Our team at Centrifuge, who launched Centrifuge OS and Tinlake on the Ethereum Blockchain, is excited to receive public support to broaden Centrifuge OS’ capabilities in building a Centrifuge Chain. The German state of Berlin, represented by the Investment Bank Berlin, in collaboration with the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), has awarded us with a 400k € grant and a 1 Million € subsidized loan.

The Scaling Problem

Centrifuge’s vision is to enable businesses worldwide to access and create the decentralized economy. Our users are businesses of all sizes, from all over the world. The Centrifuge network is open source and permissionless: anyone can join, transact, access or provide financing for the global financial supply chain. We are working towards thousands of transactions per day on Centrifuge, transacting millions of EUR worth of value.

Today, Centrifuge operates on the Ethereum blockchain. Even with the current planned and coming upgrades of Ethereum, performance will not be able to keep up with Centrifuge’s growth to millions of users and trillions of transactions. Even today our users experience the limitations of speed, throughput, and cost of the Ethereum blockchain, limiting the use of Centrifuge OS to very specific types of product lines, services, and transactions. Privacy-preserving features are not yet sufficiently available on Ethereum, additionally limiting business and enterprise use-cases.

The Centrifuge Chain

Research teams all over the globe are working on figuring out the scaling and cost-efficiency problems that public Blockchains face today. We have also been throwing time at this conundrum, and are therefore thrilled that we now can dedicate financial resources and channel (wo)manpower to research and develop a scalable, public blockchain for our specific use case.

We evaluated many emerging blockchain technologies. We built proof of concepts and deployed test networks. Eventually, we settled on building the Centrifuge Chain as public proof of stake blockchain with Parity Substrate. Over the last months, our development efforts have focused on building the core chain logic, furthering our zero-knowledge-research, running simulations and preparing the launch plans for the chain and the underlying incentive structures to provide a scalable, secure, reasonably-priced infrastructure for Centrifuge’s users.

You can expect more detailed posts and papers about our research and development approach in the coming months. For now, we are happy to have the resources to build this crucial piece of infrastructure for a decentralized financial system.

IBB and ERDF

The Investment Berlin (IBB) is the business development bank of the German federal state of Berlin. They offer loan-based and investment-oriented forms of financing along with grant programs for the thriving Berlin start-up scene. One of their initiatives is the Pro FIT project financing, a grant dedicated to technological innovation for SME’s in Berlin, co-financed by the ERDF.

The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is one of the main financial instruments of the EUʼs cohesion policy. Its purpose is to contribute to reducing disparities between the levels of development of European regions and to reduce the backwardness of the least favored regions.

We’re absolutely thrilled to have received the grant and loan, and are grateful to the ERDF and to the Investment Bank Berlin for believing in us. We have put together a brilliant team and are wasting no time in diving in!

For more information about us, check out our Website, or join the conversation on Medium and Twitter.