As blockchain vies for mainstream acceptance this week in the halls of the United States Congress, a growing number of compliance-oriented crypto projects are hopeful that a more favorable regulatory environment could soon lead to a surge in blockchain-based RWAs, or real-world assets.
One such startup, Plume, has raised $10 million in seed funding for what it says will be the first layer-2 blockchain purpose-built for RWAs. The round was led by Haun Ventures and included participation from Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures.
Plume’s Ethereum-based blockchain is pitched as a one-stop shop for easily bringing off-chain assets onto blockchains, meaning the protocol helps people navigate the morass of paperwork, custodial requirements and other legwork required to bring things like real estate, art and certain kinds of financial instruments onto blockchains.
“The RWA industry is one of the fastest-growing verticals in crypto today but there remains a critical gap – to date there has not been a permissionless blockchain equipped with fullstack RWA infrastructure to deploy any asset class compliantly,” the company explained in a statement shared with CoinDesk. “The robust DeFi ecosystem on Plume enables users to do everything with RWAs – from earning yield, borrowing/lending, trading and speculating with leverage.”
Plume’s underlying technology is based on Arbitrum Nitro – a framework for building layer-2 “rollup” chains that write transactions to Ethereum quickly and with low fees. The tech should make it simple for the chain to interoperate and swap assets across other chains in the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem – a constellation of other rollups built using the same framework.
“When we started talking to protocols, everyone said the same thing: ‘It takes us anywhere between six months, a year, a year and a half, two years to actually get this asset on-chain before we can even write a single line of code for our protocol,'” Plume co-founder Chris Yin said in an interview with CoinDesk. “That’s just a ridiculous way to do things – it’s just duplicative work across every single protocol. We say, let’s standardize that.”
On Plume, “you have a very comprehensive set of features to actually tokenize an asset – meaning setting up your entity, filing the stuff, taking custody of the assets, doing wallets, automatic set-up, cap table management, on/off-ramping, [know-your-customer] – all of those things are baked in,” said Yin. “We just take these products, we integrate them and put a nice UI on it and make sure that it’s nicely modular.”
According to Yin, Plume currently has more than 80 projects deploying real-world assets onto its private test network. “Everything from collectibles, private credit, real estate – all these things are deploying on Plume,” he said.
Yin says Plume plans to open up its testnet to the public within “a month or so,” with a full release to follow later on.
