Centrifuge was launched in 2017 by Lucas Vogelsang and Martin Quensel.

Lucas Vogelsang is the founding engineer at Centrifuge and holds the position of the company’s CEO. Vogelsang co-founded e-commerce startup DeinDeal in 2010. After successfully selling DeinDeal to Ringier, he started working on another startup — KaufDA. Later, Vogelsang relocated to Silicon Valley to join Taulia as technical manager. In October 2017, he co-founded Centrifuge.

Martin Quensel is a co-founder at Centrifuge and its current COO. Prior to Centrifuge, he co-founded Taulia. Quensel began his career at SAP as a software developer and architect.

The Centrifuge protocol tokenizes real-world assets by converting them to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). After that, they are funded through Tinlake. Tinlake is the first DApp built on the Centrifuge chain. It was created to access liquidity on Ethereum, while CFG has its own bridge to Ethereum.

The features of Centrifuge include integration with other DeFi protocols. This feature allows Centrifuge users to get liquidity without slowdowns and protects DeFi protocols from destabilizing events by adding uncorrelated collateral. As a result, the cumulative risks are reduced and predatory lending and banks are replaced by smart contracts.

As of June 2021, Centrifuge has the highest total value locked (TVL) on the Polkadot ecosystem. Moreover, the project claims to be among the first to launch a parachain on Polkadot. When the team designed the Centrifuge chain, operational speed and low fees were prioritized.

CFG is the native token of the Centrifuge and it powers the entire network. There are three major use cases for CFG: staking, paying transaction fees and governance participation. The token is also used to reward the liquidity providers on Tinlake. As of June 2021, the total supply is 425,000,000 CFG, growing at a rate of 3% per year.

The total supply of CFG tokens are distributed as follows: 27% to core contributors, 17.1% to total backers, 7.3% to rewards and grants, 9.5% to the community sale, 11.8% to foundation endowment, 7.1% to community grants, 10.8% to development grants and 8.3% to the early ecosystem.

CFG sale took place on May 26, 2021, on Coinlist. The event was held in two stages and the supply of tokens was limited at 17 million for each round.

Users pay transaction fees in CFG tokens and transaction aggregators on Polkadot receive a share of the fee for processing and storing data. These measures, as well as the NPoS (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) mechanism and the CFG rewards, encourage users to operate fairly and select data collators that provide censorship resistance.

Overall, most of the security comes from the Polkadot relay chain. The use of Polkadot's protective mechanisms provides Centrifuge with a high level of security at a low cost.

As of June 2021, CFG tokens can be traded on the BitZ platform.

If you want to find out more about buying crypto, feel free to read our detailed guide.

Read about Aave.

Learn more about DeFi.

What is Polkadot? Take a deep dive with CMC Alexandria.

Find out how to keep your crypto safe.