CP172: Exploring Token-to-Equity to Maximize Long-Term CFG Value

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We’ve been accumulating CFG over the last year at Serotonin’s fund 5HTP. We are extremely bullish on the broader tokenization trend which we expect to continue to accelerate over the next decade.

We’re supporting this transition to equity and will be adding to our position over the duration of the CP 172 and converting to equity should the proposal pass. We find the token to be a distraction for a team that is having tremendous success in the market securing the top institutions as clients. Candidly, we find this to be true for a lot of the companies we work with on the services and investment side and think many will follow Centrifuge in the transition back to equity. The infrastructure setup for exchange listings, market makers, etc is expensive from both a time and capital perspective. And our view is that time and capital can be better allocated to growing the business over the short term.

We also think it will be extremely important for Centrifuge to be able to raise more capital and align key institutional partners onto the cap table directly. Executing this strategy will have the best chance to maximize shareholder value over the long term.

Our duration for this investment is a decade long so we are not concerned about the liquidity profile changing in the short term. Our view is that anyone investing in tokenization should maintain a long term time horizon. The transition of the entire financial system to onchain will not happen overnight. We expect the winners of this transition to capture a huge amount of value in the long run and Centrifuge is in a prime position to be one of the key players.

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Thank you everyone for the thoughtful comments and questions. We are monitoring the community discussion in the governance forum, questions submitted to us by email at tokenizedequity@centrifuge.io, and other channels. We will respond cumulatively to questions we receive during the comment period.

I’m curious as to what exact and tangible benefits team can assure for tokenisation in the short term. Bigger projects like Morpho and Maple have doubled down on their token and explicitly been against equity structure and have grown a lot. Projects like SECZ have been on a downtrend since listing. So I have my apprehension as to weather being a equity really helps expansion.

TradFi is moving to Crypto rails and we want to move Crypto to TradFi. At the very least I’m in the camp of this should be optional move. I want my assets on chain and not with some regulator in an island. You may convert part of the token into equity and even tokenised stock both trading at par value and token convertable to tokenised equity through a portal (no time limit) but not a compulsion for anybody. You can route the fees back for token holders in the form of dividends or buy and burn.

Assume 100 cfg tokens (70 tokenised stock + 30 CFG tokens). $10 fees collected for distribution to holders. Pay $7 to 70 tokenised stock holders as dividend, use $3 to buy and burn $CFG from market.

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What? years you say that token will be pushing up and build around them, we trust you and now what? Convert it and shut down on crypto market? This is how it done? I hold coin 5 years for this moment? This no make sense. Think before write news like this. I dont want and i cant hold papers on market, i invest token becouse of that and im lost lot of money now-token dumping- and now they tell i can sell token- this is not solution its a scam

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We bought a cryptocurrency.

I believed in this team so much, i trusted you.

This looks like not a proposal but a decision that has already been made, this feels unfair and not in the interest of your supporters.

I will sell and go away if nothing change (in good ways) clearly for the CFG token.

We don’t want you’re kyc registered cayman island equities.

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Hi, I don’t know if my vote changes anything as I only have a small amount of tokens.

what I want to know is what’s going to happen to token holders like me?. What do we need to do if you decided to go with this proposal? How are we going to convert our tokens into equity?.

waiting on further instructions.

As a long-term investor holding CFG tokens, I strongly oppose CP172.

When I invested many $ of my capital into this project at $0.36, I explicitly chose to buy a crypto asset with utility and liquidity on a public blockchain. I did not sign up to invest in a traditional entity or legacy equity registered in the Cayman Islands.

Forcing crypto investors into a traditional equity structure with zero secondary market liquidity, mandatory trust structures, and endless KYC/AML bureaucracy is a complete violation of trust. This sudden 180-degree pivot is unacceptable and breaches the social contract established in CP171 less than a year ago.

If you want to phase out the token, you should offer a fair, guaranteed buyback option at historical entry prices for those who backed you from the start. Forcing retail to accept massive market losses because the team wants to cater to TradFi institutions is fundamentally wrong.

I will be voting NO on this proposal.

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I am an ordinary CFG holder through OKX. Regarding this Token-to-Equity proposal, I currently have three main concerns.

First, I need clarity on whether ordinary holders like me, who hold CFG through OKX, will ultimately be eligible to participate in the conversion from CFG into Centrifuge equity. I hope the specific jurisdictional and investor eligibility requirements can be disclosed before the governance vote.

Second, if I am unable to convert because of jurisdictional or other eligibility restrictions that are not the result of my own choice, I do not believe the current proposal’s suggestion that holders may “sell CFG on the open market or continue holding it as they do today” is an adequate solution.

If Centrifuge’s primary value-accrual mechanism ultimately moves from CFG to company equity, then for a long-term holder who is willing to convert but is prevented from doing so solely because of eligibility restrictions, being told to either keep holding the old CFG token or sell it on the market effectively means that this group bears the economic cost of the structural transition.

I did not choose to exit Centrifuge, nor did I choose to reject the conversion. If the purpose of this new structure is to allow long-term CFG holders to participate more directly in the future value created by Centrifuge, then existing holders should not lose their long-term economic interest simply because they are unable to qualify as direct equity holders.

Third, I therefore hope the team will seriously consider designing an alternative mechanism for holders in this situation.

Personally, I am not attached to becoming a direct shareholder of Centrifuge. I do not particularly care about voting rights, being listed on the shareholder register, or other corporate governance rights. What matters to me is whether, as a long-term CFG holder, I can continue to participate economically in Centrifuge’s future enterprise value growth, dividends, and eventual exit value.

One possible reference point is the model currently used by OKX for certain tokenized U.S. equities: an eligible entity holds the underlying real shares, while another financial instrument passes through the economic exposure of those shares, including price appreciation, dividends, and other economic benefits, to product holders. Those holders do not need to become direct shareholders of the underlying company.

I understand that Centrifuge may remain a private company after the conversion, which would create obvious challenges around valuation, price discovery, and liquidity. I also do not believe that any such economic-interest product would need to have continuous secondary-market liquidity comparable to a publicly traded stock from day one.

At least for me personally, even if such an economic interest could not be freely traded for a considerable period of time, I would be willing to accept that. Preserving my long-term economic exposure matters more to me than having immediate liquidity.

So I hope the team can address a more fundamental question:

If some existing CFG holders are willing to participate in the conversion but are unable to receive Centrifuge equity because of jurisdictional or eligibility restrictions, would Centrifuge be willing to design an alternative mechanism that preserves the long-term economic interest associated with their existing CFG holdings, rather than leaving them only with the options of continuing to hold the legacy CFG token or selling it on the open market?

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Wait a minute, are you trying to say that you introduced a treasury, added inflation, migrated to Ethereum, added even more inflation of new tokens to fund ‘development’—only to announce in the end that your actual plan is to abandon crypto entirely? Isn’t this a textbook case of exploiting your own community? How else are we supposed to interpret this

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