Centrifuge Tinlake brings unprecedented real-world value into DeFi

TL,DR

Centrifuge Tinlake brings new real-world assets into decentralized finance (DeFi), pushing the current scope and future potential from crypto into the traditional business world. The Tinlake framework was just used to finance invoices of the DeFi summit conference organizers.

Invoice Financing on the Ethereum Blockchain

If you’re familiar with Centrifuge, you know that our team has an extensive background and history with supply chain financing. Taulia, the market leader in financial supply chain optimization, with 1.5 million businesses connected worldwide, was founded and built by some of us. With Centrifuge, we are harnessing the potential that decentralized finance offers, in order to further expand financing opportunities to businesses of any size, in any part of the world, beyond what was previously thought possible, by unlocking value that was previously inaccessible.

We launched Centrifuge Tinlake a month ago, a platform that enables anyone to draw loans against tokenized real-world assets such as invoices, warehouse receipts, or royalty payments, and just last week we presented the results of our first pilots. We used Tinlake to facilitate financing worth ~180K USD with our partners New Silver, Future Finance and the Maker Foundation, by tokenizing mortgages and using these as collateral to access short term loans.

These assets were registered, tokenized and financed in less than 30 minutes, with fees of less than a dollar, at competitive rates, thus presenting an alternative to the status quo that is cheaper, faster and more transparent for borrowers and lenders alike.

In spite of technological upgrades in the traditional finance industry, pricing is still vulnerable to external factors such as central bank governance policies, and the political climate. The Tinlake methodology provides a significant upgrade for the user, allowing anyone to borrow on their own terms, with prices that are wholly determined by the intrinsic credit of the specific transaction.

We’re thrilled with the traction that Tinlake is receiving and what lies ahead.

Early payments for the DeFi Summit

The DeFi Summit in London is coming up next week. A 2-day conference centered around Decentralized Finance connecting entrepreneurs, academics, investors and others who are looking to learn and network in the decentralized finance industry.

The conference organizers used Tinlake to bridge the 30-day payment gap from invoicing sponsors until receiving their payment. This helps the DeFi Summit team to pay their suppliers on time or even earlier, without increasing their own working capital. Today, one-time invoice financing like this with new, non-recurring customers is almost impossible, but with Tinlake it becomes an easy and hassle-free exchange of tokenized invoices for Dai within minutes.

“Showcasing an actual real-world use-case of decentralized finance by unlocking trapped liquidity is important to us and sets the tone of our upcoming Summit.”, said Alex Obadia, who organizes DeFi Summit and leads platform and research efforts at Cambrial Capital. “I hope we’ve set an example for other event organizers and look forward to seeing how Tinlake can increase working capital for others around the world!”

Looking Ahead: Pushing beyond the Boundaries of Crypto

Despite the potential of DeFi to reimagine our global financial system, we currently see most focus on replicating existing banking products in a decentralized architecture like making bigger, leveraged bets on Ethereum or creating levers for margin trading of crypto. The impact on the existing economy and the potential to remove intermediaries or support unbanked businesses is still rather low to non-existent.

By tokenizing real-world assets, and combining this with the Centrifuge protocol features, we bring more value to the Ethereum ecosystem and move beyond purely crypto-native business use cases.

Meet us in at DeFi Summit London. Shoot us an email to get in touch.

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• Read about Tinlake and Centrifuge on our Blog
• Check out our website, or jump straight to details on Tinlake

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Centrifuge bridges the gap between our current “real” off-chain economy and “web3”. This is especially exciting if we unlock previously inaccessible value into DeFi. The DeFi summit invoices are just a tiny and first example of how Centrifuge creates new opportunities for businesses and their financial supply chains.