The RWA (Real-World Asset) narrative is widely regarded as a key path for the crypto industry to achieve a new round of growth, especially since last year, as more and more large crypto projects have begun to actively layout in the RWA field. Currently, most RWA projects primarily enter the market by issuing assets with anchored utility or on-chain financial applications, becoming the core method of their layout.
However, as an important participant in the RWA track, Plume has chosen a unique strategic path—launching the first and only L1 specifically built for the RWAfi ecosystem, to create an infrastructure focused on serving the RWA track and providing strong support for other RWA participants. This lower-level layout not only promotes the overall development of the RWA ecosystem but also lays a solid foundation for the future landing of more innovative applications.
As a new carrier for the development of the RWA track, the Plume project, with its grand vision and broad development prospects, continues to attract significant market attention and is recognized by the community, institutions, emerging banks, and crypto-native protocols (such as lending protocols, perpetual contract DEXs, AMMs, etc.) as the best solution for RWAfi.
On December 18, 2024, Plume successfully completed a $20 million Series A financing round, with major investors including top investment institutions such as Brevan Howard Digital, Haun Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Superscrypt, HashKey, Laser Digital (Nomura Group), A Capital, 280 Capital, SV Angel, and Reciprocal Ventures.
Considering that in May this year, Plume completed a $10 million seed round financing, led by Haun Ventures, with participating institutions including Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures. To date, the total historical financing amount of the Plume project has exceeded $30 million, and as financing continues to progress, the project's valuation is also steadily rising.
Plume: Building RWA Infrastructure and Creating a Unique RWAFi System
Plume is the first L1 public chain designed specifically for RWAfi (Real World Asset Finance), aiming to redefine the RWAfi market with a structure that does not require user KYC and is permissionless, providing an efficient, transparent, and convenient infrastructure for crypto-native users, helping traditional financial assets and crypto assets achieve seamless integration. The core advantage of the Plume project lies in its unique RWAfi ecosystem, which promotes the comprehensive upgrade of traditional financial assets through Web3.
In fact, RWAfi is a concept that is not new but has not yet been deeply practiced. Plume focuses more on bringing traditional financial assets (such as real estate, bonds, stocks, etc.) into the crypto world through tokenization technology, endowing these assets with liquidity, composability, and interoperability similar to crypto assets, and addressing multiple key challenges such as asset tokenization, liquidity management, compliance, and data integration through innovative technical design, enabling the RWAfi ecosystem to better serve crypto-native users while promoting the deep integration of crypto assets and real-world assets.
System Components
As a fully integrated and modular focus on RWAfi, Plume has currently built the first modular and composable RWA-focused EVM-compatible chain and launched several core components, including the tokenization engine Arc, smart wallets, and off-chain data system Nexus, which work together to provide strong technical support for the RWAfi ecosystem.
Arc Tokenization Engine
Arc is a core component of Plume, focusing on simplifying and streamlining the tokenization process of real-world assets. Through Arc, both physical and digital assets can be quickly tokenized and integrated with compliance and data systems, ensuring the accuracy and security of tokenized assets in the network. The advantage of Arc lies in its automated compliance checks and low-cost operations, allowing asset issuers to quickly launch tokenized assets at a lower cost while ensuring compliance with legal requirements in various countries. The modular design of Arc provides high flexibility, supporting the tokenization of different types of assets, whether real estate, energy projects, or alternative assets such as art and collectibles, all of which can be efficiently managed through the Arc platform.
Smart Wallet
Plume's smart wallet not only supports the management of crypto-native assets but also provides advanced features designed for RWAfi. Users can store, trade, and generate yields on assets through the smart wallet, which also has a high degree of customizability, allowing users to adjust control options according to personal needs. The smart wallet supports various DeFi functions, such as yield farming, liquidity mining, and lending, ensuring that users can fully leverage the value of their tokenized assets. Through the smart wallet, Plume provides a seamless way for users to manage all types of assets (including crypto assets and tokenized real-world assets) on one platform, greatly improving the convenience and efficiency of asset management.
Nexus Data Network
Nexus is another key innovation in Plume's architecture, enhancing the functionality and accuracy of RWAfi by introducing off-chain data to the blockchain. Nexus provides real-time, actionable market data through reliable off-chain data sources, supporting new financial use cases such as prediction markets, DeFi applications, and speculative indices. The data pipeline of Nexus connects with external sources, converting off-chain information into on-chain usable data in real-time, helping users make more precise investment decisions.
The introduction of Nexus allows Plume to provide richer functionalities for the RWAfi market, enhancing market transparency and improving the efficiency and accuracy of asset trading. With accurate off-chain data, Plume can optimize asset pricing and trading, making tokenized assets more liquid and valuable in the market.
To promote asset liquidity in the RWAfi ecosystem, Plume is currently establishing partnerships with multiple liquidity providers to ensure efficient circulation of assets within the network. By integrating mechanisms such as staking and yield farming into the platform, Plume offers various liquidity options to help users optimize the liquidity of their assets in different market environments.
SkyLink is an example of a collaboration with LayerZero in this direction, serving as a proprietary solution designed by Plume for cross-chain RWA yield distribution. Through deep integration with LayerZero, SkyLink enables investors on different blockchains to receive and manage yields from RWA in real-time. It achieves cross-chain token minting and swapping through SyncPools technology, ensuring that YieldTokens flow seamlessly across multiple chains. SkyLink provides an efficient and secure cross-chain platform, allowing investors to flexibly participate in the RWAfi ecosystem and engage in yield farming, trading, or staking across different chains, thereby enhancing asset liquidity and composability.
At the same time, Plume currently also supports integration with other DeFi protocols, allowing tokenized assets to be traded and liquidated in more decentralized financial products.
On the other hand, since RWAfi involves the digitization of real-world assets, compliance has always been a significant challenge faced by the industry. Plume achieves compliance verification of tokenized assets through integration with a network of compliance partners, ensuring that all transactions comply with relevant regulatory requirements. Its integrated compliance check tools provide a simplified compliance process for platform users, enabling crypto users and traditional financial institutions to easily adhere to necessary legal standards, thereby avoiding risks arising from compliance issues.
Plume's compliance framework not only enhances the acceptance of RWA assets but also attracts more traditional financial institutions and institutional investors to join, driving the rapid growth of RWAfi.
Since its market entry, Plume has garnered significant attention. Since the seed round, Plume has made remarkable progress and is becoming an important driving force in the RWAfi ecosystem. Currently, there are over 180 projects built within the Plume ecosystem, with the total on-chain asset amount exceeding $4 billion, and hundreds of millions of assets are about to go on-chain. Through two months of testing activities, Plume successfully attracted 3.75 million active users, with on-chain transaction volume exceeding 280 million. Additionally, Plume performed exceptionally well in its first pre-deposit activity, oversubscribing 6 times in just 90 minutes, successfully filling a $30 million funding pool, further validating the market's high recognition of the Plume ecosystem and its innovative technology.
After the first pre-deposit activity concluded, Plume Network launched a second Pre Deposit Vault on the Nest platform, surpassing the $10 million deposit limit in less than 20 minutes. Due to high demand, Plume decided to reopen the Vault to ensure more community members could participate in this event. Users can deposit USDC and USDT and receive Plume Network rewards on the mainnet. Participants can pre-deposit through the Nest Vault entrance (vault.nest.credit/).
In addition to technological innovation, Plume's rapid development also stems from its strong resource system.
It is reported that Plume's team members come from top companies such as Coinbase, Robinhood, LayerZero, Polyhedra, BNB Chain, Galaxy, dYdX, and other creative companies. Meanwhile, in its two rounds of financing, Plume has also received support from several top traditional institutions. This means that beyond technological innovation, the top resources backing Plume in both the Web2 and Web3 fields are providing an important foundation for the ecosystem to achieve long-term growth and continuous expansion. Similarly, the support of top resources also represents Plume's expectations for long-term growth in the RWA field and the RWAFi system.
Plume: Bringing a New Growth Path to the Crypto Market
Essentially, the value system of the crypto market is still built on the foundation of consensus. Although events like ETFs and elections have brought a significant influx of funds to the crypto market, driving this bull market, the flow of funds is essentially profit-driven. When the market fails to provide substantial returns for these investors, and the influx of incremental funds slows down while the overall market begins to decline, the collapse of confidence and a downward spiral are often unavoidable; every bull-bear cycle seems unable to escape this pattern.
In fact, Real-World Assets (RWA) are becoming a key narrative for improving the speculative and zero-sum game nature of the crypto market. RWA encompasses traditional assets such as real estate, infrastructure, and art, which hold significant positions in the global economy, with a potential market size exceeding $800 trillion. Compared to traditional financial assets like stocks and bonds, RWA typically exhibits higher stability and lower volatility. Therefore, RWA is not only an important way to bring over $800 trillion of traditional financial markets onto the blockchain but also a key bridge to bridge the significant gap between the crypto market and traditional finance, establishing a more solid value foundation for the crypto market.
Compared to other narratives, the RWA narrative has a clear and significant promoting effect on the crypto industry, especially as more and more traditional listed companies, government departments, and traditional financial institutions enter the fray; RWA is not only a trend but also an opportunity.
The narrative value of Plume lies in its creation of a set of RWAfi infrastructure that preserves pipelines for various roles to enter the RWA system and establishes a value cycle for RWA assets in a DeFi manner, capturing real yields. Similarly, in the early development of the RWA field, Plume, as an infrastructure role, has occupied a favorable ecological niche in the early development of the RWA market and has become an important driving force for advancing the field to the next stage.
As Plume secures a new round of investment and the ecosystem continues to expand, it is not only becoming a leader in the RWAFi narrative but also bringing a new value growth path to the crypto market.