What Is Centrifuge? Tokenized Funds, Pools and CFG

Centrifuge is infrastructure for onchain asset management. Managers can use it to operate tokenized financial products, including funds and private-credit offerings. It is broader than a marketplace for loans: its manager documentation also covers Treasury, money-market, equity and onchain strategies.

How Centrifuge works

A manager structures a financial product and configures its onchain operations. These can include investor access, share issuance, pricing, subscriptions and reporting. The onchain setup needs to reflect the product’s underlying structure; deploying a token does not establish its legal terms by itself.

Three concepts help explain the investor-facing workflow:

Component	Role
Pool	Organizes a financial product’s accounting, share classes and management permissions.
Share token	Represents a claim associated with the pool; the particular product determines its terms.
Vault	Provides an entry point for investing in or requesting redemption from a share class, using a specified asset and network.

A pool can coordinate activity across networks. That does not mean every share token is freely transferable: investor permissions and the product’s rules still apply.

For the broader structure, read how tokenized funds work.

Are deposits and withdrawals instant?

Not necessarily. Centrifuge documents two vault models:

• Synchronous vaults: a deposit can return shares in the same transaction, but redemptions remain request-based.
• Asynchronous vaults: investors request deposits or redemptions, the manager processes the orders, and investors then claim the resulting shares or assets.

Request-based processing can accommodate periodic valuations and offchain settlement. A token being transferable on a network therefore does not establish that a fund can redeem it immediately for cash.

Is CFG the same as a fund-share token?

No. CFG is Centrifuge’s ecosystem token, documented as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. A share token belongs to a particular financial product. Buying CFG is not the same transaction as subscribing to one of those products and does not, by itself, give the buyer its fund shares.

What should readers check for each product?

The infrastructure is only one part of the assessment. Read the product’s own documentation to establish:

1. Exposure: which assets or strategy generate its returns, and who manages them?
2. Rights and access: what claim does a share represent, and who is eligible to hold or redeem it?
3. Liquidity: when are requests processed, and what conditions can delay payment?
4. Dependencies: which custody, valuation, contract and operational arrangements does the product rely on?

Private credit adds borrower and underwriting risk; a Treasury-oriented product has a different exposure. Neither the Centrifuge name nor the presence of a token is a substitute for examining the individual offering.

For a different layer of the stack, compare Plume’s blockchain ecosystem with RWA infrastructure more broadly. This profile describes infrastructure, not a recommendation to buy CFG or any fund.

Primary sources

• Centrifuge — Manager guide
• Centrifuge — Pools
• Centrifuge — Vaults
• Centrifuge — CFG token summary