Just last month we announced Tinlake, a platform built on decentralized financial infrastructure that enables anyone to draw loans against tokenized real-world assets*. Any asset that can be represented on-chain as an NFTs (Non-Fungible Token) can be financed using the Tinlake infrastructure, which in turn, dramatically simplifies the process of accessing the world of decentralized finance. You can read more about Tinlake here.

Today, only a few short weeks later, we are thrilled to announce the first Ethereum mainnet transactions on the Tinlake platform. This week, we have successfully executed pilot transactions with partners who have used Tinlake to access financing in the stablecoin Dai. The Maker Foundation facilitated our partners’ borrowing 182,000 Dai. In the coming months, the Maker Foundation will release Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD), a version of Dai collateralized with multiple asset types. In anticipation of this launch, Centrifuge and the Maker Foundation are collaborating to provide technology and capital for short-term loans that simulate the Dai credit system under MCD.

Below is a brief overview of the pilot transactions, which we will present in full detail in the coming weeks.

Next week, in the frame of Berlin Blockchain Week, our CTO Philip Stehlik will present Tinlake at dappcon. If any of this sounds exciting to you, make sure to reach out to us or meet us at one of the many events during Berlin Blockchain Week.

Bringing Real-World Assets on Chain

In addition to a supply chain financing pilot we did earlier this summer, this week we facilitated financing for our pilot partners of more than USD 180,000.

The Centrifuge journey started with invoice financing. We are on a mission to facilitate access to liquidity for SME’s of any size in any part of the world, and supply chain financing is our home turf. Tinlake is a natural extension of invoice financing, and therefore, it should come as no surprise that the first Tinlake transactions have been providing early payments to entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses using unpaid invoices as collateral.

The demand for decentralized finance (DeFi) from other asset classes is so much larger than business documents like invoices, so the second pilot is a mortgage portfolio. New Silver is a tech-first non-bank loan originator with a focus on single-family residential and small balance commercial investment properties located on the East Coast of the United States. For this pilot, New Silver secured a loan against a real property mortgage with a maturity date in March 2020. Click here to see the corresponding transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

Our third pilot was launched with FutureFin, a leading provider of private capital liquidity for residential financing, bringing to market a uniform, adoptable mortgage token framework for portability, security, and processing. Using Tinlake, Centrifuge and FutureFin are defining a standardized mortgage token, which reduces issuance and origination costs, data transfer, and friction in processing and servicing. Just yesterday, FutureFin closed its first mainnet mortgage funding, worth over USD100,000.

Tinlake, the ideal tech stack for MakerDAO’s Multi Collateral Dai

We know the potential cryptocurrencies have in global financial innovation, not only in terms of ease of transfer of value, but also regarding transparency, cost-efficiency, speed, and accessibility.

With Tinlake, anyone will be able to access credit without having to rely on a centralized entity. Anyone with real-world assets, such as unpaid invoices, future music royalties or artworks, can tokenize these and lock them into a CDP, drawing Dai in exchange. The Tinlake platform can be used with Centrifuge NFTs or any other NFT following the ERC721 standard. This way decentralized lending can be extended to numerous non-fungible assets, such as mortgages, royalties or the receivables of any company.

“Expanding the MakerDAO collateral portfolio to include uncorrelated real world assets is a critical step in scaling the system,” said Rune Christensen, CEO of the Maker Foundation. “With Tinlake, Centrifuge has built the kind of user-friendly access portal that institutions expect when dealing with technology. In doing so, they are taking the first steps towards bridging the old world and the new. We’re hopeful that the pilots being run on Tinlake will spur interest and discussion from the MakerDAO community and from institutions seeking to bring real-world assets into our universe.”

Maex Ament, CEO and Co-Founder of Centrifuge says

“In traditional finance, to borrow against real-world assets, you need the likes of Goldman Sachs, huge volumes, and the costs and overhead are massive to conduct such transactions. Yesterday, we tokenized and financed mortgages in 30 minutes, with fees of less than a dollar at competitive rates, presenting an alternative to the status quo that is cheaper, faster, more transparent and inclusive. Welcome to the new world.”

What’s Next?

This is the first of a number of active pilots we’re working on with our network of partners. We will share much more on the process, the collaborations and opportunities of different asset types in the coming weeks.

In the meantime:

Meet us at Berlin Blockchain Week. You can see where we are presenting here, or shoot us an email to get in touch.

Follow us on Twitter

Read about Tinlake and Centrifuge on our blog

Check out our website

For more information about MakerDAO, visit their websit

* For us, real-world assets mean non-crypto, non-fungible assets, existing in the “real world”, such as an original artwork or a specific invoice.

Thanks Maya Byskov Gadegård for co-authoring this post.