I want to explain why I brought forward the proposal to restore Centrifuge DAO governance under CP171.
When CFG holders approved CP171, we were told:
“There is a single value accrual mechanism: CFG.”
“There is no equity business.”
“Tokenholders will retain ultimate control.”
And the structure was described as “reversible by design.”
Those commitments mattered.
The community spent years supplying capital, liquidity, governance and support while the RWA thesis was still uncertain.
Now Centrifuge has become important institutional infrastructure and tokenized finance is accelerating.
At exactly that moment, CP172 proposes a fundamental shift away from CFG-based decentralized governance toward a private corporate shareholder model.
I am not opposed to tokenized equity in principle.
But before making an irreversible change, CFG holders should be allowed to ask:
Have we even finished exploring what CFG itself could become?
CP171 explicitly committed Centrifuge to developing a sustainable value-accrual framework for CFG.
Since then, DeFi has moved incredibly quickly. Protocols such as Hyperliquid and Maple have shown how protocol growth can support powerful token-economic flywheels.
Centrifuge could explore its own model:
protocol revenue → CFG buybacks
fees → CFG burns
staking → economic participation
protocol growth → stronger CFG demand
The right model may be completely different.
But the community should decide.
Centrifuge is only now reaching the scale where genuinely powerful CFG economics may become possible.
Why abandon that possibility just as the economic engine is finally arriving?
There is also a capital-formation question that deserves proper community discussion.
One of the arguments for CP172 is that a corporate equity structure could make it easier to raise capital from investors. But finance itself is rapidly moving onchain, and an increasing amount of capital backing the next generation of protocols comes from crypto-native funds, treasuries and investors that already understand token-based networks.
With the right economics — sustainable revenues, buybacks, staking, utility and genuine value accrual to CFG — Centrifuge may be able to finance far more of its future growth through its own ecosystem and aligned onchain capital rather than becoming dependent on traditional outside equity.
Perhaps outside equity will still be valuable. Perhaps it will not.
But that is exactly the kind of strategic choice the community should be allowed to examine and debate before we permanently change the structure.
We should first ask whether Centrifuge can use the open financial system it helped pioneer to finance its next stage of growth.
At the same time, global capital is moving onchain.
Institutions are tokenizing funds, credit and securities. Stablecoins are becoming core financial infrastructure. A new generation is building AI agents, autonomous markets and financial applications around open, composable protocols.
If capital is moving onchain while Centrifuge moves away from token-based community governance, we risk moving structurally in the opposite direction to the ecosystem we helped pioneer.
And this is about something even more important than token economics:
Centrifuge’s identity and credibility inside the new open-finance industry we helped pioneer.
That reputation took years to build.
The next generation of builders is even more crypto-native. They will choose infrastructure based not only on technology and institutional relationships, but on whether they trust protocols to remain open, neutral and aligned with the ecosystem they are building in.
A fundamental shift from decentralized community stewardship toward a private corporate structure, without a deep community mandate, could change how future builders and users perceive Centrifuge for years.
Trust takes years to build and moments to lose.
Centrifuge itself framed the meeting of traditional finance and DeFi as “Suits vs Hoodies.”
The goal should be to bring the Suits onchain without losing the Hoodies, the open architecture or the community stewardship that made Centrifuge credible in the first place.
That is why CP171’s safeguard matters.
CFG holders were told they retained ultimate control and that the structure was reversible.
Before fundamentally changing Centrifuge’s identity and the role of CFG, the community should have the opportunity to decide whether DAO governance should be restored and whether a stronger decentralized economic model around CFG should be pursued instead.
This is not about automatically rejecting CP172.
It is about choosing, deliberately and transparently, what kind of protocol Centrifuge wants to be.
Centrifuge helped pioneer open finance. We should not abandon that identity just as open finance is finally becoming mainstream.
RFC — Reinstate Centrifuge DAO Governance Under CP171:
GitHub: