Centrifuge (CFG), a blockchain platform focusing on tokenizing investment products, has appointed Jürgen Blumberg, former Goldman Sachs Director of the company’s Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) Accelerator business in Europe as its new Chief Operating Officer.
He will also serve as Chief Investment Officer for Anemoy, Centrifuge’s affiliated asset management company.
The appointment comes as a tokenization of assets in the real world (RWA) is aware of the traditional financial world. Global banks, asset managers are increasingly exploring to use blockchain rails to relocate and record ownership of assets such as bonds, foundations and shares. They perform the operational efficiency, wider distribution and around the clock, programmable transactions.
It is potentially a huge option. The Tokenized RWA market, now standing at $ 25 billion and more than doubling in a year, is expected to grow to more trillion of dollars in the next decade, according to McKinsey, 21Shares, Ripple and BCG reports.
Centrifuge builds regulated structures for these products that place themselves as a bridge between blockchain rails and financial institutions seeking exposure to digital versions of well -known investment products. It has over $ 760 million of the total value locked on the platform, Defillama shows, including the $ 400 million tokenized US Finance Ministry issued with Anemoy. The protocol recently expanded products for Avalanche (Avax) and Solana (SOL), created an on-chain version of the S&P 500 index and launched a tokenized fund with collateral with security obligations with asset manager Janus Henderson.
Before coming to centrifuge, Blumberg spent over two decades in traditional capital markets at Goldman Sachs, Inesco and Blackrock, which helped develop the ETF market into a large part of global asset management. In an interview with Coindesk, he draws parallels between tokenization and the early days of ETFs, and how it disturbed mutual funds market.
“There is a large part of the world that was never really the focus of traditional funding: the global south, for example, or all the countries that have problems with high inflation, or with currencies that are not really easy to use in other jurisdictions,” Blumberg explained. “Now they suddenly get a whole new ecosystem in DEFI [decentralized finance] the world that lets them all participate [and] Give them the same quality of products as anyone else. “
“Tokenized assets in the real world really democratize the economic ecosystem,” he added.
Blumberg will focus on helping to bring traditional financing companies to the chain and at the same time improve operations and tokenized products for institutional use.
“There is a great distribution option for Tradfi,” he said. “From a technology point of view, if you are too late, you can miss the train.”
Read more: Credit Agricoles Active Service Unit Backs Tokenized Sme Exchange in Europe
