Centrifuge and Pharos have announced a new collaboration with the goal of enhancing the functioning of institutional assets in blockchain ecosystems. The collaboration, announced on February 17, 2026, involves developing a more powerful distribution framework of tokenized financial instruments, such as the products of the U.S. Treasury and high-rated structured credit.
Addressing the Distribution Bottleneck
The past few years have seen the growing popularity of tokenization, especially in fixed-income markets. Nonetheless, the process of such digital representations is still disaggregated. Lots of tokenized assets are restricted to certain platforms or a group of users, which lowers their chances of attracting wider participation.
Beyond the major financial centres, e.g., the United States and Western Europe, there tend to be regulatory and operational barriers to access to dollar-denominated credit and treasury products. In cases where assets can be available in tokenized form, onboarding processes, custody structure, and compliance can limit adoption. Consequently, tokenized products do not often have active secondary markets or become a part of decentralized financial applications.
The Centrifuge-Pharos partnership specifically aims at this bottleneck. Instead of just issuing tokens, the joint venture is about creating the conditions in which institutional-grade assets can become usable and can be placed in live onchain financial processes.
Combining Tokenization Standards with Layer 1 Infrastructure
Centrifuge is experienced in the institutional tokenization standards and structuring of assets. The platform has been keen on closing the gaps between traditional finance and blockchain networks by allowing real life assets to be digitized to satisfy compliance and governance needs.
Pharos, in its turn, adds a dedicated Layer1 blockchain that is used to support high-throughput financial transactions. Its design is focused on parallel computing and modularity, whereby a number of transactions and processes can execute without congestion. This technical base makes Pharos a distribution and liquidity layer that can handle high institutional volume.
Assets formed by means of Centrifuge can use the network of Pharos and access a broader range of wallets, enterprise frameworks, and execution channels under the partnership. This is a set up that seeks to establish that tokenized treasuries and structured credit instruments are not immediately rendered idle once they are issued, but remain active in decentralized ecosystems.
Leadership Perspectives on Infrastructure Gaps
Both organizations emphasized the role of infrastructure in opening the next stage of onchain finance by executives. As Bhaji Illuminati, the CEO of Centrifuge Labs, pointed out, creating tokens is not the answer to the problem of accessibility and usability. He reported that the alliance is concentrated on the layer of distribution that enables institutional assets to operate in a real financial setting onchain.
This opinion was shared by Wish Wu, the CEO of Pharos, who explained that the biggest roadblock is not investor interest but infrastructure on a system level. He described Pharos as seeking to establish an open and composable architecture in which institutional assets can continuously interact, communicating with decentralized protocols and financial services.
Their remarks highlight a common underpinning that tokenized finance needs to be scaled beyond regulatory compliance or being digital. It needs infrastructure that links issuance, liquidity and execution.
Expanding Access to Dollar-Denominated Products
Among some of the wider goals of the partnership is to enhance access to U.S. dollar-based treasury and credit instruments within the emerging markets. Most investors who are not in the mainstream financial hubs have had challenges with accessing such products. A well-designed blockchain-based distribution would help to eliminate friction and increase reach.
Centrifuge and Pharos can offer a route to institutional assets into new regions by aligning tokenization standards to a high-performance Layer 1 network, considering operational integrity and compliance concerns.
