According to Blockworks, the past week in crypto funding saw significant deals in real-world assets, despite the industry bracing for the fourth Bitcoin halving. Real-world assets refer to off-chain goods such as real estate or US Treasurys that are tokenized. Centrifuge, a platform for generalist real-world assets, raised $15 million in a round co-led by ParaFi Capital and Greenfield. This follows $7 million in strategic capital raised by Centrifuge throughout 2022.
Centrifuge facilitates pools of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including loans, credit, and real estate. These pools are specifically designed to manage RWA liquidity pools, which are assets locked in a smart contract to support a liquid market for these RWAs. Centrifuge tokenizes assets by creating NFTs that embed links to detailed off-chain data, leveraging blockchain technology to ensure transparency and accessibility while securing sensitive data off-chain.
Centrifuge has also explored launching RWA liquidity pools on other chains, including Arbitrum and Base. The platform currently holds $285 million worth of assets in its liquidity pools, a figure that has seen a significant increase from around $80 million at the end of 2022. With the new funding, Centrifuge plans to grow the team, invest in product development, and support the broader tokenization ecosystem education and growth, according to co-founder Lucas Vogelsang.
In other news, Homium, a tokenized real estate platform, raised a $10 million Series A to put home equity loans on the Avalanche blockchain. The round was led by University of Utah-linked Sorenson Impact Group and Avalanche’s “Blizzard” ecosystem fund. Homium offers homeowners “shared appreciation” loans that are pooled with other loans and converted to a tokenized security. The product aims to provide tokenized access to home appreciation at scale. Currently, Homium’s loans are only available in Colorado.
RWA Inc, a company focusing on fractional assets, announced a $1.175 million private funding round this week. Meanwhile, Puffer, a liquid restaking protocol, announced $18 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital. Puffer is rolling out a pufETH liquid restaking token that aims to offer holders exposure to yield from Ethereum staking and EigenLayer restaking. The protocol is not yet in mainnet. Puffer is the third-largest liquid restaking protocol by total value locked (TVL) behind ether.fi and Renzo, according to DeFiLlama.