Author: Zen, PANews
Real-world assets (RWA) are becoming a focal point in the market as an important bridge connecting traditional finance and cryptocurrency. However, the current RWA market still faces many challenges: inefficiency, high costs, and a lack of smooth connection between the traditional financial system and the on-chain ecosystem, with bottlenecks in further development urgently needing to be overcome.
To address this issue, a fully integrated and modular chain focused on RWAfi, Plume, was born. As the first truly crypto-native RWA public chain, Plume is committed to providing a more efficient, transparent, and convenient solution to create a dynamic, liquid, and composable scheme, redefining finance for the RW market to make it as versatile as native crypto assets.
Financing in the millions, deploying assets exceeding one billion.
After nearly a year of rapid development, Plume Network has been recognized by the community, institutions, emerging banks, and crypto-native protocols (such as lending protocols, perpetual contract DEX, AMM, etc.) as the best solution for RWAfi. Currently, over 180 projects have been built on Plume, with a total deployed asset exceeding $1 billion, and several hundred million assets are about to go on-chain. During a two-month testing activity, Plume also achieved significant results: the number of active wallets exceeded 3.75 million, and the on-chain transaction volume exceeded 270 million, fully demonstrating the activity of the ecosystem and user participation enthusiasm.
In November, Plume held a pre-storage event with an initial target of $5 million, which was quickly filled within 70 seconds, surpassing expectations. In response to the community's enormous demand, Plume promptly raised the cap to $30 million, ultimately exceeding its goal in 90 minutes, with oversubscriptions reaching six times the original plan.
Plume's growth potential has also been recognized by several well-known VCs, having cumulatively completed $30 million in financing. In May of this year, Plume announced the completion of a $10 million seed round, led by Haun Ventures, with participating institutions including Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures. This round of financing has laid a solid foundation for Plume's innovation and expansion in the RWAfi field.
On December 18, Plume announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing (total raise of $30M), with investors including Brevan Howard Digital, Haun Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Superscrypt, Hashkey, Laser Digital (under Nomura Group), A Capital, 280 Capital, SV Angel, Reciprocal Ventures, and others.
With the DeFi concept, a blockchain ecosystem designed specifically for RWA.
Although there are now many Layer 1s in the industry, and new projects continuously entering this space intensify competition, Plume recognizes the need to create a blockchain specifically designed for RWA due to the customized demands for permission management, compliance, and liquidity in the series of operations of real-world assets on-chain. It aims to achieve its goals by embedding more customization and functionality at the network level.
Unlike traditional RWA models, Plume aims to create a more efficient and accessible ecosystem for crypto users and traditional financial institutions by leveraging DeFi principles, being the first and only protocol focused on RWAfi. RWAfi represents a new model in the blockchain finance sector, meaning that tokenized RWAs are composable and flexible like native crypto assets. Based on a focus on adopting crypto-native concepts, Plume prioritizes composability, liquidity, permissionlessness, and interoperability from the perspective of building what crypto users truly need, designing its products and business around RWAfi.
Plume's modular infrastructure is specifically designed to support the tokenization and management of real-world assets, with its core components being the tokenization engine Arc, the smart wallet, and the on-chain data highway Nexus. Through the collaborative work of these components, Plume provides a smooth and secure environment for managing multiple asset categories, ensuring compliance and facilitating data integration.
Arc aims to simplify the creation, registration, and management of tokenized RWAs, supporting the tokenization of both physical and digital assets, integrating compliance and data systems to ensure the accuracy, security, and compliance of each asset in the network. As an efficient asset tokenization engine, Arc's structure allows asset issuers to tokenize assets quickly and economically, while automated compliance checks reduce operational complexity and costs.
Plume's smart wallet aims to truly achieve the composability of RWA assets, providing customizable control features for managing digital assets, yield tools, and contract-based interactions. Users can access advanced DeFi functionalities through this smart wallet, such as yield generation and liquidity management, maximizing functionality while ensuring asset security and user control.
Nexus is a foundational component of the Plume architecture, bringing real-world data onto the blockchain to support new use cases such as prediction markets, DeFi applications, and speculative indices. Nexus's data pipeline integrates reliable off-chain data and connects to external sources, delivering real-time, actionable insights directly to the blockchain. By providing accurate, real-time data, users can make informed decisions regarding tokenized assets, enhancing the functionality and accuracy of on-chain financial products.
On core functionalities, Plume emphasizes accelerating the onboarding of real-world assets, liquidity, and regulatory compliance, providing a comprehensive framework that covers liquidity management, built-in anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and data access functions.
Plume leverages its network with compliant partners to achieve compliance verification of tokenized assets, ensuring that transactions comply with relevant regulatory requirements. It simplifies the regulatory compliance process and user registration process by directly integrating compliance into the platform. With integrated compliance features, users can confidently participate in RWAfi transactions, accessing a broader range of opportunities on the Plume network while meeting necessary legal standards.
In terms of critical asset liquidity and market efficiency, Plume promotes liquidity development by collaborating with trusted liquidity providers and deploying yield enhancement mechanisms. Its trading functionality enhances liquidity options for RWA tokens through staking, yield farming, and integration with DeFi protocols, supporting market activity. This allows users to engage in asset trading by reducing slippage and increasing asset stability, capitalizing on liquidity and yield opportunities in the RWA market.
Focusing on real yields, emphasizing service to crypto-native users.
As a special area where blockchain technology intersects with traditional assets, the immense potential of RWA stems from the traditional financial industry. Perhaps based on this, most RWA projects are currently led by individuals with traditional finance (TradFi) backgrounds, who attempt to bring traditional financial products onto the blockchain. However, mainstream users on the blockchain often tend more towards crypto-native rather than traditional financial users, making it difficult for most products to find a market fit.
Plume believes that to truly drive the growth of RWA, it is essential to first focus on the needs of on-chain users. Its RWAfi concept is not only about bringing RWAs on-chain but also about following what users are already doing when integrating traditional and crypto-native worlds, creating products that are easy for them to understand and accept. This is because on-chain users are often the most vibrant and innovative when exploring RWAfi application scenarios, and they have a strong demand for real yields, liquidity, and composability. Essentially, Plume meets these needs in a DeFi-like manner, aligning products with the market. Users are superficially engaging with decentralized financial products, but behind them are real-world assets that can yield actual returns.
As an open, permissionless chain, Plume provides an easy-to-use, compliant, and efficient asset onboarding tool, allowing anyone to freely build and promote development without restrictions. Among the hundreds of protocols that have attracted Plume so far, these assets cover various categories. Currently, the asset categories on Plume can be roughly divided into three categories: collectibles, alternative assets, and financial instruments. Collectibles include wine, artworks, watches, sneakers, and Pokémon cards; alternative assets mainly consist of private credit, real estate, or green energy projects; financial instruments are primarily stocks or corporate bonds.
However, for the vast majority of crypto users, the category of the asset itself is not important; its utility and potential returns are the focus. Therefore, starting from the perspective of benefiting existing on-chain users, Plume also focuses its work on the three most important use cases for crypto users. The first type is yield farming, which revolves around earning yields through depositing funds, circular operations, etc., while achieving efficiency and convenience in operations. The second type is trading, including buying, selling, lending, and traditional spot trading. The third type is speculation, mainly involving derivatives and other similar high-risk investment operations. Plume focuses on assets and application scenarios related to these protocols, making them more aligned with the actual needs of crypto users.
Plume focuses on bringing real yields through yield-bearing assets and attracting real users from existing markets to expand the crypto ecosystem and use cases for RWAs. For instance, Plume has partnered with Projective Finance, an RWA project in the renewable solar energy sector, providing users with opportunities to earn yields from solar assets valued at $100 million. Projective Finance tokenizes "leveraging commercial solar construction loans and later operational assets," which will serve public school district development projects. Plume Network stated, "These projects have 100% contracted income, and the costs are predictable." According to the announcement, both teams believe that the school districts' commitment to these development projects reduces the overall risk of the tokenized projects, with expected yields between 9% and 18%.
In addition to emphasizing the needs of on-chain users, Plume also serves traditional financial institutions and can address major challenges in compliance and liquidity in promoting institutional adoption. This bidirectional service strategy positions it well to achieve innovation and breakthroughs in the RWAfi field, satisfying the different core needs of crypto-native users and traditional financial institutions.
Looking ahead, Plume, which is about to officially launch its mainnet, will technically enhance the scalability and security of its infrastructure and further integrate to improve data privacy; in terms of ecosystem development and RWA expansion, it will undoubtedly add more asset categories, including tokenized luxury goods, stocks, and new forms of commodities; moreover, by expanding cooperation with financial institutions, Plume will make it easier for institutional investors to access tokenized RWAs. This strategic positioning not only promotes the connection between the crypto world and traditional finance but also makes Plume an important bridge for advancing RWAfi development.
