Powered By Base: Centrifuge (CEO, Bhaji Illuminati)

We remain incredibly enthusiastic and deeply convinced that technology will be the backbone of finance. I am Bhaji. I am the CEO of Centrifuge. We are proud to partner with Coinbase for tokenization. And I'm Ben Spiegelman and I lead the institutional initiative for Base.

One of the first big projects we worked on together was bringing the S&P 500 to the Base ecosystem. We've been building the fund natively on-chain since day one. We have S&P's first on-chain data license, and the fund is managed by Janus Henderson, a $ 500 billion asset manager. When you faced the selection process, what stage was Base at in your journey? How did it help you meet the needs of your product, your customers, and your infrastructure providers?

What really sets Base apart is the users, the community, the developers, and the ecosystem— how much everyone wants to work together. So when we brought this new product to Base, it was very collaborative in terms of integrations and how to think about growing and expanding the use and adoption of this product. When we think about large ecosystems, we talk about technology, security, scalability, community and user base, and then, of course, the broader vision of how to bring all assets into Base and Coinbase, combining technology with the distribution potential and scale we know this industry will achieve. When you deal with these institutions, what questions do they ask you? Is it about chain choice?

Is it about the liquidity of the assets? What are the main issues that these institutions, among the largest in the world, bring to your attention regarding their tokenization efforts? Many of the conversations we have are about the current structure, which funds have on-chain demand, and how we're building these products for integration across the on-chain ecosystem. I was hired to institutionalize our work, lead the go-to-market strategy, take the niche product developed just for the on-chain crypto audience and think about how to create greater education and awareness about tokenization, bringing it to the mainstream TradFi circles. We just partnered with New York Life to build their first tokenized product together.

I'm a $900 billion asset manager who's pushing tokenization right now. We don't just focus on selling to the issuer, we aim to help the issuer sell better to their customers. They no longer ask, “ customers. They no longer ask, “ Should we move to tokenization?” They ask themselves, “What should we do with the products once they are tokenized?

” There's no better place for developers and users to grow and support the ecosystem's success. It's been a truly exciting journey, and much of the great work we put in early on is now paying off .