Alexandra is a Senior Content Editor at Techopedia with 10+ years of experience in covering tech, finance, and crypto industries. Previously, Alex served as a…
Every couple of months, the crypto industry sees a new emerging trend. This time, buzz continues to pick up around tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
Since December 2024, the industry surged by more than 106% rising from $13.5 billion to $27.9 billion, according to data on RWA.xyz as of September 2025. In mid-August, emerging tokenized RWA platform Centrifuge saw its total value locked (TVL) surpass $1 billion, driven by higher institutional adoption and the launch of the first-ever tokenized S&P 500 index fund.
How can the project affect the tokenized RWA industry, and how will the Centrifuge price react?
Centrifuge Crypto News: Surpassing $1B in TVL
Centrifuge came to life in 2017 and is widely known for coining the term “real-world asset.” Despite being around for eight years, the protocol has only started to see mass success at the start of this year, when its TVL grew by more than 2,600%, up from $36 million in January to over $1 billion in August.
The company’s impressive growth could be attributed to a number of partnerships, including the launch of the Janus Henderson AAA CLO ETF (JAAA), the largest CLO ETF, fully on-chain, as well as bringing the S&P 500 Index on-chain, a “first-of-its-kind proof-of-index infrastructure for tokenized index products.”
According to Centrifuge CEO Bhaji Illuminati, the protocol’s main goal is to bring institutional-grade financial products fully on-chain.
He told Techopedia:
“On one side, tokenization enables asset managers to launch their funds with fundamentally better operations; lower costs, faster reporting, and global investor access. On the other hand, vaults provide the infrastructure to structure, manage, and distribute these products seamlessly across [decentralized finance] DeFi. Together, Centrifuge delivers the yield and vault infrastructure to make RWAs a core building block for the entire on-chain economy.”
Experts in the RWA space refer to Centrifuge as a project that acts as the “quiet backbone,” obsessed with “doing the boring but necessary stuff.”
“Others love to talk about yield, but Centrifuge talks about audits, structures, frameworks. That’s what matters when you’re dealing with institutional capital. They’re not just tokenizing assets; they’re making sure the rails actually support growth without breaking. That’s what separates a one-off experiment from an actual market infrastructure play,” Blake Jeong, the co-CEO of IOST, a blockchain infrastructure platform focused on building RWA-native solutions for institutional adoption, told Techopedia.
Yuri Berg, the CBDO of FinchTrade, said that Centrifuge’s recent partnerships have helped establish the company as a leader in handling institutional-grade products, with many now expecting it to focus on becoming the technology provider for significant assets like Fidelity or Vanguard.
Berg told Techopedia:
“Think of it as becoming the ‘Shopify for tokenized funds.’ This signals a major shift where the goal isn’t just creating new products, but providing the infrastructure for the entire traditional finance industry to move onto blockchain.”
Solving the ‘Last Mile Problem’
When projects start thinking about bringing real-world assets on-chain, one of the most challenging parts is ensuring they work like native DeFi tokens while remaining compliant with off-chain legal frameworks.
The CEO and founder of Firepan, Ian Kane, explained that Centrifuge managed to address this issue by standardizing the entire process, giving issuers a clear, structured framework to follow when bringing real-world assets on-chain.
At the end of July, Centrifuge launched Centrifuge V3 across six Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, including Ethereum, Base, Plume, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and BNB Chain, thus achieving cross-chain product issuance, borderless investor access, and liquidity flow across some of the most active DeFi ecosystems in the industry.
In addition, the protocol’s infrastructure, which verifies the legibility of assets and helps manage them, allows DeFi protocols to “do what they do best while [Centrifuge handles] all the complex real-world issues in the background,” FinchTrade’s Berg highlighted.
“Without this foundation, every DeFi protocol would have to become experts in legal documentation, asset verification, and regulatory compliance. That’s like asking a race car driver to also be a mechanic, lawyer, and accountant,” he said.
In addition to the V3 upgrade, Centrifuge debuted its deRWA tokens on Aerodrome, one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEX) in the EVM ecosystem, in late August, making them available to millions of users and allowing them to use tokenized RWAs for trades, swaps, lending, and allocating capital.
Bitget Wallet’s CMO, Jamie Elkaleh, said:
“Issuing an RWA isn’t enough – it has to be liquid, composable, and accessible where users already are. Centrifuge has worked to get deRWA tokens into venues like Aerodrome on Base, Coinbase’s DEX interface, Bitget Wallet, and OKX Wallet, and also into lending markets such as Morpho. That distribution-first approach matters because it lowers the barrier for DeFi users and turns RWAs from static products into assets people can actually use.”
Tokenized RWAs Will Only Continue to Grow
The recent success the tokenized RWA industry has witnessed is only expected to grow, the interviewed experts told Techopedia.
Han Qin, co-founder and CEO of Jarsy, a private equity tokenization platform, highlighted that RWAs introduce durable, rate-driven cash flows and collateral diversity. He said:
“Private credit and treasuries already dominate early traction, and index products extend that base to equities. The data is clear: the RWA market nearly quintupled in three years to approximately $24-27 billion by mid-2025 (excluding stablecoins), with private credit leading and tokenized treasuries exceeding $5 billion. That’s cornerstone behavior.”
Traditional institutions are already actively tapping into tokenized RWAs, as seen with Centrifuge’s most recent partnerships, and experts are noting that this is just the beginning.
“Longer term, [traditional financial institutions will] use platforms like Centrifuge or Firepan.com as their own fund administration rails – issuing, rebalancing, reporting, and even interacting with DeFi protocols as part of their treasury strategy,” Firepan’s Kane said.
What’s Next for Centrifuge Crypto?
Possible US interest rate cuts this September, along with capital rotation and the search for higher yields, are driving renewed focus on RWAs. Scalable infrastructure is key for higher adoption, and Centrifuge is already exceeding expectations.
“Expect more assets, more institutions experimenting, and volume starting to compound. It’s not about overnight 100x pumps, it’s steady adoption that builds real staying power,” IOST’s Jeong said.
In the next few years, the tokenized RWA space could see a “phased approach.” Asset managers are already tokenizing existing funds, custodians are starting to integrate for compliant access, and banks could eventually look at collateral and structured products on-chain.
“Centrifuge’s V3 design is clearly oriented toward institutional-grade needs – abstracting away chains, creating a unified interface – and that’s exactly what larger players require if they’re going to engage meaningfully,” Bitget Wallet’s Elkaleh added.
According to Centrifuge’s Illuminati, the company is already working on bringing a number of new institutional products on-chain that will be paired with a DeFi distribution layer to integrate RWAs directly into protocols and unlock both institutional and retail channels for growth.
“We’re rolling out white-labeled products so asset managers can go to market in weeks, not months. And we’re working with S&P on the first on-chain proof-of-index product, opening the door for asset managers to launch fully on-chain funds that track global benchmarks,” he said.
The CFG token also proved to have high significance, becoming “the easiest way to bet” on the RWA market.
FinchTrade’s Berg said:
“As Centrifuge establishes itself as the essential infrastructure for tokenized assets, investors will view holding CFG like owning a piece of the highway system that all this traffic has to use.”
While the Centrifuge crypto price has traded primarily in the red zone since the start of the year, the token had picked up some momentum at the end of August 2025, gaining about 25% and reaching highs of $0.3592 from lows of $0.2863 in mid-January.
IOST’s Jeong added that, unlike other native tokens, the CFG price is less likely to “moonshot” overnight. Instead, if Centrifuge manages to cement itself as the RWA-native infrastructure layer, its token could also benefit.
“It’s a long play, tied to compliance-driven adoption rather than hype cycles,” he said.
The Bottom Line
Centrifuge is emerging as the backbone of the tokenized RWA movement, with over $1 billion in TVL and major institutional partnerships.
By solving compliance and infrastructure challenges, it enables RWAs to behave like native DeFi assets: liquid, accessible, and scalable. As traditional finance moves on-chain, Centrifuge is helping to build a new era of crypto tech.
