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

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

After two decades in ETFs at firms like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, Jürgen Blumberg has joined Centrifuge and Anemoy to help bring fund management onchain. In this interview, he explains why tokenized funds are starting with distribution, where today’s wrappers fall short, and how real transformation will come from rebuilding issuance, pricing, and liquidity at the protocol layer..

AuthorAuthor

Louis Tellier & Maximilian Vargas
August 07, 2025

It’s peak summertime, and for the first time in months, the industry is catching its breath.

Sure, the new SEC under Paul Atkins is still active (this week clarifying that liquid staking doesn’t count as a securities sale). But beyond that, things have quieted down a little bit.

We take this moment as an opportunity to bring you a special Briefing today. Instead of your usual top stories, today’s Briefing features three insightful conversations we’ve had over the past few days.

Here’s what’s inside:

  • Exclusive: Inside BBVA’s crypto playbook

  • ETF veteran joins tokenization platform Centrifuge 

  • Crédit Agricole backs blockchain startup Lise

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more.

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

  • Crédit Agricole invests in Lise, a DLT platform seeking a Pilot Regime license. It is the third banking institution to invest in the French startup, following BNP Paribas and Bpifrance. Scroll down for our chat with Lise CEO Mark Kepeneghian.💰

  • FedEx, Marex, and Corpay join J.P. Morgan’s blockchain payment network. Marex becomes the first clearing firm to use Kinexys for instant, 24/7 settlements with Brevan Howard Digital. Corpay leverages Kinexys to enable near real-time foreign exchange conversions, expanding trading hours and speeding settlements. The bank also unveiled a real-time supply chain finance solution with Oracle, enabling automated early payments and improved liquidity for global suppliers.🏦

  • White House challenges Basel rules on crypto assets. In a report released last week, the White House takes aim at the Basel Committee’s 1,250% risk weight for tokenized assets on public blockchains, calling it a barrier to meaningful bank participation in the sector. According to Bloomberg, the SEC has already begun updating its accounting rules to treat stablecoins as cash equivalents.🇺🇸

BANKING AND DIGITAL ASSETS

Exclusive: Inside BBVA’s Crypto Playbook

First one: On July 4, BBVA became the first bank in the European Union to launch regulated cryptocurrency trading and custody services for retail customers, offering Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) directly through its mobile banking app. The launch followed the bank’s receipt of its MiCA license on March 25.

  • In-house solution: What sets BBVA apart is not just speed to market, but architecture. The bank has built its own in-house custody and trading infrastructure, a rare move among traditional players, and plans to extend this platform to institutional clients in the coming months. With live operations already in Switzerland, Turkey, and Spain, BBVA is preparing for further expansion across Europe.

Interview: To understand the strategy behind these moves, we spoke with Francisco Maroto, BBVA’s Head of Digital Assets. He explains why they rejected white-label solutions, their move to integrate crypto natively into the banking experience, and how the bank is now moving into tokenization, Visa-backed settlement, and infrastructure services for other institutions.

________________

On why BBVA chose to build custody and trading infrastructure in-house:

“Initially, we considered white-labeling a third-party custody solution. But after the FTX collapse, it became clear that counterparty risk was a major vulnerability, especially for a bank. So we made the harder choice: we built everything ourselves.

It delayed our time to market, but gave us full control, internal accountability, and the resilience we need to scale.”

On integrating crypto directly into BBVA’s core banking app:

“Our customers were already investing in crypto, just not with us. They were moving funds to external exchanges. We saw an opportunity to meet that demand natively, within the same app they already use for fiat banking. It made strategic sense.

For many banks, offering crypto used to feel too risky, reputationally. But the environment has shifted. MiCA brought clarity. Public understanding has matured. We now see crypto as another asset class, and believe that in 1–2 years, most banks, traditional and digital, will offer it in some form.”

On how BBVA chose its rollout markets:

“We started in Switzerland in 2021 because FINMA had a clear regulatory framework and our Swiss operation is a small private bank, ideal for testing. Once that proved successful, we expanded to Turkey. That was a market-driven decision. Inflation, high crypto adoption, and stablecoin usage made Turkey a natural next step. There, we serve all customer segments, retail, wholesale, institutional, and private banking and already offer more than 14 tokens, soon 30–40.

Spain followed once MiCA became law. Today, the service is live for retail customers in Spain, and we have launched digital banks in Italy and Germany, which will also offer crypto services in the future.”

On BBVA’s tokenization strategy and first use cases:

“Tokenization is still early. Demand is limited, and regulation is still evolving. But we’re positioning now, because we believe real use cases will emerge quickly once clarity improves. We’re focused on three sectors: tokenized money market funds, tokenized real estate, and SME financing.

All of these use cases require onchain settlement. So we’re starting with the tokenization of money. We’ve partnered with Visa to launch a euro-denominated token under MiCA, targeting use cases like delivery-versus-payment in securities, and financing platforms using stablecoins. Initially, these will be ‘walled garden’ deployments with known participants. But why not in the future list them on different exchanges as well.”

On offering BBVA’s infrastructure to other financial institutions:

“Our long-term goal isn’t just to serve BBVA clients. We’re building infrastructure that can support the broader ecosystem. Just like we already offer traditional custody services to other institutions, we plan to do the same with crypto, making our infrastructure available to other banks and regulated players.

This is a new business line for BBVA. We’re treating it with the same standards and controls as any other institutional product. The architecture is in place. Now we’re scaling it.”

TOKENIZATION

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.

________________

Why he left the ETF industry to join Centrifuge:

“When I entered the ETF industry 15 years ago, the product was still early, but the advantages were already clear. ETFs eventually overtook mutual funds by solving problems around fees, performance, and transparency.

Tokenization feels like a similar moment. Back then, if you didn’t get one of the first S&P 500 index licenses, you couldn’t catch up later. That experience taught me that being early matters. I joined Centrifuge because I want to help shape this infrastructure while it is still being built.”

On the current state of tokenization:

“Right now, tokenization is primarily a distribution opportunity. Tokens allow traditional asset managers to reach a growing segment of crypto-native investors. That’s how we grew our first two products, the Treasury and AAA CLO funds, to almost 1.5 billion dollars in assets under management in less than six months.

But structurally, these tokens are still wrappers around conventional fund setups, typically domiciled in the British Virgin Islands. BlackRock did the same with BUIDL. These offshore structures rely on service providers and legal frameworks built for the traditional system.

That legacy setup brings complexity. The fund stack includes custodians, administrators, market makers, exchanges, and data vendors. Even generating basic documents — like KIDs, factsheets, or portfolio composition files — requires coordination across multiple third parties. And all of that is just to keep the fund running.”

What the future will look like:

“The real step change will come when we can create portfolios natively onchain, without first setting up a conventional fund vehicle. That requires regulatory clarity and infrastructure built specifically for blockchain-native issuance and operation.

But once in place, it will allow us to break apart the fund stack into programmable components — issuance, pricing, reporting — and rebuild it in a more modular and automated way. That’s how tokenization will eventually outperform today’s fund structures not just on accessibility, but on efficiency, cost, and product innovation.”

On why liquidity starts with the primary market:

“In ETFs, liquidity depends on creation and redemption. That’s what enables arbitrage and keeps bid-ask spreads tight. The primary market feeds the secondary.

Tokenized funds are very similar. Most can only issue new tokens once per day in the primary market, based on the NAV of the underlying fund. 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.

Long term, we want to replicate the ETF model: a two-tiered structure where multiple participants can mint tokens under equal conditions and offer continuous liquidity. DeFi has market makers, but not yet with institutional scale or regulatory clarity. Our goal is to build infrastructure that supports real-time creation, secondary trading, and price transparency across venues and participants.”

A conversation with Mark Kepeneghian, CEO and Founder of Lise, following the addition of CACEIS, the asset servicing arm of Crédit Agricole, as its third banking shareholder, alongside earlier investors BNP Paribas and Bpifrance, France’s state investment bank.

  1. Bitwise Investment Memo On Project Crypto (Matt Hougan) — Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan unpacks SEC Chair Paul Atkins’ “Project Crypto” speech and highlights three investment areas (Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto super-apps) he believes are best positioned to benefit.

  2. Tokenization: The Unstoppable Wave (InnoWei Teh) — A practical overview of how tokenization solves core inefficiencies in finance — settlement delays, high costs, and limited access — and what institutions must get right on infrastructure, design, and regulation.

  3. Global Stablecoin Regulation Overview (EY) – A visual summary of stablecoin regulations across key jurisdictions.

What do you think of today's briefing?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.

Reply

or to participate.