Centrifuge

Centrifuge began in 2017 with a financing problem, not a blockchain looking for a use. Invoices, mortgages and streaming royalties could produce cash, yet small originators faced layers of agents and bespoke paperwork before that cash could reach investors. Tinlake, the team's first Ethereum platform, represented each financed claim as an NFT and placed it into a pool. The aim was to make a private credit relationship visible enough for smart contracts to account for it.

Tinlake did not erase the legal deal. Its offchain room held negotiated and signed agreements; its contracts then split pool exposure into TIN and DROP. TIN absorbed defaults first and sought the higher return, while DROP sat above it in the payment waterfall. That pairing matters to Centrifuge's history: the tokens investors bought described a particular pool position. They were never interchangeable with CFG, the network token that later carried governance and fee functions.

In mid-2021, a Centrifuge pool entered MakerDAO as real-world collateral. Centrifuge describes it as Maker's first credit facility of this kind and later that year connected an RWA Market to Aave. The integrations answered Tinlake's first question—DeFi capital could fund offchain credit—but made transaction cost and throughput harder to ignore.

The response was Centrifuge V2, a dedicated Substrate chain later connected to Polkadot. Pool operations gained a chain tuned for asset financing, and the native CFG paid fees and governed that network. The design solved for execution, but it placed the product and its capital on a different rail from Ethereum users.

By 2023 Centrifuge was sending Liquidity Pool contracts back onto EVM networks so investors could reach pools from their preferred chain. The project had travelled in a circle with a consequence: its own chain was no longer the only natural home for either the product or its token.

On May 22, 2023 the project launched a redesigned Centrifuge App and announced that Tinlake was being sunset. Existing Tinlake pools stayed live, including through the legacy interface, but new pools used later contracts. To a returning investor the brand and some pool names continued; underneath, the protocol generation had changed.

V3 extends that separation. One hub keeps a pool's accounting, prices and investment requests, while spokes issue its share tokens and accept deposits or redemptions on supported networks. A transfer between chains burns on one side and mints one-for-one on the other. Fund managers can attach transfer restrictions and operating policies. Centrifuge supplies the rails; each pool still defines the asset, manager, eligibility and legal terms riding on them.

CP149 passed on March 20, 2025 after V3 had chosen EVM execution. It replaced native Centrifuge Chain CFG and Ethereum WCFG with one Ethereum-native ERC-20 at 0xcccCCCcCCC33D538DBC2EE4fEab0a7A1FF4e8A94. Both predecessors converted one-for-one, but CP149 also raised the proposed supply from about 560.2 million to 675 million by assigning 115 million new CFG to the Foundation for migration, incentives and strategy.

Self-service migration opened May 20 and ultimately closed December 4, 2025. The official recap says 516,027,513 CFG, 91.33% of eligible balances, moved through the process. A final case review ended April 10, 2026. The closure gives the same ticker a hard historical boundary: legacy chain CFG and WCFG are no longer exchangeable for the asset traded today.

Supply did not stop at the CP149 proposal. Centrifuge reported 697,164,473 CFG in June 2026 and says issuance grows 3% annually into the Treasury. A September 5 RPC read returned 700,331,222.690578743802703564 CFG, while CoinYQ's August market snapshot says 680 million. These figures likely describe different times or data pipelines, but the published materials do not reconcile them, so the discrepancy remains visible here.

Centrifuge's current product pages point to managers such as Anemoy and institutions such as Janus Henderson and Apollo. The distinction is more than branding. The BVI Financial Services Commission lists Anemoy Capital SPC Limited as a regulated professional fund, while V3 issues a separate share token for each pool class. Subscription, redemption, underlying assets and investor eligibility belong to that fund structure and its documents.

CFG sits beside those fund products. Its contract supports vote delegation and ordinary ERC-20 transfers. The review of all Rely and Deny authorization events on September 5 identified two active authorized addresses, called wards, at that snapshot: Root at 0x7Ed48C31f2fdC40d37407cBaBf0870B2b688368f and InflationMinter at 0x50a168Cd6957e07B6dE6C1A99B2f940475f70dEf. Root can manage these permissions, mint and change metadata; InflationMinter is limited to periodic issuance to a fixed destination. Only a ward can call the authorized burn-from-balance function. If the balance belongs to another holder, the ward also needs that holder’s allowance for the amount. Any holder can use a separate function to burn their own tokens. The non-proxy CFG token and the protocol Root path, where an increase in privileges carries a 48-hour delay, are separate control systems.

Centrifuge documents CP171 as approved on November 3, 2025. Active DAO machinery paused, CNF took oversight and treasury management, and Centrifuge Labs became the operating and development arm. The proposal frames that move as a way to speed institutional execution. It is an organizational promise of alignment, not a fund subscription agreement.

A new fork in that story opened on August 17, 2026. CP172 asks whether eligible holders should surrender CFG to subscribe one-for-one for shares after a Cayman corporate restructuring. The proposal requires KYC, jurisdictional eligibility, board approval and later legal documents; it is not an automatic conversion, and the September 5 Snapshot vote was still active. Its FAQ says public-token liquidity support would wind down after a completed subscription window.

Holders retain a specified route to ask for DAO reinstatement: a complete forum proposal, 14 days of discussion, a GitHub submission, a seven-day Snapshot vote and at least 4 million CFG in quorum. Centrifuge's unresolved wager is therefore unusually concrete. After moving pool technology across three generations and collapsing two old CFG representations, can one Ethereum token make capital and governance less fragmented while leaving its claimed alignment observable enough for holders to judge?