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AMA with Centrifuge
On the 21st of December, 2021 at 14:00 UTC, Decentralized Club had the honor of hosting Lucas Vogelsang, CEO and Co-Founder from Centrifuge for an Ask-Me-Anything session on their Telegram page with a community of over 70,000 people. It was hosted by DC Admin, May.
The session was divided into two segments. Introductions were made in Segment 1, questions from the community were answered in Segment 2.
If you missed this event and would like to know what Centrifuge is all about, you can find a recap of the interview here. Information here should be researched and should not be taken as investment or financial advice. Also note that slight edits have been made for clarity, and links in this recap lead to images, documents, or other media.
Segment 1 - Introduction
[May]
Hallo, 大家好, नमस्ते, Selamat!
My name is May and I’m the host for the AMA with Centrifuge
Today we have a special guest from the Centrifuge Team
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Hello everyone, I'm excited to be here!
[May]
You’re welcome to the Decentralized Club
It’s an honor to have you here
How is your day going?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Great, we're working on a ton of stuff. Glad I could make room to jump in here though and share what's going on at Centrifuge
[May]
Awesome!
Thank you for sparing time to do so.
Before we get into the session, could you please tell us about yourself and your role at Centrifuge?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Yes, originally born in Switzerland, I've spent the last 15 years working in tech right out of high school
Before starting Centrifuge, I worked together with my Co-Founders at a FinTech company called Taulia in San Francisco back in 2016. We worked with some of the largest companies in the world (like Coca-Cola and Toyota) but also with tiny small businesses allowing them to borrow money against their invoices.
We saw how badly our current banking system works especially for smaller people and when I started diving into crypto in 2017 that was a big motivation for me.
[May]
This is great!
[Lucas Vogelsang]
So we started working on Centrifuge to solve some of these issues and build a better system
I'm an engineer at heart but now do all sorts of stuff, my role is CEO
[May]
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Good to have you!
Let’s get right into the session.
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Yes!
[May]
Can you tell us about Centrifuge and the inspiration that got it started?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Yes, I've mentioned a bit already about our experience in Fintech. I think it boils down to this: our current financial system is extremely inefficient, mostly favoring large institutions and a lot of middlemen. If you compare that to the core values and ideas of DeFi it's the exact opposite: DeFi has the goal of removing barriers to entry and making it easy for anyone to use and participate. We are building the necessary infrastructure for real businesses and individuals to borrow money from DeFi
Imagine real estate, trade finance, commodities, etc. can now be borrowed and lent against in stablecoins.
[May]
Oh yes!
Great answer.
What innovative solution is Centrifuge bringing to topple its competitors with similar offerings in the DeFi and FinTech sector?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
I think that's easy: from the very start we wanted to focus on these assets to become part of DeFi overall and as such focused on making sure they're interoperable. Interoperability is DeFi's secret weapon. So from very early on we started working with Maker and are the first real-world asset to be used as collateral on Maker. We're also very close to launching the first market together with Aave.
The reason this matters is because it ultimately brings more liquidity to these assets which makes it cheaper and easier for borrowers to borrow.
[May]
I agree! Good to know you’re working with Aave!
What is Tinlake?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Centrifuge allows businesses (we call them issuers) to bring real-world assets on-chain and pool these loans. Investors can supply the capital to the pool and get LP tokens that earn a yield on these pools.
So for example New Silver is an issuer that lends out loans to real estate developers who rebuild houses and then sell them. They have > 100 loans worth $20M in their pool.
As an investor, you can go and invest in that pool using DAI and earn stable interest in crypto.
You can check out tinlake.centrifuge.io to see the 10 pools that are currently live with different assets that you can fund.
[May]
https://t.me/decentralized_club/680406
Could you give us a quick summary of the yield incentives for your pools?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
In addition to the stablecoin yield you make by investing in these assets, the protocol gives out rewards in CFG to investors. This is a way to distribute tokens to the users of our protocol and reward early participation
[May]
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
What are the utilities of $CFG?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
The CFG token powers our chain, it's used as a governance token and will in the long run be used to pay fees when borrowing/lending.
Centrifuge Chain is the marketplace for these assets and charges protocol fees for these transactions
[May]
You have a solid usecase
What major news should we look forward to from Centrifuge by the start of 2022?
[Lucas Vogelsang]
two things: RWAMarket (Aave & Centrifuge based money market with RWA as collateral) - sign up is live at rwamarket.io
it will go live soon and the community already voted on a CFG rewards program for it
(https://gov.centrifuge.io/t/poll-aave-rwamarket-rewards-proposal/3284)
and secondly: we’re going for a Polkadot Parachain and started off our crowd loan last week. The auctions are in the next few weeks and we’re hoping to go live with Polkadot and bring RWA to a new ecosystem
https://centrifuge.io/parachain/crowdloan/
[May]
Surely looking forward to these!
Alright! Let’s get straight into the questions from our Twitter community.
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Yes would love to answer a few
Segment 2 - Community Questions
[May]
Has the Centrifuge proposal for a permissioned Real World Asset market on Aave been approved? If so, when is Real World DeFi coming to Aave?
Twitter Username: @dheerubhai198
[Lucas Vogelsang]
yes, it has. the AAVE community voted on it and we’re already testing on mainnet
We will ship it as soon as testing has been completed.
This will be in a few days if things still go well this year :)
[May]
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
A relevant point is about centrifuge's parachain offer and Polkadot collective loan, so knowing that this will bring great growth benefits to Polkadot DeFi, could you explain to me, what benefits or contributions you will also receive or if it is not something mutual?
Twitter Username: @Pirry05Universe
[Lucas Vogelsang]
I think it goes both ways, Centrifuge brings collateral to other protocols, and issuers on centrifuge get access to more liquidity
[May]
According to the project's roadmap- what are your most important next priorities?
Twitter Username: @AkansuUygar
[Lucas Vogelsang]
I mentioned earlier: Aave in the near term and then integrating with Polkadot based projects like Acala and Moonbeam to kickstart DeFi on Polkadot
a few other things we’re working on is decentralizing governance, bringing in institutional capital to pools, and scaling our infrastructure
[May]
Centrifuge’s crowd loan parachain opened in batch 2. So, why Batch 2 and why does Centrifuge need a parachain slot? In the future do you plan to integrate with other parachains?
Telegram Username: @romia32
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Yes, we see the Polkadot ecosystem as an important place for centrifuge assets to be used. I already shared Moonbeam and Acala as projects we will integrate with.
We didn’t want to overpay in the first batch and think the second batch will be more reasonable :)
I will have to go now unfortunately
Thanks for all the questions and I hope I was able to share a bit about what we’re doing!
[May]
It was great to have you! Wish we could take more questions!
Our warm regards to the rest of the team at the Centrifuge HQ.
Do have a great day!
[Lucas Vogelsang]
Likewise. Thanks!
[May]
The AMA with Centrifuge is now over.