Centrifuge Builds the Exit Layer for Illiquid RWAs

Tokenization can move a fund interest across blockchains in seconds. It cannot make a private loan mature faster or force a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) portfolio to liquidate without cost.

Onchain vaults have already inherited the economic logic of managed funds, as reported in March. When every exit is expected to happen atomically at blockspeed, the system is left with three imperfect choices. The fund can retain a large cash buffer and dilute returns. A lender can provide a standing facility and absorb the timing mismatch. Or a lending market such as Morpho, one of the largest onchain credit venues, can liquidate the position, effectively asking its lenders and liquidators to underwrite an asset whose fair value and exit window are both uncertain.

Traditional finance has notice periods, redemption gates, credit lines and secondary fund markets to manage the same problem. Onchain finance needs its own versions.

Centrifuge is now pushing one of the more compelling answers. Rather than pretend the underlying asset is instantly liquid, it wants to make the claim waiting for liquidity transferable.

From token factory to operating system 

Centrifuge began with individual onchain credit pools. It has since expanded into infrastructure with Centrifuge Protocol V3, pivoting toward larger, better-vetted institutional asset managers to allow them to issue, administer and distribute real-world assets (RWAs) onchain. The current stack coordinates accounting, pricing, permissions, capital flows and multichain deployment from one control layer, while products can still differ in who may hold them, how frequently they are valued, what fees they charge and how redemptions are processed.

This is where its moat sits. Asset managers such as Anemoy and Janus Henderson bring the products and the asset-management layer. Centrifuge supplies the tokenization, operating infrastructure and DeFi distribution. Few competitors span that full route from fund origination to DeFi distribution, and even fewer have been doing it for the past decade, making Centrifuge one of the longest-running RWA platforms.

The platform has the assets to prove it. The 29 Jul snapshot shows $1.65bn distributed across Centrifuge products, up from $254.5mn one year earlier. That places it eighth among the largest tokenization platforms with approximately 4.5% of the $37bn distributed-asset market, trailing Securitize, Ondo and Circle but ahead of Ethena and Maple, according to data provider RWA.xyz.

Within the supplied tokenized-credit sector, Centrifuge sits among the three largest distribution stacks next to Maple. The latter is not a perfect peer, however, because its lending has historically centred more heavily on crypto-native borrowers, while Centrifuge's exposure is tied to offchain funds and institutional portfolios. That institutional route is the one it has been widening: New York Life Investment Management agreed a tokenization partnership with the platform at the end of June.

Two funds carry almost the entire platform 

The headline scale hides a concentrated product base. The Janus Henderson Treasury Fund, JTRSY, accounts for $881.3mn, or 53.5% of the platform. The Janus Henderson AAA CLO Fund, JAAA, contributes another $691.9mn, or 42.0%. Together, the two products represent 95.6% of Centrifuge's distributed assets. Anemoy's Apollo diversified-credit strategy is a distant third at $43.4mn. Everything else combined contributes less than 2%.

(Source: RWA.xyz)

The same concentration appears by category. Treasury products represent 54.2% of value and corporate credit another 42.8%, leaving only 3.0% across diversified credit and equities. Ethereum carries 64.1% of distributed value, followed by Avalanche at 15.8% and Solana at 12.3%. The three networks together account for 92.2%.

(Source: RWA.xyz)

Grove, an allocator that deploys capital on behalf of stablecoin issuer Sky and its USDS token, explains much of that scale. The supplied holdings snapshot attributes approximately $769.8mn of JTRSY and $124.8mn of JAAA to the Sky allocator, giving Grove exposure to roughly $895mn of Centrifuge products. Its deployment followed extensive risk assessment and due diligence, offering meaningful validation of the infrastructure. It also means more than half of the platform's value is connected to one allocator. The next stage must therefore be measured through distribution breadth, not total value locked alone.

The rails are already collecting rent 

Centrifuge's revenue is modest beside its asset base, but remarkably steady.

Monthly management fees have remained between $406k and $512k since October 2025. The latest print reached $481k, equivalent to a $5.8mn annualized run rate, while the trailing 12 months generated $5.3mn. Over the same period, the underlying assets distributed $52.4mn of yield to allocators.

(Source: DeFiLlama)

Put differently, approximately $1 accrued to the platform for every $10 of asset yield delivered to investors. Centrifuge is monetizing the operating rails rather than retaining the investment return.

ERC-8161 turns the queue into an asset 

Asynchronous vaults already separate a redemption into two moments. First, the investor submits the request. The fund later values the portfolio, arranges liquidity and settles everyone in the same processing window. That model is slower than a conventional DeFi withdrawal, but far better suited to assets whose value cannot be established every block.

The remaining problem is what happens in between. Until now, the investor has been stuck in the queue.

ERC-8161 changes that. The recently finalized Ethereum standard allows a pending deposit or redemption request to be transferred to another address before it is fulfilled. It was co-authored by Cain O'Sullivan and Centrifuge co-founder and CTO Jeroen Offerijns, extending the asynchronous vault framework that Centrifuge also helped develop. Centrifuge has positioned transferable requests as part of the direction for Vaults v2, although it has not said when they will go live.

The distinction matters. Centrifuge is not making private credit liquid. It is separating the investor's need for cash from the manager's ability to unwind the asset.

A market for more than redemptions

Transferability could make those rails considerably more valuable.

A market maker could buy a pending redemption at a discount and wait for settlement. A lender could advance cash against a pending redemption, taking a secured claim on the eventual proceeds rather than purchasing the position outright. Allocators could move requests between wallets, entities or strategies. Portfolio vaults could net incoming subscriptions against outgoing redemptions before selling anything. Liquidity providers could combine instant reserves for small withdrawals, committed credit for ordinary flows and market-priced queues for larger exits.

This is broader than a secondary market. It is the beginning of a financing and routing layer around time-delayed assets.

The blocker is pricing time itself

A pending request has no canonical valuation because its final net asset value and settlement date remain unknown. Compliance restrictions must follow the position. Legal ownership must survive the transfer. Buyers need confidence in queue rules, reporting and manager behaviour. ERC-8161 also transfers the entire pending balance, making partial exits harder without another wrapper. Without reliable data and committed balance sheets, transferable requests risk becoming movable illiquidity rather than genuine liquidity.

Centrifuge's opportunity is therefore larger than tokenizing another fund. The platform that builds the market for entering, financing and exiting illiquid onchain assets sits at the point where duration itself becomes tradable.