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Plume's RWA Chain
January 9, 2025

Securing Trillions - Bringing Real Assets Onchain

Plume Network's technology unlocks the onboarding of trillions in real world assets onchain, driving a paradigm shift toward Real World Asset Finance (RWAfi).

With secure and scalable blockchain architecture, Plume enables individuals, businesses, and institutions to access new opportunities for tokenizing, trading, and managing real world assets within an open & permissionless ecosystem. This approach transforms the value of these assets through composability, programmability and global reach.

To realize this vision, we are building the Plume RWA Chain – the first full-stack Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem purpose-built to bring the real world onchain.

The Challenge: Why Existing Blockchains Fall Short for RWA’s

While blockchains like Ethereum offer strong security for crypto-native assets, they face a significant scaling challenge when it comes to securing the multi-trillion-dollar RWA market. In particular, Ethereum's security is tied to the value of staked ETH, which is currently around $120 billion. Ethereum's proof-of-stake security model was not designed to secure the global RWA market, which includes firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, and Fidelity, managing over $20 trillion combined. Scaling Ethereum's security to support these assets would require an impractical increase in ETH's market capitalization.

Existing scaling solutions (including optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups) ultimately derive their security from a base layer designed for the free exchange of cryptocurrencies whose value is tied to the chain; they inherit limitations that make them unsuitable for securing large RWA volumes with exogenous value. This creates a critical vulnerability when applying existing blockchain infrastructure to assets of global significance.

In addition, existing blockchains must rely on centralized third-party solutions for integrating with the real world. Chains like Ethereum build up their oracle infrastructure, asset issuer integrations, and data availability solutions from a hodgepodge of disparate service providers, without being optimized for the deep integration of the offchain world. At the end of the day, this patchwork structure can sustain economic activity of crypto-native assets, but reaches its limits when expanding into real world integrations.

RWAfi requires a chain purpose-built for scale, resilience, and real world integration.

Plume's Solution: An L1 Chain Optimized for RWAs

Plume addresses this challenge with an innovative approach: a new Layer 1 chain secured by a novel two-tier consensus mechanism called proof of representation.

Plume's L1 architecture is designed from the ground up to bring real world assets onchain. Proof of representation can secure more assets than crypto native systems by utilizing cryptoeconomic incentives to delegate responsibilities and create a self governing system. Existing chains must rely on trusting centralized offchain entities to integrate assets, data, ownership, or anything else from the real world. Plume's architecture provides a counterweight so that we can reliably bring things from the real world onchain without relying on a single point of failure.

The consensus mechanism utilizes cryptoeconomic incentives to convey state from the real world secured by a stake that is slashable if validators misbehave. Existing blockchain networks are designed to verify and validate data from a plurality of sources, but are not optimized for working with information sources that are only narrowly accessible, gated, or for example contains sensitive information. Plume resolves this problem by adding a two-layered system of trust into the model where cryptoeconomic incentives and slashing are utilized to bring distributed trust to real world assets.

The end result is a blockchain framework optimized for onboarding real world assets and real world data. This in turn creates a powerful feedback loop, attracting both crypto-native users and institutional players, further strengthening the network’s security and expanding the ecosystem. Compared to other blockchains, Plume provides a secure, compliant, and scalable platform for RWA tokenization, designed for institutional onboarding and powered by tokenized RWA economic security:

Plume L1 Ethereum Solana Cosmos
RWA Focus Purpose-built for tokenizing and securing RWAs General-purpose blockchain High-throughput but lacks RWA focus Modular architecture, adaptable to RWAs
Compliance Integration Native support for AML/KYC options, sanctions compliance, secure data pipelines Requires external tools Requires external tools Requires external tools
Consensus Model Proof-of-Representation Proof-of-Stake Proof-of-History + PoS hybrid Tendermint BFT
Data Integration Native real-world data highway (Plume Nexus) Limited offchain data solutions Limited offchain data solutions Native support for IBC and oracles
Ecosystem Composability Seamless across DeFi and RWA applications Strong for crypto-native assets Focused on DeFi and NFTs Interoperable zones with high modularity
Scalability Tailored for high-value RWA transactions Scalability relies on separate rollups High throughput but constrained by state Scalability depends on zone configuration

Plume’s Modular, Scalable, Full-Stack Infrastructure

Plume’s full-stack architecture seamlessly integrates RWAs into the blockchain ecosystem, and is EVM-compatible, ensuring seamless integration with the broader Ethereum ecosystem and the tools developers already know and use.

  1. Arc - Tokenization Engine: Arc simplifies the tokenization process by integrating compliance workflows and reducing barriers for asset issuers, providing an efficient path to bring real-world assets onchain.
  2. Passport - Smart Wallets: Passport allows users to store contract code directly within their Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs). This native functionality supports RWAfi composability, yield management, and advanced account abstraction features.
  3. Nexus - Data Highway: Nexus enables the secure integration of real-world data into the blockchain using cutting-edge technology like zkTLS. Prioritizing data transactions within the chain unlocks opportunities such as betting on economic indicators or leveraging tokenized luxury goods.

The Need for a Purpose-Built RWA Chain

The market for tokenized assets from the real world (RWA) represents a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity poised to redefine the onchain experience. But RWAfi demands a blockchain designed to address its unique challenges.

By onboarding assets from the real world and users through RWAfi, we bridge the gap between crypto and real world value, unlocking unmatched liquidity, global access, and transparency—expanding crypto into a trillion-dollar economy that aligns with real world needs and scales to onboard the next billion users and assets.

Only Plume is building the architecture to lead this transformation:

  • Scalability: Designed to handle the trillions in value unlocked by assets from the real world.
  • Security: An economic model optimized for securing assets from the real world at scale.
  • Composability: Seamless integration with DeFi protocols, unlocking real yield and liquidity without trade-offs.
  • Full-Stack Ecosystem: Integrated tools for tokenization, compliance, liquidity management, and distribution, fostering a thriving community of developers, asset issuers, and users within a secure, scalable, and composable environment.

The onchain future isn’t about retrofitting existing systems—it’s about building purpose-built ecosystems.

Put simply, Plume redefines how the real world interacts with the onchain world.

This is the third in a four-part series to explain what, why, how, and when Plume Network will be ready to bring the world onchain:

  1. Manifesto: Bringing the World Onchain With RWAfi
  2. Thesis: The Case for a Tokenized Future
  3. RWA Chain: The Only L1 Purpose-Built for Securing RWAs
  4. Mainnet: An RWAfi Ecosystem Ready for Business