Centrifuge Explained

Centrifuge is an infrastructure project built around tokenizing private credit — loans to businesses, trade finance receivables and similar structured lending — connecting originators of that credit with onchain sources of capital.

How the model works

Asset originators, such as specialty lenders, bring pools of loans or receivables onto the platform, where they’re placed into legal structures and represented as tokenized pools. Investors can provide capital to these pools in exchange for tokens representing a claim on the pool’s cash flows, with terms — interest rate, seniority, expected duration — set by the specific pool.

Why private credit is a distinct RWA category

Unlike a Treasury bill, private credit doesn’t have a standardized, publicly quoted price or a government guarantee behind it. Its risk depends on the specific borrowers, the quality of underwriting by the loan originator, and the structure’s protections for investors in a downside scenario. This makes private credit tokenization a meaningfully different risk category from tokenized Treasuries or money market funds, even though both fall under the broader “RWA” label.

Reading this profile

This is a description of the infrastructure and asset category Centrifuge focuses on, not an evaluation of any specific pool’s credit quality or an investment recommendation. Private credit carries default risk that varies significantly by pool and requires its own due diligence.