Article reproduced from: Zen
Author: Zen, PANews
Real-world assets (RWA) are gradually becoming the focus of market attention as an important bridge connecting traditional finance and cryptocurrencies. However, the current RWA market still faces many challenges: inefficiency, high costs, and the lack of smooth connection between the traditional financial system and the on-chain ecology, with bottlenecks in further development needing to be overcome.
To address this issue, a fully integrated and modular chain focused on RWAfi, Plume, was created. As the first true RWA public chain serving crypto-native users, Plume is committed to providing a more efficient, transparent, and convenient solution for creating a dynamic, liquid, and composable market, redefining finance for the RW market to make it as multifunctional as native crypto assets.
Raised tens of millions, deployed assets exceed one billion.
After nearly a year of rapid development, Plume Network has been recognized by communities, institutions, emerging banks, and crypto-native protocols (such as lending protocols, perpetual contract DEXs, AMMs, etc.) as the best solution for RWAfi. Currently, more than 180 projects have been built on Plume, with total deployed assets exceeding $1 billion, and hundreds of millions of assets are about to go on-chain. During a two-month testing period, Plume achieved remarkable results: the number of active wallets exceeded 3.75 million, and the on-chain transaction volume exceeded 270 million, fully demonstrating the ecosystem's vibrancy and user engagement.
In November, Plume held a pre-storing event with an initial target of $5 million, which was quickly filled in 70 seconds, exceeding expectations. In response to the huge demand from the community, Plume immediately raised the cap to $30 million, ultimately exceeding the target in 90 minutes, with oversubscription reaching six times the original plan.
Plume's growth potential has also been recognized by several well-known VCs, having completed a total of $30 million in financing. In May of this year, Plume announced the completion of a $10 million seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures. This round of financing 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.
Leveraging DeFi principles, a blockchain ecosystem specifically designed for RWA.
Although there are already many Layer 1 projects in the industry, and new projects continuously entering this field intensify competition. However, due to the customized needs for permission management, compliance, and liquidity in the series of operations of real-world assets on-chain, Plume realizes the need to create a blockchain specifically designed for RWA and aims to achieve its goal by embedding more customizations and functionalities at the network level.
Unlike traditional RWA models, Plume aims to create a more efficient and easily accessible ecosystem for crypto users and traditional financial institutions by leveraging DeFi principles, being the first and only protocol focused on RWAfi. RWAfi is a new model in the blockchain finance sector, meaning that tokenized RWAs can be composable and flexible like native crypto assets. Based on a focus on adopting crypto-native concepts, Plume prioritizes composability, liquidity, permissionlessness, and interoperability, designing products and business around RWAfi from the perspective of building what crypto users truly need.
Plume's modular infrastructure is 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 operation of these components, Plume provides a smooth and secure environment for managing various asset categories, ensuring compliance, and facilitating data integration.
Arc aims to simplify the creation, registration, and management of tokenized RWA, supporting the tokenization of both physical and digital assets, integrating with 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 speculation indices. Nexus's data pipeline integrates reliable off-chain data and connects with 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.
In terms of core functions, Plume focuses on accelerating the onboarding of real-world assets, liquidity, and regulatory compliance, providing a comprehensive framework covering liquidity management, built-in anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and data access functionalities.
Plume utilizes its network with compliance partners to achieve compliance verification of tokenized assets, ensuring that transactions meet relevant regulatory requirements. By integrating compliance directly into the platform, it simplifies the regulatory compliance process and user registration process. 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 key asset liquidity and market efficiency, Plume promotes liquidity development by partnering with trustworthy liquidity providers and deploying yield enhancement mechanisms. Its trading functionality enhances the liquidity options for RWA tokens through staking, yield farming, and integration with DeFi protocols, supporting market activity. This allows users to participate in asset trading by reducing slippage and improving asset stability, taking advantage of liquidity and yield opportunities in the RWA market.
Focusing on real returns, primarily serving crypto-native users.
As a special field at the intersection of blockchain technology and traditional assets, the enormous potential of RWA stems from the traditional financial industry. Perhaps based on this point, most current RWA projects are led by individuals with backgrounds in traditional finance (TradFi), attempting to bring traditional financial products to the blockchain. However, mainstream users on the blockchain tend to be more crypto-native rather than traditional finance users, making it difficult for most products to find a market fit.
Plume believes that to truly promote RWA growth, it must first focus on the needs of on-chain users. The concept of RWAfi is not only to put RWAs on-chain but also to tailor products that are easy for users to understand and accept by combining traditional and crypto-native worlds, following what users are already doing. This is because on-chain users are typically the most vibrant and innovative when exploring RWAfi application scenarios, with a strong demand for real returns, liquidity, and composability. Essentially, Plume meets these needs in a way similar to DeFi, aligning products with the market. What users encounter on the surface are decentralized financial products, but behind them are real-world assets that can generate actual returns.
As an open and permissionless chain, Plume provides an easy-to-use, compliant, and efficient asset onboarding tool, allowing anyone to freely build and drive development without restrictions. Among the hundreds of protocols that Plume has attracted so far, these assets cover various categories. Currently, Plume's asset categories can broadly be divided into collectibles, alternative assets, and financial instruments. Collectibles include wine, art, 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, based on the starting point of benefiting existing on-chain users, Plume also focuses its work on the three most important use cases for crypto users. The first is yield farming, which centers on earning returns through depositing funds and cyclical operations, while achieving efficiency and convenience in operations. The second is trading, including buying, selling, lending, and traditional spot trading activities. The third 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 delivering real returns through yield-bearing assets and brings real users into the existing market, expanding the use cases of the crypto ecosystem and RWAs. For instance, Plume collaborates with the RWA project Projective Finance in the renewable solar energy sector to provide users with the opportunity to earn returns from solar assets valued at 100 million dollars. Projective Finance tokenizes "leveraging commercial solar construction loans and post-operation assets," which will serve development projects for public school districts. Plume Network states, "These projects have 100% contracted revenue and predictable costs." According to the statement, both teams believe that the school district's commitment to these development projects lowers the overall risk of 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 the main challenges of compliance and liquidity in promoting institutional adoption. This bidirectional service strategy is expected to achieve innovation and breakthroughs in the RWAfi field, meeting different core needs of crypto-native users and traditional financial institutions.
Looking ahead, Plume, which is about to officially launch its mainnet, will technically further enhance the scalability and security of its infrastructure based on existing foundations and further integrate to improve data privacy; in terms of ecological development and RWA extension, it will undoubtedly add more asset categories, including tokenized luxury goods, stocks, and new forms of commodities; furthermore, by expanding cooperation with financial institutions, Plume will make it easier for institutional investors to access tokenized RWA. This strategic positioning not only promotes the connection between the crypto world and traditional finance but also makes Plume an important bridge for promoting RWAfi development.