If you’ve ever been stuck in a vault redemption queue waiting for your assets to settle, you know the frustration. Your capital is locked, the market is moving, and you’re just… sitting there. Centrifuge, alongside co-authors Cain O’Sullivan and Jeroen Offerijns, has finalized a new Ethereum standard designed to fix exactly that problem.

ERC-8161, which was created on February 12, 2025, and has now achieved Final status on the Ethereum EIPs site, extends the existing ERC-7540 standard to allow pending deposit and redeem requests in tokenized vaults to be transferred to another address before settlement occurs. In English: if you’re waiting in line to get your money out of a vault, you can now hand your spot in line to someone else.

How ERC-8161 actually works

To understand why this matters, you need to understand the problem it solves. Tokenized real-world assets, things like real estate bridge loans and treasury bills brought onchain, don’t settle instantly. There are offchain processes involved, legal checks, valuation updates, and other bureaucratic realities that mean your redemption request might sit in a pending state for hours or even days.

ERC-7540, which was finalized in 2024, introduced the concept of splitting vault operations into separate request and claim steps. You submit a request to redeem, and then later you claim the proceeds once everything settles.

ERC-8161 builds on that foundation by making the pending request itself transferable. The standard transfers pending (not yet claimable) balances for specific request IDs, and it supports independent interfaces for both deposit and redeem operations. It requires ERC-165 and ERC-7540 for implementation, so it’s designed to slot cleanly into the existing vault architecture.

Why secondary markets for redemption queues matter

ERC-8161 enables the creation of secondary markets for redemption queues. A user who needs immediate liquidity can transfer their pending redemption claim to a counterparty willing to wait, likely at a small discount. The buyer picks up a position that will settle at full value. The seller gets their capital back faster.

For protocol integrators and account managers, ERC-8161 simplifies restructuring operations by allowing pending positions to be delegated to new addresses or operators. If a fund needs to move positions between wallets for governance or operational reasons, they no longer have to cancel and resubmit requests.

Centrifuge’s track record with async vault design

Centrifuge isn’t new to this problem space. The protocol’s Tinlake platform, which has been operational since November 2020, introduced epoch-based request queuing specifically designed for illiquid real-world assets, including real estate bridge loans. That early architecture handled the async nature of RWA settlement by batching requests into epochs, processing them in bulk rather than trying to force instant settlement on inherently slow assets.

The progression from Tinlake’s epoch-based model to ERC-7540’s request-claim split to ERC-8161’s transferable pending positions represents a logical evolution, with Centrifuge’s fingerprints on much of that progression.