Altair: tokenize the real-world assets and finance them on the Kusama network

5 min readOct 12, 2021

It's very lucky that Altair winning the 9th parachain slot of Kusama with a winning probability of 35%.

Centrifuge is a platform for SME financing, and connecting DeFi to the real-world, with which have worked with Maker for > 2 years on this topic because they both believe that to make crypto really big they have to find ways to bring this technology to everyone. People who need money for financing everyday things and not just crypto trading.

We host an online AMA with Mike, Capital Markets, and Institutional Capital at Centrifuge. Check all Q&A below.

1. Firstly, would you please introduce yourself and the project of Centrifuge/Altair?

Centrifuge is a platform for SME financing. The platform allows investors to connect with organisations in need of capital, cutting out unnecessary intermediaries, such as banks. The model is radically faster, more cost effective, and more transparent than traditional finance.

Altair is one of the fastest spinning stars in the galaxy, and is also the bridge from Centrifuge to Kusama. You will now be able to tokenize real-world assets and finance them on the Kusama network.

2. What are the rationale or advantages behind your decision to enter this space?

Centrifuge connects DeFi to the real-world. The untapped multi-trillion dollar market of real-world assets (RWA) is now entering DeFi through Centrifuge. Today businesses are using Tinlake to access the liquidity that DeFi offers, while investors finance assets for an attractive, stable yield

This means assets like real estate, farm land, business revenue can be used as collateral, tokenized and people can borrow against it.

Likewise investors can use DeFi to earn yield on stable crypto uncorrelated assets :)

There are so many cool assets and new users in the real world that we are bringing into DeFi. We could make TVL in DeFi 100x and we’re still only a fraction of the real estate market today.

Maker is one of our biggest partners. We’ve been working with them for > 2 years on this topic because we both believe that to make crypto really big we have to find ways to bring this technology to everyone. People who need money for financing everyday things and not just crypto trading. This partnership culminated in Maker accepting Centrifuge real-world asset pools as collateral and extending credit lines of 50M DAI thus far.

We also hope to live with Aave shortly — offering the first real-world asset backed money market product!

3. I’d like to congratulate you on Altair winning the 9th parachain slot of Kusama. You were lucky, with a winning probability of 35%. Could you tell us when the participants of your crowdloan will receive their rewards? And what about the unlocking schedule?

Altair went live with a stripped down runtime. There are currently no balances, external collators, governance, or transfers enabled yet. Now that Altair has been running smoothly — it will begin the process of a series of runtime upgrades gradually rolling out the network after passing code review and acceptance testing. The team is targeting roughly 5 weeks from now for this to be complete.

Crowdloan participants that staked KSM to the Altair crowdloan will need to claim their AIR on-chain once AIR claiming has been enabled in a few weeks from now! If you contributed directly on Kusama or through the Altair website, you will be able to navigate to https://centrifuge.io/altair/crowdloan to claim your AIR once the claim function is enabled on Altair (remember to connect your account with the polkadot.js extension!). If you contributed through an exchange you will get your AIR tokens in your exchange account.

Crowdloan participants will receive 25% of the AIR reward up front and the remaining 75% will be released linearly over the slot ease period.

4. What are your long-term and short-term plans for Altair after winning the slot?

Imagine if you bought a mortgage-backed security and you could look at all of the houses in it? We think that would be wild. In fact, so wild that it belongs on Altair! Welcome to the first functionality coming soon to Altair: NFT Studio. Users will be able to use NFT Studio to view NFTs, mint NFTs, and look at NFT collections. Next up is integrations with other protocols. We think it is essential to collaborate and integrate with other parachains and projects in the Kusama ecosystem.

Longer-term, Altair wants to push the limits of what is possible today in DeFi. Not only will you be able to finance assets on-chain — but you will also be able to view collections of assets in each pool! From real-world assets like houses to NFT collectibles — Altair is bringing this functionality to life after the Launch Process is complete.

5. Could you give an introduction of Tinlake in terms of what it is, how to operate and how to benefit from it?

Tinlake is an open marketplace of real-world asset pools, built to access the massive liquidity on Ethereum. It brings together Asset Originators (who bring in assets to finance) and Investors that seek to utilize the full potential of DeFi.

Asset Originators can responsibly bridge real-world assets into DeFi and access bankless liquidity. Investors can earn attractive yields on different tokenized real-world assets such as invoices, mortgages or streaming royalties

you can check it out here: https://tinlake.centrifuge.io

6. After Altair becomes a parachain, which parachains are you going to cooperate with for interoperability?

We are working hard to ensure the smooth and successful launch of the Altair network. After we launch with the first use cases thereafter we will focus on integrating with other parachains in the Kusama ecosystem. Off the top of my head I think working with a parachain like Karura would be a great synergy!

7. Will Centrifuge participate in the bidding for Polkadot parachain slot? Could you share some information about your plan and strategy?

Yes we intend to launch a polkadot parachain when it becomes available. We will use a similar campaign to our successful Altair campaign. We will harness the power of a strong community to support us, and being a live project already gives us a unique advantage.

We plan to release details around the Centrifuge’s parachain strategy shortly. Please stay tuned for more news here.

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