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I’m thrilled to announce our $10M seed round today led by Haun Ventures along with Galaxy Digital, Superscrypt, Reciprocal, Portal Ventures, and others. We’re also fortunate to have great founders & execs from leading projects including Eric Chen & Mirza Uddin of Injective, Anthony Ramirez of Wormhole, Calvin Liu of EigenLayer, Zon of Initia, Andrew Kang of Mechanism, Jeff Feng & Jayendra Jog of Sei, Martin Quensel of Centrifuge, Adam Lawrence of rwa.xyz, Austin King & Tyler Tarsi of Omni, and others join the round to help us build Plume.
We started Plume with a very simple realization – RWAs are here. But it turns out building in RWAs is still far too hard. We saw this firsthand working with various RWA projects – it’s tough to deploy assets onchain. And as we spoke to more protocols we realized that everyone had the same problem – it took too long to get started. It could take several months, up to 1 or even 2+ years to get your assets onchain, all before you could start building. Having to spend so much time setting up infrastructure seemed ludicrous. So we got to work.
RWAs aren’t new. We’ve been told this before – the institutions are coming. And of course then they didn't. So you can feel all of CTs eyes roll when RWAs are mentioned – regulation, compliance, institutional buyers, etc. It’s all so tiresome. But the truth is that RWAs have always been misunderstood. It's a not just about tokenizing assets or bringing TradFi onchain – it’s about the convergence of the real world and web3.
It’s both the classic view – tokenizing sneakers, watches, wine, real estate, private credit, bonds, etc. But also about building net new things that only can live at the intersection of RWA & web3 – for example RWA perps. So it’s not only buying or trading Pokemon cards onchain, but also being able to speculate on those cards without tokenizing & taking out a 50x lev long on it. It’s not only owning a part of an auto shop’s cashflows onchain for yield, but also being able take out a 20x lev long on if you think there will be more car accidents this year. As crypto natives, that’s how we see and think about RWAs – a tool to express ideas about the real world onchain in novel & interesting ways.
In tandem the institutions seem to have woken up to web3. The BTC ETF passed, ETH ETF seems around the corner, Blackrock’s BUIDL fund now has ~$400M onchain, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI has over $275M, etc. Over the last few years the institutions have made an important pivot – they’ve gone from focusing on private blockchains to public blockchains. And that is a very powerful shift. The world’s biggest asset managers are changing their view of crypto from a back office tool that makes fund admin cheaper to instead a 24/7 global network of people, dollars, and use cases. So instead of a new piece of tech, they are viewing crypto as an entirely new audience to tackle and create new revenue opportunities. And while this will take time, the sounding gun has been fired. The institutions are coming.
We’re building the tools, infrastructure & ecosystem for this future. In just a short period of time we’ve been able to attract over 80+ projects to build on Plume and have many more in the works. We have a fully integrated view of RWAs – Plume takes all the features of tokenization and bakes it directly into the chain so we are the easiest place to not only tokenize any asset but also the best place to transact. Projects are coming to Plume because we are a truly purpose built and full stack product for RWAs. We maintain an open & permissionless ecosystem so RWAs can freely grow while providing a full suite of compliance tools so both sides can live and grow together.
Many people ask when RWAs will actually happen. What people miss is that they're already are here. Stablecoins are one of the biggest products in crypto with incredible product market fit. We’ve seen Maker & others bring more and more RWAs onchain. Not to mention that people are already doing what we’re trying to do with Plume. When things are more risk off, people rotate assets into safer, yield bearing assets. And people are already expressing their ideas about the real world onchain in a multitude of ways. Every major world event immediately generates hundreds of alts for people to speculate on. Even Worldcoin is an RWA – not for the orb but for exposure to Sam Altman. Great product follows human behaviors and Plume is here to bring RWAs in all forms onchain.
We wouldn’t be here without this incredible community. Our ecosystem partners, integration partners, and community have all been amazing partners to work with in bringing this vision to light. And of course, there would be no Plume without our team. We are deeply indebted and grateful to every single one of you, and so much more to come!
So what’s next? Incentivized testnet inbound. Follow us on socials to stay tuned!
- Chris Yin, CEO & Co-Founder