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As DeFi continues to expand its horizons, Polkadot and its canary network Kusama have experienced no shortage of interest from protocols and platforms seeking to leverage its embedded interoperability.
Among them, Centrifuge’s Altair DeFi platform aims to bridge the Polkadot, Kusama, and Ethereum ecosystems, enabling users to access DeFi liquidity as and when needed seamlessly.
Built using Substrate and with nearly the same codebase as the Centrifuge Chain, Altair serves as an experimental platform for users who want to test the limits of asset financing. With Altair, users can tokenize and finance their most experimental assets, from works of art in NFT form to undiscovered assets.
Altair participated in the fourth Kusama parachain auction in June 2021, raising more than 6,000 KSM from its crowdloan, underlining the support and backing the project has received from the community. The team plans to compete again in Kusama’s upcoming parachain slot auctions, starting September 2021.
Using Altair, Centrifuge is bringing its world-leading infrastructure for funding real-world assets (RWA) to the Centrifuge Chain. Altair will serve as the testnet for experimenting with new features before they're available for users and deployed on the Centrifuge Chain.
When Centrifuge is fully live on Polkadot, Kusama will be used for minting NFTs, financing undiscovered assets, and other innovative ideas dreamed up by the Kusama community. In the future, Altair’s ingrained interoperability can support more projects across Polkadot and Ethereum, all while using Kusama to deliver greater access to DeFi liquidity.
Kusama is an experimental ecosystem that exists as its own network. A groundbreaking blockchain platform, Kusama offers business teams the opportunity to test and scale their platform versions and applications before being released on a Polkadot parachain. Due to Altair's target audience being risk-takers and innovators, a Kusama integration will enable rapid and inclusive development for Altair.
Altair allows anyone to tokenize their assets and use them as collateral to get financing through Tinlake, Centrifuge’s asset-backed lending platform. As collateral for loans, users provide their own non-fungible assets, and Altair connects the DeFi ecosystem on Kusama and facilitates borrowing from other protocols.
The Altair ecosystem, built by Centrifuge, has been owned and governed by the Centrifuge community from day one of launch. Since its founding in 2017, Centrifuge has developed a decentralized asset financing protocol designed to unlock economic opportunity by connecting lenders and borrowers while eschewing the intermediaries and inefficiencies of brick and mortar financial services.
Centrifuge uses NFTs to represent real-world assets, such as a mortgage or invoice, to be used as collateral in Tinlake. As a result of this process, traditional finance services can access DeFi liquidity and support a wide range of real-world use cases. As the first and the largest real-world asset (RWA) platform for DeFi, Centrifuge is built on Polkadot to ensure low fees and speed, helping the platform the highest TVL in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Using Centrifuge's privacy-enabled NFTs, certain asset attributes remain private on the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. By extension, the Centrifuge Chain - a public, decentralized ledger - tracks ownership. The P2P protocol is leveraged to create, exchange, and verify asset data for private, off-chain data exchange, allowing the platform to bridge the value from real-world assets (RWA) to DeFi. The platform is already integrated with Maker and features a bridge to Ethereum, ensuring a continuous flow of liquidity.
Since its inception, Centrifuge has garnered backing from prominent investors and VC firms, including Atlantic, Blueyard, Crane Venture Partners, Fabric Ventures, Fenbushi, Fintech Collective, Galaxy, HashCIB, Inflection, IOSG, Julien Bouteloup, Mariano Conti, Moonwhale, Mosaic, Rockaway, Semantic, Stani Kulechov, and TRGC. The platform successfully raised $8 million during its seed round in 2018 and received an additional $4.3 million from its SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) in 2020.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.