RWA Tokenization Firm Centrifuge Has a New CEO, Bhaji Illuminati

Centrifuge, a real-world asset (RWA) protocol with over $100 million of total value locked, has a new CEO, Bhaji Illuminati.

The company’s former chief marketing officer, Illuminati is tasked with moving Centrifuge forward as the tokenization of RWAs starts entering the mainstream.

“We can lean on our experience and the lead that we've created over the past eight years and turn that into a very strong position now when the market is ready,” she said, pointing to Blackrock’s BUIDL fund as a “strong indicator of adoption and readiness for asset managers to start using this technology.”

That accelerated the pace of adoption, she said, because when the world’s largest asset manager is willing to take regulatory and reputational risk of tokenizing a fund, “that opens up doors for a lot of other asset managers.”

Between that, the Trump Administration’s new regulatory atmosphere, and MakerDAO’s Spark Tokenization Grand Prix, launched in July to bring $1 billion of tokenized assets onto the platform, “it really is this inflection point, where the number of conversations we're having, the amount of inbound we're getting, the time is now for the real adoption of this technology,” Illuminati said.

“And there's a sense of urgency, not just coming from us, but actually coming from TradFi… where nobody wants to be the last one who's not using blockchain technology as part of their process,” she said.

One of Centriufuge’s clients, fund manager Janus Henderson said they had tokenization and blockchain on their roadmap for a long time but never had that “why now” moment. The Maker Grand Prix gave them “enough reason to justify starting to do that work,” because they wanted to go after that potential allocation, she said.

A New Direction

Illuminati takes over from Lucas Vogelsang, who will be moving to the company’s board to focus on strategy.

Centrifuge is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that aims to bridge real-world assets such as invoices and other receivables to the blockchain, enabling businesses to access liquidity from the DeFi ecosystem. Founded in 2017 by Vogelsang and Martin Quensel, the company has raised over $20 million across multiple rounds and has a total-value locked of almost $120 million, according to Dune Analytics data.

The platform's CFG token, which has a market capitalization of $95 million, is down by more than 30% in the past 30 days to $0.1825 and is down by over 90% from its all-time high of $2.19 in October 2021, according to CoinGecko.

Taking over as CEO, first on a temporary basis and now permanently, was an opportunity for Illuminati, who was not, like most of her fellow CEOs, either a developer with experience in the blockchain space, or someone from the financial world and Wall Street.

“But my background, coming from marketing and the go-to market side, gives me a unique perspective, where I'm able to help communicate more broadly to traditional finance and to the wider capital markets systems that we need to start building these products for,” she said.

Illuminati started at Centrifuge in February 2023 as CMO after years at various companies in the fintech, software and marketplace applications industries. She has been interim CEO since July of 2024.

As for being one of the few women in a leadership role in the crypto industry, Illuminati said it was a topic that hadn’t come up.

“I’ve always viewed being a woman as an advantage rather than a challenge,” she said. “I try to bring a unique perspective to leadership—emphasizing empathy, curiosity, listening, and the ability to make critical decisions quickly with the right information," she said. "I’ve always believed that surrounding myself with people from different backgrounds and experiences leads to better outcomes.”

She hopes being a woman in a leadership role helps other women be attracted to those roles.

“Innovation comes from fresh perspectives and that only happens when you bring together a range of people with different backgrounds to exchange ideas and collaborate,” Illuminati said.