Tokenization Specialist Centrifuge Appoints Former Goldman Sachs Executive as COO

Centrifuge, a blockchain platform focused on tokenizing investment products, has appointed Jürgen Blumberg, former Goldman Sachs executive of the firm’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) accelerator business in Europe, as its new chief operating officer.

He will also serve as chief investment officer for Anemoy, Centrifuge’s affiliated on-chain asset management firm.

The appointment comes as tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is drawing new attention from the traditional finance world. Global banks, asset managers are increasingly explore using blockchain rails for moving and recording ownership of assets like bonds, funds and equities. They do so pursuing operational efficiencies, broader distribution and around-the-clock, programmable transactions.

It's potentially a huge opportunity. The tokenized RWA market, now standing at $25 billion and more than doubling in a year, is projected to grow to multiple trillions of dollars over the next decade, according to reports by McKinsey, 21Shares, Ripple and BCG.

Centrifuge is building regulated structures for these products, positioning itself as a bridge between blockchain rails and financial institutions seeking exposure to digital versions of familiar investment products. It has over $760 million of total value locked on the platform, DefiLlama data shows, including the $400 million tokenized U.S. Treasury fund issued with Anemoy. The protocol recently expanded products to Avalanche (AVAX) and Solana SOL$132.88, created an on-chain version of the S&P 500 Index and launched a tokenized fund of collateralized loan obligations with asset manager Janus Henderson.

Before joining Centrifuge, Blumberg spent over two decades in traditional capital markets at Goldman Sachs, Invesco and BlackRock, helping develop the ETF market into a major part of global asset management. In an interview with CoinDesk, he draw parallels between tokenization and the early days of ETFs and how it disrupted the mutual funds market.

"There's a big part of the world which was never really the focus of traditional finance: the Global South, for example, or all those countries which have problems with high inflation, or with currencies which are not really easy to use in other jurisdictions," Blumberg explained. "Now suddenly they get a whole new ecosystem in the DeFi [decentralized finance] world, which lets all of them participate [and] give them the same quality of products as anybody else."

"Tokenized real world assets are really democratizing the financial ecosystem," he added.

Blumberg will focus on helping bring traditional finance firms on-chain and simultaneously improve operations and tokenized products for institutional use.

"There's a big distribution opportunity for TradFi," he said. "From a technology point of view, if you are too late, you might miss the train."

Read more: Credit Agricole's Asset Servicing Unit Backs Tokenized SME Exchange in Europe