TradFi Veteran Joins Tokenization Platform Centrifuge as COO: “This Feels Like the Early ETF Days”

Prominent hire: On Monday, Centrifuge announced the appointment of Jürgen Blumberg as Chief Operating Officer. The former COO EMEA of Goldman Sachs’ ETF Accelerator will also serve as Chief Investment Officer at Anemoy, Centrifuge’s onchain-native asset manager.

• Vast ETF experience: Blumberg brings over 15 years of experience in the ETF industry. Before joining Goldman, he held senior roles at Invesco and BlackRock, building out ETF trading infrastructure and scaling capital markets operations across Europe.

Bridging TradFi and DeFi: At Centrifuge and Anemoy, he will work with financial institutions to bring real-world assets onchain and help design tokenized fund structures that meet institutional standards. His appointment comes just two weeks after Centrifuge launched v3 of its protocol, enabling full onchain asset management, from issuance and allocation to lifecycle operations.

Interview: In our conversation, Blumberg explains why tokenization feels like the early ETF days, what needs to change for tokenized funds to scale, and why solving primary issuance is the key to unlocking liquidity.

From TradFi to Tokenization

You’ve just joined Centrifuge as COO and Anemoy as CIO. What motivated your move from Goldman Sachs and why now?

If I look back at my career, it’s always been rooted in trading. I studied business in Munich, then started out working with multi-listed equities, executing arbitrage strategies across different venues. From there, I developed a real passion for ETFs, especially around their capital markets structure.

At BlackRock, I entered the ETF space at a time when these products were still viewed as disruptive challengers to the mutual fund industry. They solved obvious inefficiencies: high fees, lack of transparency, and limited tradability. Passive ETFs offered better performance than most active mutual funds, and their ability to trade intraday gave them a significant advantage. That was what drew me in.

After BlackRock, I joined Source ETFs, which was later acquired by Invesco, and then spent over six years at Goldman Sachs. I started there as Head of Capital Markets for ETFs, later also became Head of Product, and eventually COO for the ETF Accelerator in EMEA, a white-label ETF platform. So I’ve been deeply embedded in both product structuring and market infrastructure for ETFs.

The Case for Fund Tokenization

And now you see tokenization as a similarly transformative shift?

Yes, I see a strong analogy. When I entered the ETF space 15 years ago, it was still early, but the structural benefits were already visible. That’s how tokenization feels to me now.

Right now, we’re at a phase where the token primarily serves as a distribution tool. For traditional asset managers, it’s a way to tap into a growing onchain investor base, people who live natively in crypto environments and expect assets to be blockchain-native. That’s where tokenized funds come in.

But the long-term vision is much more profound. We want to deconstruct the entire fund value chain and rebuild it onchain. That means 24/7 trading, near-instant settlement, programmable asset management, and reduced reliance on intermediaries like fund administrators, custodians, or data providers. It also means breaking free from fixed trading hours and fragmented pricing mechanisms.

What are some of the fund components you’d want to migrate to tokenization vehicles?

Launching a traditional ETF today requires numerous intermediaries:

• A fund administrator,

• A custodian,

• Stock exchanges or other trading venues,

• Market makers and authorized participants,

• Index and data providers,

And finally: providers for document and data files like PRIIPs KIDs, Annual Reports, Factsheets, and Portfolio Composition Files (PCFs).

All of this infrastructure is expensive, and in many ways, outdated. Over time, we want to bring these individual functions — pricing, trading, reporting, issuance — directly onto the blockchain. That way, you can automate and program many of them, and reduce cost and operational drag.

Some components, like custody, will likely be replaced later due to the regulatory complexity and risk involved. But other parts, such as data publication and primary issuance mechanics, are ripe for innovation much sooner.

Let’s return to the current use case: distribution. Why is that compelling now?

There’s a growing pool of investors, from DAOs to crypto-native treasuries and professional users, with meaningful assets onchain. These users aren’t interested in sending wires or downloading PDFs. They want wallet-native financial products that integrate seamlessly with DeFi infrastructure, and that’s what tokens enable.

That’s why we launched two tokenized funds this year: the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund (JTRSY) and the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Fund (JAAA). Combined, they’ve attracted around $1.5 billion in AUM. We’re seeing strong momentum, especially among onchain investors who want transparent, secure access to yield-generating traditional assets.

So yes, the token starts as a gateway to a new client base. But it doesn’t stop there.

Still, today’s tokenized funds are mostly wrappers around traditional vehicles, right?

That’s true, and it’s a limitation. Today, if you want to tokenize a fund that holds real-world assets like U.S. Treasuries, you need to domicile it in a jurisdiction that supports this legally and operationally. That’s why we, like BlackRock, used a British Virgin Islands (BVI) structure.

But BVI isn’t necessarily optimized for large-scale, publicly distributed fund products. Service providers are expensive, the cost stack is inefficient, and operational complexity is higher than it needs to be. So what happens is:

1. You incur the cost of the fund structure itself.

2. Then you layer tokenization on top, which brings its own overhead.

In the end, that double cost layer impacts performance and limits how competitive you can be, especially compared to ETFs or mutual funds.

So the breakthrough would be portfolios issued natively onchain?

Exactly. The real inflection point will come when you can issue tokenized portfolios without first setting up a traditional fund. That requires regulatory evolution because most jurisdictions today still mandate that a fund exists before you can tokenize its shares.

But our belief is: once you get natively digital securities approved, where the entire construct is built and regulated onchain, you can strip away much of the current complexity. And that’s when the true cost advantage of tokenization kicks in.

Primary Market Liquidity and Outlook

Let’s talk liquidity. Most people focus on the secondary market. But you’ve emphasized primary market mechanics. Why?

In ETFs, liquidity depends on the ability to create and redeem shares in the primary market once a day — that’s what enables arbitrage — which in turn keeps bid-ask spreads in the secondary market tight. The primary market feeds the secondary, which works best in an ecosystem where many liquidity providers compete for investor flow.

In tokenization, the ecosystem is very similar. Most funds today can only issue new tokens once a day, when the traditional fund calculates its Net Asset Value (NAV). The big difference is that the mechanics allow for instant mint and redeem. We are working on a function where traditional secondary market mechanics implement a liquidity layer to the primary market as well, a gamechanger in our view.

For instance, if you tokenize something like an S&P 500 fund, you can still build pricing models while the U.S. market is open. But what about evenings, weekends, or during Asian hours? We want to enable continuous or intraday token creation, even during off-hours and that requires new models for real-time pricing..

So your vision includes a two-tiered market structure, like ETFs?

Yes. We believe tokenized funds should adopt the capital markets logic of ETFs, with a robust primary issuance process and an open, competitive secondary market.

That means creating infrastructure where multiple market participants can mint tokens under standardized conditions and offer continuous liquidity. DeFi already has market makers, but not at the same institutional scale or with the same regulatory clarity.

Ultimately, we need to build a system where the same token can be created by different players, traded across venues, and priced in real-time — all while maintaining transparency and investor protections.

Shifting to your role at Centrifuge. What will your focus be day-to-day?

I’ll be wearing two hats. First, I’ll use my relationships across traditional finance, with asset managers, private banks, and institutional allocators, to help them understand the opportunity in tokenization. That includes guiding them through how to issue products onchain and helping them choose between working with us as a technology provider or a full-service partner.

Second, I’ll be working on product design. That includes applying ETF structuring know-how to the tokenized space, from creation/redemption logic to liquidity mechanisms, reporting infrastructure, and index replication. A lot of lessons from the ETF world can be adapted to the next generation of digital assets.

Final question: If ETFs are in their mature phase, where are tokenized funds today?

Still early. Almost everything today is a hybrid: a traditional fund wrapped into a token. That adds cost, slows down issuance, and limits real-time composability.

But again, the parallels to ETFs are striking. When ETFs started, they were niche. But the teams that got involved early, the ones who shaped the infrastructure, were the ones who benefited most. I believe we’re at a similar inflection point now. Those who engage early in tokenized fund infrastructure will be the ones defining the future of asset management.