are attractive to traditional finance in the medium and long term. For now, our focus is on bringing the first real-world assets on-chain.

The on-chain fund market is still small—about $27 billion AUM—but it’s growing very fast, which is exciting. As Bhaji said, we’ve seen strong early demand for tokenized treasuries, and with good reason. At Anemoy, together with our partner Janus Henderson, we launched a CLO product offering enhanced yield. Demand has been remarkable: $750 million in assets under management just weeks after launch. That’s an impressive result by any standard. Coming from the ETF market myself, I can say that in traditional finance, a fund attracting that much AUM so quickly would be considered a major success.

Now the focus is to identify what investors want and deliver it with our partners. Right now, investors are telling us they want to move up the yield stack: reliable fixed income with slightly higher returns. Of course, that comes with additional risk, but the demand is there to accept that risk-return profile.

And there’s more to come. Through our exclusive partnership with S&P, we will launch the first-ever tokenized S&P 500 index fund. It has been fully signed off and licensed by S&P. This has made waves in the market already, because the S&P 500 is the most widely tracked index in the world. Starting with that product is extraordinary. We’ll learn a lot from it, but I can’t think of a better place to begin.

Will:

Congratulations—that’s a very exciting product you’re building.

You mentioned that investors are giving you feedback that they want to move up the risk curve. To Bhaji’s earlier point about understanding who the buy side is and where demand comes from for these products—when you say “investors,” what specific cohorts are you referring to?

Jürgen:

Yeah, I think Bhaji mentioned this briefly. These are, I would say, on-chain professional investors who are attracted to RWAs because they want a diversified risk profile. They already have access to on-chain assets and know the market very well. Many of them have built their companies—and their net worth—through on-chain investments, but they understand that diversification is key. Anything we provide helps diversify their exposure.

As Bhaji mentioned, there are professional investors—like stablecoin issuers—who want to diversify the portfolio of assets they invest their incoming flows into. There are DAOs that are very interested in these opportunities. And there are fintechs with treasury departments that want to manage their treasuries more effectively, and they fall back on solutions we provide to diversify their risk. Those are three classic examples of on-chain investors.

Will:

Yeah. Just to be clear—and this tracks with my experience too—most of the investors we’re targeting as the buy side in digital assets are firms that are already crypto-native or on-chain-native. They’re running businesses, generating revenue, or managing funds in crypto assets.

Over time, those capital pools have diversified—first into products like BUIDL, and more recently into a broader range of tokenized products. Does that track with your experience? And second, from your standpoint, how do you see this investor base evolving over time?

Jürgen:

Yes. We have a U.S. Treasury product in the market as well, with about $350 million in assets under management. The ticker is JTRSY. It has been around for a while, but we’ve seen significant asset growth this year. Investors are always open to exploring this space, and when they see something they like, they’re very keen to allocate.

Briefly on my background, since you asked: I’m quite new to Centrifuge. I recently joined as COO, and I also serve as CIO of Anemoy, our native asset manager. Anemoy is the entity under which we’ve launched these funds, in cooperation with Janus Henderson, a highly respected portfolio manager who serves as sub-advisor to our products.

Before joining, I spent over 20 years in traditional finance. I started as a proprietary trader, then moved into ETFs 15 years ago. I see many parallels between the early ETF market and where tokenization stands today—especially in funds and other securities.

In my ETF career, I worked at firms including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. At Goldman, I was COO of the firm’s ETF white-label business. There are striking similarities to what we do at Anemoy. We’re helping traditional finance—asset managers, private banks, neobrokers, and other institutions—get on-chain without building large teams for technology, legal, or compliance. We give them a fast, turnkey solution to reach their goals. Those are the advantages they want to leverage, and it’s what we’ll continue to expand on.

Bhaji:

You mentioned that a lot of RWA projects are going after the same pools of on-chain capital. That’s something we’re very aware of. Many of our conversations focus on how we can tap into new investors and bring fresh capital on-chain.

One interesting product we’re rolling out in the next couple of weeks is a partnership with a major ecosystem focused on emerging markets in the Global South. They have a strong network of apps, neobanks, and fintechs, and through this partnership, they’ll work with Centrifuge so idle stablecoins can automatically earn yield in the background via Centrifuge assets.

That’s powerful because it’s fully abstracted from the crypto side. We’re able to enable things like atomic swaps between stablecoins and yield-bearing assets, which Centrifuge provides, and pass those benefits directly back to consumers.

So we’re focused on two segments:

Emerging markets and long-tail distribution — delivering products in the background through apps, neobanks, and fintechs.
Institutional investors — hedge funds, RIAs, and others seeking exposure to tokenized products, but in ways that are differentiated and more valuable than what they can get in traditional markets.

A lot of our work is about building utility for assets once they’re on-chain. How can they be used in lending protocols like Aave? How can they be borrowed against? How can we design creative, automated looping strategies so tokenized assets have a second life on-chain?

And then, of course, there’s the access point. Take the S&P 500. For Americans, it’s easy to access. But what about global audiences who want real-time access, fractional entry, and the ability to move in and out with low check sizes? We take for granted many of the financial products we have access to in developed markets. We’re very conscious of bringing them to broader global markets, where access even to foundational products is limited. That’s where blockchain has a very strong near-term role to play.

Bhaji:

So we’re focused on two segments:

Emerging markets and long-tail distribution — delivering products in the background through apps, neobanks, and fintechs.
Institutional investors — hedge funds, RIAs, and others seeking exposure to tokenized products, but in ways that are differentiated and more valuable than what they can get in traditional markets.

Will:

To oversimplify the playbook on the risk-free end of the spectrum—tokenized money market funds, treasuries, AAA-rated CLO products—the go-to-market seems pretty clear: follow stablecoins. Wherever stablecoins are gaining adoption, growing, being used to process payments or manage treasuries, or where issuers are building reserve portfolios—that’s the natural pool of capital to bridge into these products.

From a TradFi perspective, it makes sense. You have cash, the payment instrument, and right next to it are treasuries—the risk-free asset paying the risk-free rate. That seems to be the core go-to-market for that class of products today. And I see no reason why it won’t continue. There are strong tailwinds behind stablecoins: they’re expanding into more real economy use cases and more geographies. So I’d expect that pool of capital to keep growing and flowing into these products.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, I wonder how you think about it. We talked earlier, Bhaji, about where Centrifuge started with invoice factoring and private credit instruments. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve said you see the next wave of RWAs being purpose-built for looping strategies, composability, leverage, and other crypto-native integrations.

How do you think about that part of the market?

Bhaji:

To go back to your first point, one primary driver of money market fund growth is stablecoins—but they’re not the only one. As Jürgen mentioned, there’s also a new class of CFOs and treasurers who want more sophisticated treasury management strategies. For them, it often makes more sense to go directly into a money market fund than into a yield-bearing stablecoin that’s indirectly exposed to that same fund through its reserve strategy.

So there are different access points. One of the strengths of stablecoins is their strong distribution, networks, and community development. At Centrifuge, we don’t run a retail strategy—our funds are professional-only—but we can work alongside stablecoins as complementary channels. The opportunity set is broader than just stablecoin-linked demand.

On the looping side, money market funds aren’t particularly attractive. Their yields are too low for most on-chain investors, and hurdle rates are often higher. But other strategies are starting to look interesting—particularly those with shorter durations. In the early days, tokenized assets often carried one- to two-year lockups. Now, we’re seeing products with maturities as short as a month or a quarter. That opens the door for market makers to build liquidity around these products and structure them so investors can access liquidity at different levels, depending on the underlying assets.

When we think about our product roadmap, it comes back to building for demand. We’re seeing strong appetite for products in the 8–10% yield range. That’s further up the risk curve, but still relatively liquid. These can be structured with distribution in mind, integrated into DeFi protocols, and used in lending markets. That creates adoption from more actively trading, DeFi-native strategies. Ultimately, that not only grows the fund but also deepens the on-chain use case for that type of asset.

Jürgen:

Maybe I can add something, especially regarding private markets. In traditional finance, everyone is looking for ways to distribute private market assets to more investors. But many of the existing solutions are clunky and not scalable. Blockchain feels almost purpose-built to solve this.

There are many approaches to making it work, and we’re actively developing a few ourselves while speaking with leaders in the private credit space—and in other private asset classes, too. As Bhaji said, the liquidity gap is often easier to bridge on-chain than in traditional markets. Blockchain enables more innovative structures for holding positions and layering in additional liquidity—features that simply aren’t possible in TradFi.

That’s why I think timing is important. When Centrifuge first started, we may have been too early. But now, with growing demand from issuers looking for different vehicles, the moment feels right.

Will:

Jürgen, you’re new to Centrifuge and Anemoy, as you mentioned, having most recently been an executive at Goldman. Why did you make the move now? Do you see tokenization and what you’re building at Anemoy and Centrifuge as the next natural extension of TradFi, or do you think tokenization will ultimately displace TradFi as we know it?

Jürgen:

I think I was lucky to get involved fairly early in the ETF space. When I joined, ETFs had already been around for about 10 years, so there were people who truly lived through the very early days. But even then, there was still a huge need for education—explaining the advantages of ETFs versus mutual funds, educating investors about how ETFs traded, and addressing concerns about liquidity.

Fast forward to today: ETFs are largely commoditized. Nobody asks those basic questions anymore, and regulators in many jurisdictions now allow active ETFs. The whole space has matured dramatically. But I can tell you: it was much more fun in the early years.

That’s the parallel I see with tokenization. In fact, this is probably even earlier than where ETFs were when I entered that market. Today, there are only about $27 billion in tokenized funds, but I expect that to grow significantly in the coming years.

That’s why I made the move. I feel very fortunate to join Centrifuge and Anemoy at this moment—a company that’s leading, growing rapidly, and shaping this market as it takes off.

Will:

Bhaji, I’d love your take on a similar question. You come at this more from a crypto-native, DeFi-native angle. Are we building a parallel system to TradFi? Are we building something that ultimately competes with TradFi? Or is everything naturally converging into an upgraded, more symbiotic financial system?

Bhaji:

I’d hope for the latter. Our work and our vision assume that, over time, everything converges into a better financial system—with blockchain as the technology layer under the hood.

Right now, there are two tracks running in parallel. First, traditional finance and asset managers see a ~$3 trillion on-chain market and a new source of liquidity. It makes sense for them to tokenize funds and distribute on-chain—effectively channeling on-chain capital into traditional products. That use case will keep growing.

Second—and this is where we’re most focused—we’re using the technology to make fund management itself more efficient: automate workflows, remove redundancies, cut basis-point costs at every step, and replace unnecessary intermediaries with smart contracts. That’s an oversimplification, but directionally it’s the goal. As BlackRock’s leadership has suggested, in ten years either all funds will be tokenized or none will.

So we’re pursuing both: helping finance R&D and real pilots today, while working directly with TradFi to improve the process. That’s also why having someone like Jürgen is so important. DeFi people can design elegant systems, but it only matters if it works for practitioners. We need TradFi operators to point out the pain points, where the inefficiencies are, and how to make incremental improvements on a 10-year roadmap.

Our hope is deep integration. Not “TradFi versus DeFi,” just finance—working better.

Jürgen:

I think, ultimately, people won’t differentiate anymore. The questions we hear today—Which blockchain? Which wallet structure? Which token standard?—will all be fully commoditized at some point. But the journey to get there will be absolutely exciting.

Blockchain started with the promise of making things better, faster, and cheaper. The products we have today are definitely faster. On the “cheaper” side, though, regulatory support is still needed. Right now, what we and many others do is produce a fund and then tokenize it. But imagine if we could simply tokenize the securities themselves—CLOs, for example—directly on-chain, and then package them into portfolios. We know large TradFi players are working on that, and if it comes to fruition, it could open the floodgates. Almost overnight, the market would look dramatically different.

At that point, innovation will come down to which players are fastest and most adaptive. My bet is on startups, fintechs, and companies like ours—those that can move quickly and deploy capital where it’s most needed. A lot of innovation will come from this side of the industry.

To give an example from my own background: before ETFs existed, there was no ETF trading. But the leaders in ETF trading today weren’t the big banks—they were startups. They matured, they built attractive propositions, and investors chose them over traditional players. I think we’ll see something very similar in tokenization.

Will:

You’ve painted a very harmonious picture. I agree that we’ll ultimately arrive at a place of synergy between what’s now DeFi and what’s now TradFi. But it seems to me the process between here and there may be less harmonious.

My personal view is that real change always follows the dollars. As you both pointed out earlier, we’ve already seen tokenized money market funds and other risk-free assets attract capital—still just about 1% of the total TradFi markets, as you mentioned, Jürgen. But even that small shift shows the direction of travel.

A handful of innovators and forward-thinking firms are leaning into tokenization—leveraging new distribution channels, accessing new capital pools, and exploring the added utility of tokenized versus traditional assets. That momentum will ultimately drag along a lot of traditional firms who would otherwise prefer to stand still.

I’m excited about that. And I certainly see Centrifuge as one of the leaders in this space. It’s been great connecting with you both today. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I’m excited about everything you’re building.

Bhaji:

I want to host a podcast for you sometime and hear more about what you’re building. You’re always behind the scenes asking the questions, but it seems you’re doing a great job driving growth and adoption in the RWA space and stablecoins overall. Thank you for having us, and for creating a space where we can share perspectives from different angles.

Jürgen:

Thank you so much from my side as well for having us today.

Will:

Great. Thank you, Bhaji. Thank you, Jürgen. And thank you both for joining us today.