Hey Goon Fam –
Welcome to our first public update! We’ll be doing a regular update for the goons, the ecosystem, and the community so that you all have a regular touchpoint and visibility into what’s going on at Plume.
Overview
Given it’s our first public update, let me start with some background on what we’re doing and why we started Plume.
We started Plume with a very simple idea – life is better onchain. Simple to use, permissionless, 24x7, global, and composable. But crypto is still small and we are limited by what we can do onchain. We needed to grow crypto.
Real world assets are an enormous category. Crypto today is a $3T asset class. Every sub sector of RWAs is tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars. Blackrock alone has $12T assets under management. A single company is 4x larger than the entirety of the crypto market. While verticals are often smaller than the horizontal market, in this case it’s much bigger.
RWAs – aka STOs, etc – have been around forever. Despite all the articles, talking heads, etc. unfortunately they’ve never taken off. In fact, the institutions coming into crypto have usually marked the top for each cycle.
But this time it felt different. When we started Plume, the BTC Spot ETF was around the corner, we had our first pro crypto presidential candidate, and stablecoin adoption was accelerating. What we also noticed was that unlike most people in RWAs, we were different.
The vast majority of RWA people that we met at the time were trad people doing trad things on the blockchain. While this isn’t inherently an issue, the real problem was that this setup led to people building trad products. And unfortunately there are no trad people onchain – it’s all crypto natives. And crypto people don’t want trad products, they want crypto native experiences. They want to swap, stake, lend, borrow, etc.
And so we approached RWAs from a crypto native perspective. We wanted to bring RWAs onchain but make them useful for crypto natives. While most were trying to bring the blockchain to the real world, we were trying to bring the real world to crypto.
And there’s historical precedence here. Arguably the best product in crypto from both an adoption and onboarding perspective is an RWA – the stablecoin.
The stablecoin is a great example of an RWA because most people forget it’s an RWA. And that’s because the stablecoin is just crypto. The stablecoin started out solving crypto problems (i.e, DeFi, etc). Only over time as it gained popularity did new use cases emerge – people around the world could use it to hold the US Dollar. Institutions could do cross border payments, remittances, etc. But it started off serving crypto.
And a key part of this growth is because the stablecoin isn’t what people think of today as an RWA. The stablecoin looks and feels like crypto. It’s open and permissionless. You can swap into it anywhere, it’s composable across crypto, etc. And that’s how RWAs should be. When RWAs are done right, they cease to be RWAs – they just become crypto.
The institutions are coming. But not in the way that people think they are. While people think institutional capital is here, it’s not true. Institutional supply is here, not demand. Meaning we have a new set of people trying to sell us their assets, not new people trying to buy. Larry Fink isn’t coming to save us, he’s coming to dump on us.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What this does is it increases the types of products that we can interact with onchain. We’re not RWA maxis. We are simply following existing onchain behavior. When the world is up, people want to hold tokens. But when the world is down, people rotate into RWAs. But today that’s only the stablecoin. We are simply increasing the surface area of what onchain people can do.
What we’re doing at Plume is turning the real world into tokens. Plume is an ecosystem, a network, and a community focused on making it easy to interact with the real world onchain. The token is a superior format. People like tokens. They like to hold them, stake them, spend, lend, borrow, etc. And so we want to make it as easy as it is today to swap into a camel farm as it is to swap into Fartcoin.
And this is how we grow crypto. When the world is tokens, the line between “real world assets” and crypto native assets blur. They’re just all tokens. And we can start to mix and match these things to create a package that is a net new thing. And these net new things are how we get new people to come onchain.
Plume combines software, an EVM chain, liquidity, community, and an ecosystem designed specifically for this. Ecosystems each have their own style and flavor, whether it’s set explicitly or implicitly. Some chains are known for memes. Some have a more web2 feel to it. We’ve just intentionally built this from the start to serve this use case.
Now enough blabbing from me. Onto the update!
Q1 2025 Overview
A ton has happened last quarter. Bitcoin hit all time highs, we elected a new president, saw the first presidential memecoins, and then crypto dumped and has been struggling ever since. In contrast, RWAs and tokenization had an amazing quarter. We crossed $20B in tokenized assets onchain, Blackrock’s quarterly update includes an entire section on tokenization, Vlad of Robinhood has been relentlessly talking about tokenization, even the Bank of International Settlements has confirmed the benefits of tokenization. And RWA tokens have been one of the best performing sectors in crypto (was positive before Trump’s tariff talk began).
We’ve been working across 3 main dimensions the last quarter – growth, brand, and product. More below on each, but here are some quick highlights:
- We launched $PLUME which now trades across 40+ exchanges
- $PLUME was included in Grayscale’s Assets Under Consideration list
- Plume’s flagship RWA vault product Nest hit $50M+ in TVL during our pre-deposit campaign
- Partnered with Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s largest exchange to tokenize & distribute RWAs
- Announced partnership with Paypal’s PYUSD, Goldfinch Prime (products from Apollo/Ares/KKR/Golub), Superstate’s first chain expansion, and more
- Unveiled Skylink with LayerZero, our RWA yield streaming product to distribute RWA yields to 17 other chains including Solana, Injective, and others
- Published RWA 2.0, our narrative piece detailing how we think about Plume & RWAs
We’re also excited to welcome a few new investors to the Plume family. We announced YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) investment in Plume, LayerZero’s lzCatalyst (their first investment), and Apollo Global’s (the 3rd largest private equity firm in the world) strategic investment. We’re grateful for their support & partnership.
Growth – BD & Partnerships
We look at growth & partnerships at Plume across a few categories. This can be new protocols that we are working with, distribution partners, infrastructure, and more. We added over 65+ new partnerships spanning those categories.
Some highlights from each:
- Institutions & Asset issuers
- Paypal’s PYUSD deploying into our PayFi vault
- Goldfinch Prime featuring products from Apollo, Ares, KKR, Golub
- Superstate deploying their treasury bill and carry fund product
- Protocols
- Fractit for rental car fleets
- Music for IP rights
- Backed for onchain equities
- Spice Protocol supply chain liquidity and data layer
- 0G Labs for AI agents
- Suranceplus for reinsurance
- Solera Plume native lending market utilizing Morpho’s technology
- Distribution
- Mocaverse to integrate Plume to distribute our products to their network over hundreds of companies and 700M+ users
- Mercado Bitcoin is Brazil’s largest exchange and Plume is their primary partner for not only tokenizing their assets but distributing assets on Plume to their users
- Infrastructure
We’re grateful and incredibly excited to work with these great projects and build future of crypto together.
Brand – Marketing & Community
A big part of building a chain is to build awareness. That comes in the form of top down mentions like media as well as bottoms up work of building & engaging a community.
We had a great quarter finally getting recognized by multiple publications including The Block, Grayscale, and others. We had over 1M views on our content and had a bunch of earned media. Some of the highlights below:
- Grayscale included Plume in their Assets Under Consideration
- Plume was quoted in The Block’s article on tokenized equities
- Admitted into Superstate’s RWA Industry Council
- Featured in Blockmedia, a leading Korean crypto publication
- Plume in depth profile in ODaily, a leading Chinese crypto publication
- The Rollup Livestream with the founders of Frax, Wormhole, and Plume
- Binance AMA & a Binance Research Industry Report
- One of our ecosystem partners GAIB included us in their RWAfi Industry Report
- Keyrock and Centrifuge included us in their 2025 Tokenization report
We were also fortunate enough to be able to participate in several industry events all over the world to evangelize our story and meet other industry leaders in RWAs. A few great ones that came to mind:
- Ernst & Young’s Global Blockchain Summit - speaking about Ethereum
- Centrifuge’s RWA Summit - on a panel with Ostium, Chainlink, and Keyrock on tokenization
- Blockworks Digital Asset Summit - hosted events with Mercado Bitcoin, Galaxy, Serafund, and others
- Web3 Festival - great event for capital providers in Asia, hosted numerous events
- Bybit’s CCCC - invited to Bybit’s exclusive event for the top crypto content creators
- ETH Denver - spoke & hosted several events including speaking on the main stage
This has also been the first quarter where we hosted our own industry event during ETH Denver, Plume Denver. We hosted a half day event with over 25 speakers and 30 sponsors including from leading crypto projects like Maple, Midas, M^0, Conduit, Injective and also TradFi folks from Franklin Templeton, Ernst & Young, Brevan Howard, Paxos, and more.
We had a great venue budgeted for 200 people, but once word was out we had over 2000+ signups and over 600+ show up leading to a huge line and a bit of overcrowding but ultimately great conversations with those pushing RWAs forward. It was a great success and an important moment for our brand and our partners as easily one of the most well attended events during all of ETH Denver. Grateful to the community, our partners & friends who showed up to help make the day a huge success. There are a ton of pics and videos online, but we did a short recap video here if you want to check it out.
One of the things that took off in this last quarter was the use of Kaito. While imperfect, we use Kaito to get a relative sense of where we are. You can see from the below charts that in the last 3 months, we’ve dramatically increased our mindshare within the RWA category, now recognized as one of the top 5 RWA projects. Now the job is to not only maintain that, but continue to grow it.
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We’ve also been able to continually grow the community both in size & depth. In our Discord server since TGE we’ve seen a steady increase with absolute number of messages being sent as well as a consistent rise in number of message per user. Not only are we seeing increased activity, the fervor continues to spread with one of the goons painting their face with Plume’s logo and another getting their second Plume tattoo!
Product – Platform & Mainnet
The focus for product & engineering has been both getting our upcoming mainnet out as well as building the future of Plume. We performed a successful airdrop, built up our mainnet including our upcoming stablecoin, validator tooling, $PLUME utility, as well as designing & building the future of RWAs, PlumeOS.
We integrated several partners into our chain including Anchorage, Fireblocks, LayerZero, etc in order to give us enterprise grade custody solutions and cross-chain compatibility. We can’t build the future of crypto alone and are grateful to work with category defining products to support usage from retail all the way to the largest institutions.
And security matters. We’ve gone through multiple cycles and phases of audits from a variety of folks in order to ensure the highest level of security for our users. We partnered with all of these firms below to audit, test, and battle proof our ecosystem and prepare for prime time.
In tandem with the chain itself, we have been busy building several products. Arc is our tokenization engine, Nexus is our real world oracle solution, and then we also built Nest as a front end to distribute products that are tokenized through Arc.
We’ll talk more about each of these products in more depth in the upcoming weeks, but here is a quick teaser on one of our core products, Nest. Nest makes it easy for users to easily swap into real world assets in a crypto native fashion – deposit stables, receive RWA tokens. Nest will have several vaults on mainnet, but here are a few as an example:
- nTBILL - earns 5.5% APY and is backed by various treasury products like Anemoy (Centrifuge), M^0, Mountain Protocol, and more
- nRWA - earns an estimated 11% APY and is backed by a mixture of products from treasuries, ETFs, private credit, and more. In it is Blackstone, Carlyle, PIMCO ETFs, private credit through OpenTrade, Mansa, Kasu, Credbull, alternative assets through Mineral Vault (oil wells), and treasuries through M^0 and Mountain
- nELIXIR - earns 3.12% APY and is backed by Elixir’s deUSD product, Blackrock’s BUIDL product, and Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE product
Each of these vaults is underwritten & audited by Cicada Partners, a team that does onchain credit & risk. The individual assets within each vault are also all audited by Cicada with diligence scorecards like this published on the vault page.
We’ve also built & developed what we’re calling the Plume Portal, a web application that both acts as a directory as well as a guide for navigating the Plume ecosystem. The portal will be the centerpoint for the end user for everything from automated yield strategies (Optimizer), bridging, staking, quests, directory, leaderboard, daily activities, and more. This Portal will be dynamically updated to highlight different exciting parts of the ecosystem in realtime so users can easily navigate the entirety of the Plume ecosystem.
Lastly one of our product announcements this quarter was centered around our partnership with LayerZero. We built & announced Skylink, our RWA yield streaming product that makes it easy to stream RWA yields to multiple other ecosystems including Solana, Injective, and others.
Our orientation around Plume is simple – we built Plume to grow crypto. And while we are Plume maxis, we want to make it easy for RWAs to flow to wherever they want to go. And so that’s why we built this feature to partner with other ecosystems vs. compete with them and have seen great reception for it. We currently are partnered with 17 chains publicly and have a slew of others that we have not announced yet.
Next Up
Mainnet is around the corner. There is much to talk about for mainnet including season 2 of the $PLUME airdrop campaign, various quests/ecosystem projects, staking, validators, pUSD, PlumeOS and so much more. We’ll go into these in way more depth in a dedicated post coming soon.
For now, know that the Plume mainnet is inbound. Stay tuned and as always – much love to the Pluminati. Goons in control. Plume season loading!!