Earlier today, the team and I joined the Ondo Summit to discuss the future of onchain finance with a group of incredible individuals from large financial institutions, partners, friends, and industry experts. We’ve been closely working with the Ondo team ever since we started Plume and have a tremendous amount of respect for what they've accomplished and the impact they've made on the space. In fact, we were thrilled to finally announce our partnership and collaboration with them just a few weeks ago.
While there were several great announcements, the ones that stood out were Ondo Global Markets (GM) and the introduction of the Ondo Chain, a new Layer 1 blockchain focused on Institutional Grade Finance. Led by former McKinsey partner Ian De Bode, Ondo is building a new blockchain designed to bring TradFi onchain, with an environment developed in partnership with BlackRock, PayPal, Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, Google Cloud, ABN Amro, Aon, and McKinsey.
We're incredibly excited to see the continued innovation in the space. We've always said that one of the key attributes of RWAs is the size of the market. There is simply so much to do here. Crypto is a ~$3 trillion asset class, while BlackRock alone is a $12 trillion asset manager. If we add up all the relevant areas in RWAs it leads to over $3,000 trillion in assets that need to come onchain. If the the existing $3 trillion asset class of crypto needs multiple chains, the RWA world will require at least an order of magnitude more.
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Wall Street 2.0
While on the surface, some might see similarities among the various RWA chains, there's a reason we're excited to continue partnering with Ondo on our path to tokenize the world and support them in this new phase.
If you read Ondo's primer on their chain, you'll notice many familiar concepts we've pioneered for the past year—an ode to stablecoins, a focus on utility and yield through a robust ecosystem, and even a nod to the Buttonwood Agreement. We admire Ondo’s acknowledgment of Plume’s founding principles as the requisite path forward for bridging traditional finance and DeFi.
The key difference is in approach. Ondo Chain represents Wall Street 2.0: a new financial ecosystem designed for institutions. And it makes total sense! Ondo has been a trailblazer in bringing institutional-grade RWAs to the blockchain. They pioneered the introduction of US Treasury Bills onchain and have been instrumental in helping BlackRock's money market fund attract liquidity from funds, foundations, and more to purchase these assets. It’s bullish for them, it’s bullish for Plume, it’s bullish for crypto, and it’s bullish for finance.
2 Sides: The Buy Side & The Sell Side
In Wall Street parlance, there are two sides of the business: the buy side and the sell side.
The buy-side brings the capital — they are the demand, providing funds to invest in projects, buy assets, and so on. Then there’s the sell-side that brings the assets — issuers that bring various asset classes, financial instruments, and more to the market for the buy side to potentially purchase.
Ondo has been a pioneer in helping asset managers bring sell-side products onchain. OUSG is their permissioned token representing BlackRock's money market fund, with $265M+ onchain, held by 50+ parties. Their other product, USDY, is a permissionless treasury token with $385M+ onchain and 10,500+ holders. They've been incredibly successful in bringing offchain assets onchain for us to buy.
A big part of why people are excited about RWAs is that they believe institutions are coming to buy our bags. Unfortunately based on the current state, it seems like we’re the ones being asked to buy theirs.
We believe that Ondo Chain will be critical in onboarding sell-side partners. As their Chief Strategy Officer, Ian, mentioned during the event, they are building the chain to help institutions gradually transition onchain over time. To further emphasize the point — not only is Ondo building for institutions, but the chain itself is actually being built by the institutions. The companies listed below are some of the largest asset managers in the world and they are working with Ondo to help build the chain. And so Ondo Chain as Wall Street 2.0 makes sense.
But naturally, the sell side will always depend on the buy side. And that's where Plume comes into play. Plume has always been, first and foremost, focused on community. Our belief is simple — community is everything. We’ve seen this with memecoins like GameStop, DOGE, Tesla, and more. That’s why we’ve started here. We built an ecosystem of over 180 projects and a community of over 1 million Twitter followers & 18 million+ onchain wallets with more than 280 million onchain transactions. We've driven millions of users, transactions, and dollars to our partners already.
The proof is always in the pudding. We've been fortunate to develop such a passionate community with such a fervor for what we’re building that several folks even got Plume tattoos!
This is the key distinction between us and why we're so excited to continue partnering with the great folks at Ondo. Plume isn't Wall Street 2.0 — we are Robinhood 2.0. So while we work with great partners like Ondo (Blackrock), DigiFT (UBS), Dinari (Blackstone), etc., and also manage our own direct relationships with financial institutions like Brevan Howard, Galaxy Digital, Apollo Global and WisdomTree, we have always, first and foremost, been focused on the people. And this community of people is the buy side. Without the buy, the sell side cannot exist.
Robinhood 2.0
We're building Robinhood 2.0. And it's not about equities. It's about what Robinhood represents and how they revolutionaized finance. Robinhood’s rapid rise and growth has been a cultural reckoning signifying a shift in the dynamics from institutions to the retail user. Robinhood prioritized their community above all. They built net new features like high yield savings accounts with brokerage balances, lower fees, higher risk options strategies, and more coupled with a beautiful mobile interface that brought a new audience into finance.
There is no clearer example than the rise of GME, DOGE, and SHIB. At the time, these memes were a new emerging behavior showcasing not only the changing tide, but also the strength in the retail user. We saw retail shine with communities like r/wallstreetbets taking the driver’s seat and ultimately putting Melvin Capital, an $8B hedge fund out of business. Through Robinhood, the world was no longer driven by large financial institutions – the retail user was in control.
We’ve seen the power of this and learned it firsthand. Not only did we live it ourselves, but our cofounder and CTO, Eugene Shen, was a founding engineer at Robinhood Crypto and helped scale them from nothing to billions of dollars a day in volume. So everything we do at Plume embodies this ethos – the future of finance is bottoms up. There is a new generation of retail users in control and they want access to new products & experiences while still being able to work with the largest financial institutions and asset issuers.
Plume is the People's Chain
Plume is the people's chain. Plume is distribution. Plume is the capital. Sell-side institutions will come where there is demand to sell their products to the buy side. No matter how many sell-side institutions we onboard, they will continue to need the buy side, both retail and institutional. And buy-side institutions aren't just going to come onchain to do what they can already do off-chain (and, truthfully, the onchain version is worse!). They're going to come because something genuinely new is happening here — new products, new users, and new yields. And those new things start with retail.
Plume’s goal is to build infrastructure & a platform to bring the right assets to our community which we know and love. By bringing on interesting assets and harnessing the power of community, we will continually organically grow our capital base & users. We’ve built a full-stack ecosystem that combines software, a chain, liquidity, community, and an ecosystem to make it the easiest place for the sell side — the asset issuers — to bootstrap their markets onchain.
And by doing this, we can actually begin to create net new things. We don’t just onboard RWAs; once tokenized, we can also design innovative structured products that unlock new yield opportunities. We can mix and match not only real world products, but also intertwine crypto into these products so we can create personalized assets that you can’t find anywhere else but at Plume. And it’s only through these novel products and use cases — ones that require coming onchain for — that will eventually onboard institutional buy-side investors.
Closing Thoughts – Robinhood 2.0 is Here
Earlier, I mentioned that the Ondo folks referenced the Buttonwood Agreement in their primer. It’s a great moment in history, and one we deeply admire. Not only is it a particularly useful way to showcase our viewpoints, but it also highlights how our perspectives align.
Earlier this year, we launched our foundation with the introduction of a famous painting — of the Buttonwood Agreement.
The first thing you'll notice is that our version is not Wall Street 2.0. Instead, it’s Robinhood 2.0. We have both crypto natives and TradFi folks coming together to create an agreement that forges a new world. We’re not just bringing TradFi onchain—we’re building an entirely new global financial system that includes everyone, from individuals to institutions. And to build a new world, you have to start from the bottom up. You have to build for the user. You have to build the iPhone, not the Blackberry.
That’s why we’re so excited to welcome Ondo Chain and continue our partnership with the great folks there. There is so much whitespace in the RWA industry and we have so much to do together. By combining Ondo’s institutional sell-side ecosystem with Plume’s onchain buy-side ecosystem, we can unite like in Plume’s Buttonwood Agreement to create a new global financial ecosystem together. Wall Street 2.0 + Robinhood 2.0 = RWA 2.0. These are two sides of the same coin, and we could not be more excited to change the world together.
And as always -- Goons. In. Control.
Higher.
