Full Podcast:

Host: Aquarius https://x.com/0xAquariusCap

Guest:

• Chris Yin, Co-founder and CEO of Plume Network https://x.com/chriseyin

• Sam Wang, Research Lead at Aquarius Fund https://x.com/0xpotatoSam

1. Plume’s Vision for RWAs: Chris, co-founder and CEO of Plume Network, explains that Plume is building a chain specifically for real-world assets (RWAs). Their goal is to simplify interaction with RWAs through crypto rails, making them as accessible and liquid as crypto-native assets. Plume combines RWA-Fi with DeFi, allowing users to take out loans, trade, and speculate on RWAs with the same ease as crypto assets.

2. Why an RWA-Specific Chain?: Hazel asks why a separate chain is necessary for RWAs. Chris explains that RWAs require specialized infrastructure to work efficiently on-chain. Customization is needed to handle issues like permissioning, compliance (AML/KYC), and liquidity. Existing chains like Ethereum aren't optimized for these features, leading Plume to develop its own ecosystem to facilitate seamless onboarding, governance, and execution of real-world assets.

3. Institutional Challenges: Chris highlights that institutions have been interacting with private blockchain networks but are now recognizing the value of public blockchains. Public chains provide open, permissionless ecosystems that can drive innovation and efficiency, making them more suitable for large-scale adoption by institutions. This realization is a key driver for Plume’s vision of integrating RWAs into the crypto ecosystem.

4. RWA Examples & Use Cases: Plume is tokenizing tangible real-world assets like solar farms, oil fields, and corporate bonds. For instance, users can invest in solar farms that have 30-40 year contracts with government agencies or schools, earning stable yields. These assets offer consistent returns (e.g., 12-15% APY), paid out in both stables and governance tokens. This enables investors to access stable, yield-bearing assets on-chain, with the liquidity and flexibility of DeFi.

5. Cross-Chain Liquidity & Seamless Experience: Chris addresses concerns about cross-chain liquidity by highlighting how advancements in technology, such as bridging between EVM chains, have made moving assets more seamless. Liquidity fragmentation is less of an issue, and Plume focuses on building tools to facilitate easy movement of assets and capital across networks.

6. The Success of Plume’s Testnet: The Plume testnet has been a major success, with over 3.5 million active wallets and more than 180 million transactions in just four weeks. The testnet has seen significant activity, with users bridging assets and over 150 protocols already building on the network. This early success demonstrates a strong appetite for Plume’s RWA solutions.

7. Plume’s Approach to RWA-Fi: Unlike other projects that focus on tokenizing real-world assets for the sake of it, Plume is more focused on creating RWA-Fi—bringing utility to these assets in a DeFi-native way. Chris emphasizes that most RWA projects today fail to capture the interest of crypto-native users because they’re too focused on traditional finance methods. Plume’s approach integrates RWAs into existing DeFi ecosystems, providing liquidity, flexibility, and yield opportunities for users.

8. Speculative Markets: Plume is exploring innovative speculative markets based on real-world data, such as Pokémon cards, sneakers, GPUs, and even social or economic indicators like crime rates or inflation. Users can take out leveraged positions (e.g., 10x or 50x) on these assets, providing unique opportunities for speculation. This opens up new markets for crypto users, combining real-world assets with the dynamic nature of DeFi.

9. Yield Strategies Beyond Treasury Bonds: Chris explains how Plume offers yields ranging from 10% to 30-40%, depending on the asset and risk level. For example, users can park stables in yield-bearing assets like solar farms or corporate bonds, earning stable yields paid out in both stables and tokens. Plume aims to provide higher yields compared to traditional finance products, offering crypto-native users more lucrative opportunities to park their assets.

10. Global Reach: Plume’s community is diverse, with participants from Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The network has attracted both RWA enthusiasts and crypto traders. Plume’s aggressive growth strategy involves building communities globally and working closely with partners to expand use cases for RWAs. Their focus areas include high-yielding assets, active secondary markets (e.g., for collectibles like sneakers and Pokémon cards), and innovative financial products for speculation.

11. Tokenomics: Chris reveals that Plume will launch a native token, which will be integral to the ecosystem. Token holders will gain exposure to the yields generated by various RWA projects on the network. The token will also serve governance purposes and provide users with additional ways to engage with the ecosystem. Through launchpads and launchpools, token holders can participate in RWA projects and earn stable yields.

12. Institutional Partnerships: Hazel asks about the role of institutions in the RWA space, and Chris highlights the growing interest from institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity. However, the shift toward public blockchains has been slow due to the complexity of adopting decentralized systems. Chris predicts that institutions will increasingly recognize the benefits of open networks over private ones, and Plume is positioning itself to capitalize on this trend by building infrastructure that aligns with institutional needs.

13. Real-World Transparency and Risk Mitigation: Plume ensures transparency for RWAs through partnerships with reputable custodians and real-time monitoring of assets. For example, solar farms on the platform provide real-time data on energy generation and revenue, allowing users to verify yields in real-time. This transparency builds trust and mitigates the risks associated with tokenizing real-world assets.

14. Long-Term Roadmap: Chris outlines the roadmap for Plume, which includes transitioning from testnet to mainnet, expanding the ecosystem, and launching the Plume token. Plume aims to be the go-to platform for RWA tokenization and adoption, with a focus on making RWAs accessible and useful for the crypto-native audience. Chris emphasizes that Plume is building for long-term sustainability, with plans to integrate more real-world assets and capitalize on emerging trends in decentralized finance.

Hazel: Welcome, everyone, to today's episode of the podcast. I'm super excited to have you all with us. This is Hazel from Aquarius, and I'll be your host for today's discussion. Founded in 2018, Aquarius manages venture capital and liquid funds, specializing in pre-seed and seed investments. We are a research-driven fund. We offer comprehensive support, including on-chain liquidity management and global marketing. Recently, we launched a $600 million liquid fund to institutionalize on chain liquidity management. Today, we have some incredible guests joining us. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Plume Network, along with our Research Lead, Sam. To start off, Chris, can you give us a brief introduction to Plume and what motivated you to start Plume Network? Sam, feel free to jump in after.

• Chris: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me today. I've been looking forward to chatting and talking about Plume. Really quickly, Plume is building a network, a chain, and an ecosystem focused on RWAs. The idea is very simple: we're trying to make it easier for people to interact with the real world through crypto rails, right? And through crypto itself.

• So we take a lot of the tools needed to bring things on-chain and to interact with the real world on-chain and make them useful for people on-chain. There are two phases we really think about. We do more RWA-fi, combining the best of RWAs with DeFi itself. So you can use these assets with the same sort of ease and flexibility that you have with crypto-native assets. You can take out loans against them, buy and trade easily, have open access 24/7, instant liquidity—all the things we know and love about crypto, but imbued with those same properties in RWAs, allowing them to mix between crypto-native assets and RWAs and have them all in the same place.

• So that's kind of the idea. Ultimately, we're trying to grow the crypto ecosystem and bring new people, new dollars, and new use cases into crypto itself. A lot of that, in our opinion, involves building the infrastructure to make it easier for these assets to work in crypto. So that's our story.

• Sam: Personally, I’m the Research Lead of Aquarius. Besides that, I’m also running a liquidity staking fund which is doing some delta neutral strategies. I’m also an individual developer.

Hazel: Now that we've covered the background, let's dive into the marketplace. Chris, I really have this question for you. There are already many functioning L1 blockchains. Why do we need a chain specifically for RWA (real-world assets)?

• Chris: Totally, I think it's a good question and a loaded one too. Look, for real-world assets, at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is create a new chain just for the sake of creating a new chain and ecosystem. We already have too many. There are many great places to do things already. The problem is, for real-world assets in particular, there are so many specifics required to ensure they live, operate, and are easily executable on-chain. As we started to build, we realized we needed more customization and features embedded at the network level to do this.

• We realized that not only the tooling to bring things on-chain and make them work well was necessary, but also the ecosystem and community to go to market around it. That was also an important part of the story. So that's really the ultimate reason. If you think about any assets, bringing them on-chain is a very complicated thing today. We've talked to many projects and teams that say it can take anywhere from 6 to 24 months, in some cases, to bring an asset on-chain.

• This could be anything, whether you're talking about collectibles like sneakers or watches, financial instruments like bonds or equities, or even digital assets. These things can take a long time. We make that easy to do and bring these things on-chain. And then, secondarily, we want to ensure that when it comes into an ecosystem, it has a set of things that work alongside it. Meaning you can make it useful once it's on-chain. There's an ecosystem of products, people, dollars, and use cases that can be plugged into immediately in a more crypto-native fashion. That's the story and why we think we need an ecosystem around this. We started trying to do this with either other L2s or chains and quickly realized that a lot of customization and specific things were needed.

• Sam: I'm also interested in this topic about RWAs. We know these two markets are mostly driven by policies and ETFs, so RWAs are becoming more and more significant in this market. However, I still have some confusion about why we need a whole new chain to build these RWAs when we are talking about making things organized or bringing stuff to the liquidity markets. We can do them on the Ethereum mainnet, which is also a very liquid and well-functioning network. However, if we use a whole new chain for this kind of demand, maybe we need to bring new dollars, new liquidity, and maybe this creates more inconvenience.

• Chris: Yeah, I think that's a good question. And look, the reason why you need this is a few things, right? Maybe a couple of specific examples. If you think about the tooling itself for an RWA, some things are permissioned, and some are permissionless. Some things have AML requirements, and all these things together mean customization. For example, if you think about permissioning in networks, permissioning a network like Plume is an open permissionless network. We're not a gated chain; you don't need KYC or anything to use it. But some assets might require that.

Sam: It makes sense. So can I understand it this way—like there's a dilemma between getting more liquidity or making things more convenient for users? So you guys chose to build a whole new chain because it's more convenient, and you believe the liquidity is fine since cross-chain is very seamless, right?

• Chris: Yeah, that's right, exactly. The tooling itself to onboard and bring these assets on is really important. The tooling to onboard capital is also important to customize for this. For crypto-native liquidity and usage, especially bridging and all that stuff today, we don't find it to be too much of an issue. We just had our testnet as a simple example. We're a few weeks into it, and we've seen a ton of usage, a ton of people bridging things over, and a ton of people building assets on here. We've got over 3.5 million wallets active on this testnet, over 180 million transactions in 4 weeks. We've seen a lot of people bridging assets over and also at the protocol level, with over 150 protocols building on us today. So through this, we've been able to see that these things are fluid and have improved the stack, technology-wise, for L2s and stuff. That has made moving around these ecosystems more seamless and straightforward.

Hazel: Speaking of the testnet, I'm curious—what are the stakeholder groups that Plume is working with? How can a project or a user engage with Plume? What does the flow or process look like?

• Chris: Yeah, totally. There are two ways to think about it, but the big picture is this: if you think about Plume, what we're doing is we're trying to onboard most RWA projects. I'm sure you guys are aware, or maybe Sam more so, have you used any RWA stuff before?

• But even then, I would say, generally speaking, most people haven't touched RWAs, at least in the classic definition of RWAs. The truth is, most RWAs are TradFi people coming into crypto to do TradFi things on-chain. The problem with that is you ultimately build a TradFi product. The issue is that the on-chain audience is not TradFi people, or very few TradFi people, so you end up building products nobody wants. That's why existing RWA products have really struggled with getting usage, adoption, and all these types of things. Our focus is very simple. Our team comes from the crypto-native world. My co-founders are from dYdX, LayerZero, and Axelar.

• So our team is very crypto-native. The first point is, how do we make this useful for an existing on-chain audience versus a theoretical one that's coming? We want to make things useful for the crypto-natives, and that's how we think about it. If you think about what use cases that entails, there are three main ones. Number one is yield farming. It's about earning yield, parking money somewhere, looping, and being able to do all those things. Number two is trading—buy, trade, lend, borrow, classic spot stuff. And third is speculation—derivatives and all those types of things. We focus on assets and use cases that fit within those protocols today and make sure they're more useful to crypto people.

• For example, you can park your stables into some asset—maybe it's a solar farm, a mineral field, or an oil well—it's open, permissionless, and liquid. You can earn very stable and healthy yields on that, both in stables and token yields. For trading, you can do things like sneakers, watches, Pokémon cards, whatever it might be. You can take out loans against them, do flash loans, all the classic DeFi stuff. Third, from a speculation perspective, you can do classic speculation on RWAs.

• For example, in one of our protocols, you can take out a 50x levered long on Pokémon cards. If you're bullish on certain cards, you don't have to go buy the asset and hold it. You just take a levered position. So to me, it's about making sure the assets and the types of things we bring on fit those use cases. If you come to Plume today, we have 150 protocols, a lot of different assets, and different types of things. But that's how I think about the use cases and how we deal with this. We see this already today—when things are risk-off, what do people do? They park money in stables, go yield farm, or put some in Compound and get 12% back then. We saw this a couple of years ago.

Sam: What kind of yield do you guys have other than the U.S. treasury yield?

• Chris: Totally, we have a ton of different things. We have several hundred million dollars in assets, low-digit billions of types of assets that can come on that are yield-bearing. It depends on the risk level and the types of yield you're looking for. On the low end, it's just classic treasuries with a 5% yield. But the average thing we can do on a very straightforward basis is 10%, a 10% coupon that comes from corporate bonds and other sources. We've built the tooling to bring that on-chain and make it easy to access. You can buy it just by swapping in stables. Then you can hold this asset and get paid regularly in stables alongside governance tokens.

• For example, if you use one of our protocols, you can swap your stables into this asset, stake it, and then get both stables—let's call it 10%—and on top of that, another 10-15% in governance tokens, and another 10-15% in Plume tokens. You get to 30-40-50% yields, where the difference between the APY waterfall we all know is 1% in stables and 10% in governance tokens. That's the classic APY waterfall. What we do is offer 10-15-20% in stables and another 30-40% in governance tokens on top. So you can get really stable yields in both stables and token exposure simultaneously. We have yields from 10% to 25-30% on the high end, depending on the risk level. But I'd say we focus on stable, safe assets that fit the use cases for today.

• So that's how we think about the yields and the types of things we can find. I think most things should not be tokenized today. Most things are not ready.

• You have to focus on the few things with the size and qualities that matter to the on-chain audience. It's liquidity, depth, yield, simplicity—it has to be those things to make them useful on-chain today versus something like houses.

• I think houses are a cool example. I understand why people want to tokenize houses, but the truth is nobody really wants to do it. I'm not going to go buy a house on-chain. The speculation is too slow, it's hard to understand, you have to underwrite, and it's illiquid too. It sucks. That's not the asset people want to speculate on or buy on-chain.

• So we focus on things that are much more straightforward, that I would buy. Park money in this thing, and it just prints cash. You don't need to think too much about it. While you're doing that, you're getting healthy token exposure simultaneously, and you can take that liquid token and do other things while you're earning. You can go speculate, buy something else—so your money isn't just sitting there doing nothing. That's how we think about RWAs here.

Sam: Can you give an example of a specific asset that you guys are onboarding that's ideal for a significant yield?

• Chris: Totally. I'll give you a couple of examples. One of them is a solar farm company. It's a fund that owns hundreds of millions of dollars in solar farms. These solar farms are already built, so there's no operating risk or construction risk. Each of these solar farms has a 30 to 40-year contract with a local school, government agency, hospital, or similar entity, and they're just getting paid through utility bills.

• You can make 12-15% on this every single month, with APY paid out monthly, and sometimes even on a more real-time basis. You can earn stables against that while simultaneously earning the native token and the protocol token. That's a simple example, and there's a lot of capital behind it—hundreds of millions of dollars. Another example is one of our partners, a mineral field. We're talking about oil fields with hundreds of millions of dollars of oil reserves that just generate consistent cash flow. These oil fields pump out the oil, sell it, and generate revenue, and we're providing access to that asset through crypto.

• So, you can come into this protocol, swap your stables, and begin earning against that asset. And if you want to exit, you can simply swap and leave. These are just a few examples, but we have many more that are suitable for tokenization.

Sam: That's so cool. However, is there a possibility for people like me to participate in this without requiring KYC?

• Chris: Yes, so the way we're doing this is that these assets don't require KYC. You can participate if you want, but ultimately, we're an open, permissionless chain. Anyone can do anything here, so we don't require KYC. Some protocols might want you to KYC, and some might not. But the initial set we've been spending time on are open, permissionless protocols. You can come in without any KYC, deposit some stables, and begin earning—simple as that.

• There are different tiers—some protocols might ask you to lock things up for a bit to earn extra yields. But generally speaking, these protocols are all open and liquid. You can come in, swap out, and do whatever you need to do. And that's what makes these assets more interesting because, in my opinion, RWAs are already used by everyone, even if they don't realize it. The number one RWA everyone uses is a stablecoin. A stablecoin is an RWA, and it's great because it just feels like crypto—open, permissionless, and composable. That's how you have to build RWAs to make them more useful and accessible on-chain.

Sam: Last question from this conversation—do you have any numbers on the scalability of specific RWA products, like the maximum capacity for any project?

• Chris: It's a good question. It depends on the protocol and the asset. But in big picture terms, for many of these mineral fields, you're talking about several hundred million dollars before you tap out. For some of the private credit stuff, we have partners with funds up to $34 billion. So we can really take in a lot of assets and capital, depending on the type, and create a solid TVL base. The nice thing about being open and permissionless is that people can create different pools depending on the type of assets. Someone could mix together ten different assets, put them into a pool, and maybe create a green energy index or a commodities index to have different yields and create a larger pool. There are so many ways to play with it.

• But that's the exciting part—when we put it this way, we can start to unlock the same magic we saw in DeFi with real-world assets because it's open and permissionless. People can create anything, and we've seen incredible growth and innovation because of that. The real world hasn't seen that yet, but by giving these attributes to real-world assets, we can begin to see some of the same innovations—new indices, new markets, and new tools that people actually want, and people will vote with their dollars and participation. We'll see great new products emerge from that.

Hazel: Thank you. That's really inspiring. You also mentioned the market in general, so what role do recent market movements, such as the rise of stablecoins and increased institutional involvement, play in constructing your strategy and growth?

• Chris: I think the institutional part of the story is often misunderstood or misinterpreted. The thing about institutions is they've been using crypto for a long time. If you look at most banks, many have an internal interbank or private blockchain, some permissioned chain they use to move things around different regions and geographies. It's already being used today and will only increase.

• And I think, as Sam mentioned earlier, the ETF—especially the BTC ETF—is a huge deal. It really helps change the dynamics and brings in more involvement, but it's still early. Just because Larry Fink says "tokenization" 50 times a day doesn't mean it's happening any faster. Middle Road is a $500 million fund with 20 holders—it's still very small. BlackRock itself is $10 trillion, so it's still early. The commitment is real and different this time. The last time institutions thought about crypto, they saw it as backend software, a new database. And if you look at their products, that's how it is—you can interact with them, but they settle to Polygon or Arbitrum or whatever.

• They saw it as a way to save money on fund administration and costs, but that approach doesn't drive change. No one cares about saving 2-5 basis points on fund admin; it's not going to move the needle. The interesting thing this time is they're focusing on the idea that a private blockchain isn't just as good as a database—it's much worse. You have to maintain the chain, it's private, so nobody can build on it, the security risks are real, it's slower, and it's harder to use. They've realized that a public blockchain is the way to go, and that's absolutely the right movement. We need open, permissionless networks to make this useful. Otherwise, what's the point?

• Instead of seeing crypto as a database, they now see it as a network—a network of people, dollars, and use cases. And that's how this comes together. When institutions think about it like that, you can see where it's going. They’re beginning to understand that for crypto to work at the institutional level, it's not about replicating TradFi on-chain. It’s about building new things that can only be done here, focused on new markets, new customers, and new ways to make money.

• That's what will bring things in, and that's what we're focused on. We spend a lot of time with institutions, and you'd be surprised—they're very aware of this. They're moving slowly, but they're reorienting themselves. That's the exciting thing about this. If you think about any technological shift—from web to mobile, for example—the first use cases weren't just taking existing websites and putting them on the phone. The best new use cases were things that took advantage of the native architecture, like Uber or Airbnb, which leveraged location, push notifications, and simplicity.

Hazel: Gotcha. Do you think institutions will dive deeper into this industry or start building their own chains? And what if a big institution does build its own chain—would it jeopardize Plume's position in the RWA space?

• Chris: In short, no. I was definitely worried about that initially, but when you look around, you see that many have already tried. JPM has Onyx, Goldman has a network called Canton. These are private networks run by specific entities. But the truth is, the big institutions are not technologists. If they're going to do permissioned stuff, it doesn't affect us. And you lose the benefits of doing things on-chain if it's in a private network. There's no value in it, and those projects will wither away. The only way to get value is by doing this on a public chain.

• Maintaining and building a public chain is complicated. It's better to have it mixed in with everyone else on a public chain that's maintained by the community, growing, secure, and constantly patched. Even simple things like security are very complicated to handle on your own.

• So, will people try? Sure, there will be attempts here and there. But again, these institutions are money managers, not builders. They’re not going to focus on building their own chains.

Hazel: So how do you position Plume in the current industrial landscape, more specifically in the RWA vertical?

• Chris: I think of it like this: everyone else is doing RWAs; we're doing RWA-Fi. That's how I see it. If you go to our Twitter page or website, everything centers around this idea of "Fi," which is making RWAs useful for the crypto-native audience.

• Every other product is focused on TradFi—it's TradFi people doing TradFi things on-chain. It's not focused on people like us. These products aren't useful or usable. For example, you can lock up your money for 3 years and finance a Vietnamese auto shop with a bunch of risk for a 6% yield. Nobody wants to do that. 99% of RWAs today are about financing, tokenizing, or fractionalizing assets.

• We don't care about people buying assets. What we want is to create liquidity for these assets and make them useful on-chain. That’s why we call it RWA-Fi—it's focused on making this a very classic DeFi ecosystem, where some of the assets are tokens with backing, yield, and other benefits. We're the only ones doing that. Everyone else is focusing on permissioned networks with no users, no dollars, and no protocols.

• We're committed to being an open, permissionless chain, focusing on the crypto-native audience where all the action is. You also have general chains trying to do stuff—Base, Arbitrum, Solana, and others. They're all beginning to touch RWAs, but they can't compete with us in this frame. They're good and capable, and we see them as partners, not competitors.

• But the act of tokenizing and bringing something on-chain takes time. The first step isn't choosing a chain—it's figuring out the legal structure, the custodian, the wallet, and so on. We start much further upstream than everybody else. We're helping with the entire process of bringing assets on-chain.

• We compete at a different level, with depth and focus in this area. Our go-to-market approach and perspective are different. We build the full tooling and ecosystem, and we focus on making this useful for the existing audience. These things set us apart from most RWA projects.

Hazel: Interesting. So, to my understanding, Plume is more like a foundational layer for the assets that people want to bring on-chain, almost like a launchpad.

• Chris: That's right. One of our products and focus areas is like a launchpool—a launchpad for this stuff, where you can bring your assets over, and we'll help you structure them so they're useful on-chain. We make sure there's a network of capital, protocols, and wallets to ensure these assets flow and are useful on-chain, so you can begin to extract value from them.

• We need a few showcase stories to demonstrate that these assets do become more useful on-chain. That's the important part of how we think about it. We also want Plume to be the easiest place for anyone to get RWA exposure. You should be able to buy Plume, hold it, stake it, and earn a portion of the yields from all the RWA projects on-chain—simple as that. We help funnel some of that to the holders and users.

• If you want to go deeper into it, you can explore the ecosystem, buy individual assets, speculate, take out loans, or use them as collateral. We want to offer multiple levels of involvement. At the highest level, Plume should be the easiest way to get RWA exposure without even thinking about it.

• If you want to go deeper, you can bridge into the ecosystem and get involved. And if you want to go really deep, you can start building, create new pools, indices, or markets, depending on what you want to do. You can mix cross-products like ETH plus residential real estate, for example. There's a lot more we can do here to create new, net-new things by combining these assets together.

Hazel: If you're going to have a launchpad for these assets, how will you ensure they're actually real? How do you plan to mitigate the risk of bringing them on-chain, especially since real assets aren't always transparent?

• Chris: Got it. It's a very challenging thing, but we approach it in a straightforward way. We partner with many different projects to make it as transparent as possible.

• For example, with the solar farms we mentioned earlier, one thing we can do with these assets that you can't do in the real world is integrate directly with the farm itself. You can see how much sunlight is coming in, how much energy is being generated, look at the contracts to see how much money is being earned, and calculate your yield based on that—all in real-time. You can see what's happening on a very tangible basis. You want proof of reserve? You can check the assets anytime.

• It's about making sure we use the proper custodians and integrations to make it happen. We work with all the major custodians to ensure your assets, titles, or whatever they might be, are stored securely and can be verified at any time.

• Are there risks? Yes, like anything else in the world. But we do a lot to ensure that the partners we work with are of the highest quality, and we only work with the best custodians. We also provide easy ways to constantly check and ensure that those assets are being housed properly and are still there.

Hazel: That sounds really promising. I've also noticed Plume has had an aggressive growth strategy since its launch. I've seen a lot of activity on Twitter. Could you share what this strategy looks like and what your key focus areas are?

• Chris: Absolutely. For us, it's very simple. We want anyone who thinks of RWAs to think of Plume. To do that, we need to be everywhere. We're very motivated and aggressive in our go-to-market strategy to be omnipresent. We want every protocol to be on Plume, every RWA product to be on Plume, and all RWA developers to think of us first.

• So, we focus across every protocol and ecosystem, different geographies, and different types of users—whether they're traders, speculators, or holders. We're everywhere all the time, and that's a crucial part of our strategy.

• Beyond that, we're more focused on specific use cases. The three key areas we're focusing on today are crypto use cases with an RWA twist. These include high-yielding, safe, yield-bearing assets; assets with robust secondary markets for trading, like Pokémon cards or sneakers; and speculation.

• We focus on everything globally, with particular interest in areas where RWAs are gaining traction. For instance, stablecoins are growing rapidly in regions outside the U.S., like Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. We build communities in these regions and listen to them, helping to find and make these assets easy to use on-chain.

Hazel: Could you give us a glimpse of one innovative RWA product you're working on to tokenize? You mentioned some interesting examples before.

• Chris: Sure. I'll talk about the speculative side, which I think is very exciting. One of our protocols lets you take out a leveraged long position—maybe 10x, 20x, or 40x—on Pokémon cards. That's a simple example of what can be done.

• If you extend that idea further, you could apply it to other things, like sneakers or even AI, where people are trading spot markets for GPUs. We could easily create a futures market around that, allowing people to speculate on the prices of GPUs as they fluctuate based on usage, volume, and demand.

• Even more interesting, you could speculate on something like crime rates. If you think crime rates are going up or down, you could create a market around that. We could pull real-world data onto the blockchain in a cryptographically secure, verifiable way, and build markets around that. You could speculate on CPI or other real-world indicators, making these a direct representation of those things.

• One of our protocols even lets you bet on culture. For example, you could take a long position on the U.S. and maybe short Europe. You'd create an index of different factors—CPI, population growth, etc.—and create a market around it.

• The idea is to make it easy to express ideas about the real world on-chain, in a way that's clean and straightforward.

• As a counterpoint, look at something like Worldcoin today. Worldcoin is a good example of an RWA not because of the physical orb scanning eyeballs, but because it's tied to Sam Altman. When Sam Altman gets fired, Worldcoin dumps. When he comes back, it pumps. These are proxies for what people want to speculate on.

• If you look at Ondo, it's a BlackRock proxy. Nvidia is an AI proxy today. But these are messy ways to do it. You shouldn't have to bet on Nvidia to bet on AI because there are many other factors involved. Similarly, on DexScreener, you shouldn't have to filter through 70 Trump tokens to find one with enough liquidity.

• There's a way to clean this up by bringing in real-world data and making the experience more straightforward. From there, you can create a ton of new, exciting markets that don't exist today.

Hazel: As we look ahead, what does the roadmap for Plume look like? I know you're having a testnet now—what's next in the next 6 months?

• Chris: Right now, we're focused on the community and transitioning our testnet success to the mainnet. That's our primary goal. We want to align all the necessary elements—assets, capital, and users—to ensure a seamless transition to the mainnet, where people can experience and access these things differently. We're midway through the testnet, and there's still work to do, but the mainnet is the next big milestone. After that, we'll continue expanding use cases, asset types, capital, and the network.

Hazel: We have an interesting question from the community. I've seen videos about potential airdrops—could you share if there's going to be a token and what its utility will be?

• Chris: Yes, there will definitely be a token, and we have a lot in the works. I'll give you a little preview. The main idea for the token is to make Plume the easiest way for people to get involved with real-world assets. If you're holding Plume or staking it and adding value to the network, you should be able to get exposure to all the different tokens, assets, and yields coming through the network. Through our launchpad and launchpools, we'll pool these assets, take some of the tokens and yields, and redistribute them to holders, so they get exposure to everything. Outside of that, there are many other ways to use the token within the network, which we'll talk more about in the future. But that's a simple example of what we're doing with the token.

Hazel: Do we have a timeline for the token?

• Chris: Not yet, but it's coming soon. We have the mainnet coming up, and things will follow from there. Stay tuned on our Twitter, Discord, and Telegram channels for more updates. We're excited to get this out there because there's clearly excitement from the community, and we want more people involved in what we're building.

Hazel: You mentioned the community a few times—what does the demographic of your community look like? Is there a specific pattern of interest in RWAs?

• Chris: It's a mix, really. We have a lot of RWA enthusiasts who have been involved in the community for a long time. We also have a broader crypto-native community. When we onboarded for the testnet, access was granted to existing community members, those in the broader RWA community, and partners like Celestia and other crypto communities. We've seen interest from all over the world—Asia, Africa, India, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America. Our community includes everyone from RWA enthusiasts to crypto traders and NFT collectors.

Sam: I have a question about the speculative market you discussed. It seems more like a zero-sum game, which doesn't really align with RWAs. It feels more like a prediction market. Isn't that something Polymarket does better?

• Chris: I think these things are complementary. Polymarket is a great product, but RWAs need underlying assets. Most of the proxy stuff, like speculation on Trump's speech or Worldcoin, is indeed a zero-sum game. If people want to bet, they might not need a real-world asset—it depends more on market dynamics.

Sam: Exactly. The speculative market feels like a prediction market, which is more about the odds and the dynamics of the order book, not really about RWAs.

• Chris: I get what you're saying. You're right to some extent. RWAs bring in new assets and capital inflows, while speculative markets can be zero-sum. But the difference with prediction markets is they address a small audience. They often focus on a specific binary event with a fixed timeframe, which can limit engagement. In contrast, crypto is more about short timeframes, volatility, and quick trades. So while it is a zero-sum game, we're focused on building tools and infrastructure to make it easy for people to access real-world data and create markets based on that. We're following user behavior and trying to improve the experience.

Hazel: We're almost out of time, so I want to thank you all for sharing your insights and joining us today. This has been a fantastic discussion, especially the part about the speculative markets. I think that’s all we have for today’s topic.

• Chris: Perfect. Thanks for having me—this has been a great conversation. Thanks, Sam, and thanks, Hazel, for joining and talking about this today. I always like hearing from others on these topics. If anyone has questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us anytime. We're always online, on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. Feel free to join and ping us anytime. We've got a lot of exciting stuff coming soon, so stay tuned for the testnet and upcoming mainnet.

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