Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing

[AUDIO] Chris Yin: How Plume Network Is Leading the Real World Asset (RWA) Revolution in Crypto

Peter Abilla

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Summary

Chris Yin, co-founder and CEO of Plume Network, shares his journey from door-to-door sales to building one of the most promising Layer 2 solutions focused on Real World Assets (RWAs). He explains why every founder needs to master sales, especially when pitching investors and rallying users. The conversation dives deep into Plume’s mission to make RWAs—especially yield-bearing products like mineral rights—more accessible and useful on-chain. Chris also discusses Plume’s modular architecture, the influence of upcoming legislation like the Genius Act, and why grounding product development in real user needs is essential in a hype-driven market. Plume isn’t just building infrastructure—it’s building an ecosystem and community around the future of tokenized real-world value.

Takeaways

— Every founder is ultimately in sales—whether convincing users, investors, or partners.

— Door-to-door sales experience builds critical resilience and communication skills.

— Real World Assets (RWAs) are key to connecting crypto to real economic value.

— Plume focuses on making RWA interaction seamless for both users and developers.

— Yield-bearing products like mineral rights offer new on-chain investment opportunities.

— Tokenizing alternative assets can open access to previously untapped markets.

— Plume’s modular Layer 2 is designed for interoperability and easy asset transfer.

— The Genius Act could change how RWAs are treated under U.S. regulation.

— Community is central to Plume’s go-to-market strategy, not just tech.

— Staying grounded amid hype cycles is crucial for long-term success.

Timeline

(00:00) Introduction and personal note

(02:57) Sales skills and founder mindset

(05:48) What are Real World Assets (RWAs)?

(09:01) Who Plume is building for

(12:01) Why yield-bearing assets matter

(14:00) Deep dive: tokenizing mineral rights

(20:12) Examples of unique tokenized assets

(23:06) Modular architecture and cross-ecosystem plans

(28:04) Does crypto need another L1?

(29:01) The Genius Act and regulatory tailwinds

(30:58) The future of RWAs in America

(33:43) Plume’s evolving role in crypto

(35:23) Who are RWA holders, really?

(39:59) UX is the unlock for RWA adoption

(41:24) Partnership strategy in the RWA space

(45:18) Building community engagement

(48:34) Navigating hype with humility

(51:31) Reflections on crypto’s early days and future growth

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See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.

Chris Yen, co-founder and CEO of Plume Network. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me today, Peter. Appreciate it and looking forward to getting into it. Before we begin, just want to share my condolences about Eugene, your co-founder that passed recently. ah know, it's not often something like that happens to a startup and so I just want to offer my condolences. Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. mean, look, one of my co-founders and a key part of Plume and everything we've built so far. But I think we've been grateful that we have such a strong team and a great team to kind of jump in and fill in and just get back to it. And I think we've been grateful to have a bunch of people step up and everything. So I think we're proud of what we've done so far. And I think it's been great to have things keep going. But yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. You bet. I want to begin with your bio on your Twitter. It says you're a door-to-door RWA FI salesman. ah I love that because I actually think every young person needs to learn how to sell door-to-door ah because it teaches you so much. And so I want to hear about why you describe yourself as that, and then we'll get into Plume. Totally. Look, I think I think like you said, right, every founder and I think every real executive, to be honest, outside of the founder is a salesperson. Like you're shilling no matter what. Right. And whether it's to investors, whether it's to to to users, whether it's to to LPs, we're always selling something, you know. And so think that's part of it. And I think to me, the statement on door to door one, I think I've done door to sales as a kid, you know, and I think sounds like some of you two are like, you know, people have and like, think the beautiful thing about door to door sales is there's just no there is, it's a game of like sort of energy and velocity and volume, you know, which is like, you know, it's less targeted, you know, than perhaps something super narrow, right? You're just going out and banging the doors and just getting everyone aware and like going out there and you got to go from one thing to the other and you're probably going to get 99 % of the people to tell you to leave, you know, like they have no interest, but you can eventually hook somebody and when you do, it's awesome, you know, and I feel like it's a statement for us to me, at least about where the market is part of us today. Right? Which is I often find that I'm doing kind of like, hey, have you heard of the good Lord? You know, like that kind of stuff to like the art of the arts, you know, and like I'm like the jealous when it's passing out pamphlets, you know, and give people to understand what's going on. because we are like real believers, that is the thing. And I think people are beginning people are OK, I've heard of it. You know, I don't really, you know, I don't really know what's going on. But like, it seems like it makes sense to me. I see a bunch of big logos and names and stuff. But what's going on? And so I think it's really a lot of like evangelizing. It's a lot of getting people to understand. It's a lot of like, you know, a lot of that. And so I think it's sort of like high velocity, high volume, I'm out there in the streets relentlessly about it. And I think um it's very much like, think we need to get a lot of people into the bus, in so many words. And that's how we do it. It's just sort of broad-based, I'll hit everybody out there and talk to anyone anytime about it and to make it work. So that's how I think about it and why I phrased it that way. No, I love it. think every person should learn how to sell door to door. And in fact, I want to even go further. think every young person learns, needs to learn how to work commission only. And like the lessons that that will teach you is pretty amazing because it puts everything together, right? You have to learn about the product that you're selling. You have to learn about how to sell. You have to learn about customer service. I mean, it's just, it's, the lessons are, are very broad and um can really uh teach someone how to grow up quickly. Let's get it. Absolutely. That's exactly right. And it's such an underappreciated skill, know, sales is in crypto. And we definitely need more of that. Let's get into Plume. um You've described You've described Plume as the first modular L2 purpose built for real world assets. So a bunch of kind of buzzwords there. So maybe help describe what a real world asset is. I think the audience knows what layer twos are, but maybe describe kind of like the architecture. Not too technical, but kind of give us a sense of kind of like what Plume network is built on and kind of like what's underneath it. Yep. So a couple things. Starting with RWAs, right? we get to do this. So actually, have a lot of a we have an L2L, we've got a lot of stuff in the investors. So we'll get to that in a second. But maybe starting with RWAs. What are RWAs and what are we doing here, right? I think of, like you said, RWAs, any three-letter acronym is bound to be a useless term, right? And that's kind of where it's happened, unfortunately, for RWAs, right? That's kind of where we are today, right? I think people don't know what it means. People sort of hear buzzwords. They hear BlackRock, they hear Larry Fink, they hear this, the numbers, blah, blah, right? And things going up, T-bills, right? I think the thing that matters the most for RWAs and the thing that we think about is how do we make it easy to interact with the real world on chain, right? And our view has always started with this. It started with a more crypto native perspective. I think a lot of people come to this from an academic point of view, which is, you know, if you look at assets today and the sort of way things flow in the real world, You could sort of solve a lot of these problems around coordination and all these things with the blockchain, which I think it makes sense. I get it and I think it is true. But we came out to this more from an end user view, which is look like we prefer, and I've always loved how to do things on chain and what to do here. You click around and you make things work, you interact with people all over the world. It's permissionless, open. People are just sort of building things that I haven't think about them and have to get permission. I've always loved this open innovation around these things, the composability. And but we're limited by what we could do. So we wanted to get into the real world and bring more of that type of stuff. And the added benefit is you bring in lots of users and money and capital and all kinds of things. And so that's where we started. And so when we think about RWAs today, what I think about is how do you interact with a real thing, something that has a physical tie on the blockchain? And uh the simplest way that people manifest that is you take something physical and you tokenize it and you have a receipt that lives on chain. um And so the classic example people use is something like a Pokemon card or like T-bills, right? Or when you're taking this thing and you meant a one-to-one representation, you put that on change, right? For us, right, I think a little bit more broadly in that, right? I think it's about interacting with anything in the real world. And that can be concepts, can be ideas, right? I think it's about touching things in the real world and allowing us to touch the real world through clicking buttons, right? And so that can be concepts. It can be ideas. It can be synthetic versions of different. Right doesn't have to be a physical version of XYZ. So for example, you know, you could do um Like cultures, right we have a protocol called cultured right now I've said this a bunch of times like cultured allows you to speculate on different aspects of culture, right? So if you're for example, you think that's sort of like broad sentiment for the the US is going up, know, and maybe the sentiment for like, you know, uh Australia is going down or something, right? You could like love long and love short it right? What is that? Right? The US is not it wouldn't tokenize America You know, what we did is you take a collection of data points and fees about America and you sort of weight them properly and turn them into a representation of what that is. Right. So I'd say a digital, synthetic version of America, right. And wait, and how you can now interact with that, right. On chain as well. Right. And so that's kind how I think about this. And I think it's, it's, you've seen this manifest in different ways, you know, and so that's how we think about RWA today. RWA today, uh in the blockchain world and the crypto to interact with different aspects of the reward. Click buttons and things in the real world happen and express your ideas about what's going on around you through the blockchain, right? Whereas other things, BTC, ETH, whatever, those are sort of crypto native assets and they live in their own little world, right? ah That's largely untethered. And so we want to bring those two things together, overlay them, mix and match and have them live in one universe for us all to interact with. So I can bounce back and forth between holding... holding state needs or BPC. We're then moving into holding chairs. restaurant. Or if I'm bullish on uranium, think, you know, nuclear is going up, I can just switch into that. Or if I want to switch into Farcoin, because I think that's going up, I can rotate that. So just having this in a single playing field and a seamless experience going back and forth between all these different things, which is what people do today already. People already rotate between crypto and the real world, right? But the sort of the rails that do that are very, very painful and slow and complicated, right? And so what we're trying to is just improve the user experience around what people are already doing. That's I've always felt to make things happen. You sort of follow the user and make things better that way. So that's our view on it. So we have a tremendous amount of stuff up there today. It's tokenized assets, the classic way, which is we have things like T-bills. You have things like real estate. We have things like Pokemon cards. You have things like tokenized funds. uh So maybe like a private credit fund or something that you've tokenized and put in so someone can interact with that fund by buying it. But you also have concepts, right? And things like that. You have air rights. You have a sentiment. You have all kinds of things like that as well. And you mix and match all things together to create new things. I think one of the challenges when people think of RWAs or real world assets on chain is that it's such a broad universe. um I think most people's brains kind of have to focus. And so I wonder about Plume, you guys, you go to market, if you guys have approached kind of like a have a domain specific approach or a vertical specific approach versus everything. um Maybe tell us about that. I think you're totally right, by the way. While I say everything, and we do have virtually everything, the focus is not that. um I see Plume as a broad ecosystem in which we want to let 1,000 flowers bloom, and people can do whatever they want. And I think that's great, and that's how I want to keep it. um That being said, I think the other side of it is we want to make sure that we apply our go-to-market efforts around certain categories at the right time. and where things are taking off, where things are going. And so I think about this usually in terms of audience, right? Meaning who are we serving and starting there is what ends up being the things that we focus on right now, right? And if you look today, there's sort of two broad views in the RWA world, right? One is that we are exporting crypto, the blockchain, smart contracts, all of that over to the real world. We want people in the real world to interact with these things and to utilize them and to get value out of them. That's one view and I don't think it's a wrong view, but that's one. The other side is our view, which is where is the market today and what's happening right now? And I see the world of people on chain and what people are doing for us as the on chain audience. So we focus on crypto natives as a starting point. Doesn't mean it's exclusively that we work with plenty of trad folks. We work with web two people and all that, but we start with crypto natives because I think they're here now. Right. And they're using it they, they, and again, it's going back to how we started plume. We thought life was better on chain and we prefer life on chain. So we want to build products that mimic that experience. Right. And so we start here with people that are affiliated with that. So that's where we started. So where does that actually lead to go to market wise? Right. I think it leads to what do people on chain like to do today? Right. That's the question. And as that audience changes away from today, which is like farmers and DGENs and like, you know, international folks to then you get a broad swath of maybe normies or whatever coming in. The mix of things that they're going to want is also going to change. But today, what is it still? It's going to be yield farming, right? It's making money, right? It's trading, it's speculation, right? And it's also using leverage and derivatives, right? And that tends to be what we do today on chain. So we find products and protocols and assets that fit those categories that have a similar feel and bring those things. What is that today? Right? You look at yield farming, it ends up being right. One of the big things that disciple is going on a stable farm. people love holding stables and farming points and farming stable rewards and T-bills are a whole thing. 5 % turns out 5 % is a of money. I think people in crypto sometimes forget that when we see 10,000 for the IPUIs, that 5 % in real cash is money. Mm-hmm. We find assets like that. So we work with T-VILS. We work with CLO providers. That's 6%, 7.5%. We have private credit. That's 7, 8, 9. You have things like mineral rights. It's one of the more interesting ones, I think. We work with a company called Mineral Vault. And what they have is royalties on oil wells in America. And the beautiful thing about oil and special oil wells is in Texas, they call it mailbox money. Because you own one, the money just comes in every month because it does one thing and one thing only. oil into dollars, right? That's all it is. Right. And so, you know, being able to access that flow. And if you're bullish on oil, you can now just swap into this token. You can stake stables and get access to this thing. Right. And now you're earning between, you know, 15 to 18 % APY, right? On a very regular basis paid on monthly. It's fully liquid. can get in and out anytime. Right. So that's the story for these assets. I think a lot of our initial focus, which is what do people want on chain? What are the unique attributes of RWAs you can't get on chain? A lot of people say that yields on chain are better than off chain yields. Right. And think it's true for the most part, you know, ah but it depends on two things, timing in the market where things are, because when things are bad, they're bad, you know, and number two is size, right? Most things in crypto is actually not that much size, you know, so if you want to do real size in crypto, you can't really do it on chain in any safe way, right? And so you have to go off chain, right? And, and, and so that to me is where we are, we are coming in. That's also why RDB is important because by bringing off chain yields, And I believe that economics drive everything, right? And behavior drives behavior. And so if you're bringing in off-chain yields, that's how we grow crypto reliably every single day, because we're constantly bringing in more money and more people and more users into this thing. And money and liquidity drives behavior, right? So that's our belief in our flow. So right now, we focus on yield-bearing products that are simple, straightforward, right? And have a crypto feel, right? We can make them liquid. We can make them usable. We can make them composable, right? There are less of the onerous securities rules around them for now, right? And so you can make them more accessible, right? And think about the global audience for this type. So that's what we focus on today, but that will change over time as well. know, as more people come in, you know, we'll focus more on cards or, you know, toys, real estate or whatever. But to me, it's easy things that are, you can rotate into. Let's take one of these yield bearing products. You've established that that's initially the focus right now is yield bearing products. Let's take the mineral rights one. Maybe walk the user or the audience through what it takes to put a mineral right on chain and how people can participate and benefit from that. Yes, totally. So look, it's actually a very complicated thing, right? And the whole point of Plume and one of our key protocols, Nest, is to simplify that all down to two clicks, right? um Now, the actual process of this, now let's take Mineral Vault. What is Mineral Vault? Mineral Vault, is a company, it's a fund really, that owns a collection of, I think it's about 2,500 different oil producing wells in America, right? Mostly in Texas, but all over the place. Right. So you've got a bunch of wells sitting there and a company that owns the title and owns the deed. Right. But that particular well. Right. Now, what they do now is they rent those out to companies like Exxon and companies like, you know, other companies that deal with oil, deal with extraction, deal with refining and all that kind of stuff. Right. And get that ultimately to the end user. Right. So they lease those out to people. And so for them, the reason why it's a good thing is two things. One is you're doing less of the operational heavy work. You're not actually mining yourself. You're not actually doing all this stuff. It's heavy and it's hard work and it's a lot of operating costs. You really have to think about the operations of that business at point, number one. Number two is then um looking at um just purely royalties. When you look purely at royalties, all you have to do is just lease it out. And not only do you get a base payment, you get some upside in whatever comes in. You take a small sliver of it. And so that's what it is today. That's the fund at a very basic level. Right now, how do you tokenize that? There are a bunch of different ways to do this, but the way that these guys have done it at least is what you're doing is taking a share of those funds. A fund really is just like a company. You have X number of shares. Let's just say 1,000 shares. You take 20 % of those and you move them into a new entity. A standalone SPV is an example. SPV is a special purpose vehicle. It's a special company designed just to hold those shares. And then what you can do is you can then mint tokens one to one against those shares, or maybe two to one or whatever you define. And then now this entity, the reason it's separate is now it's bankruptcy remote and protected. And so there's no way to have it mixed up and have it like, you just know that this legal entity, you can watch it and just sit there and do nothing but house those shares. And it should then tell you how many tokens are emitted out of that. And then those tokens get circulated to people within crypto. from there because those shares own shares of the fund on a regular basis, let's call it in this case monthly, right? When those royalty checks come in, if you've got 20 % of the shares here, 20 % of the royalties go into a bank account controlled by this entity, right? And it holds there like a treasury. And then the yields that come out and get minted against that as well, right? And so you can constantly see how the flow from the off-chain world goes into a special purpose vehicle, right? That then emits tokens as receipts for people on-chain to use. And so then you can redeem them for the underlying. You can then buy them and take the staples out, whatever you want or whatever you want to do with it. But that's the idea behind how this actually works. As an end user in crypto, today there's a couple ways to do it. There's two ways to do anything. One is if you want to actually own the underlying shares. um And to do that, you need to KYC. You need to do all kinds of owner-of-stuff. And it feels almost like a trad experience. You have to go fill out bunch of paperwork and wait two weeks. to do this. You got to hold the phone up and take a picture of your passport. It's the whole thing. Right. And usually you're gated by a bunch of things. You can be a credit investor, which is 200K minimum, right. In annual salary, right. Or you need to hold, um you know, million bucks liquid. Or sometimes he asks you to be QP'd, qualified purchaser, which is a $5 million liquid balance in a bank account somewhere. Right. It's a very restrictive and prohibitive to most people. Right. And so what we can also do is through Nest is the other way, which is you can own the economic interest without owning the underlying. Right. Which means you can mint a receipt token against that. It's very much die and s die. Right. Like now you can hold a version of this token and get the yield from it. Right. On a regular basis without having to do all the nonsense, you know. So that's kind of the idea. So as an end user, what we're trying to do mimic the end user experience in crypto. If you want to do anything today, you go to a swap, right? You copy, copy a contract address, right? If you're good, you maybe go to token sniffer, make sure it's not a rug. Right. And then you go to a, to a, to an AMM, you put in the contract address, you, you hit the same thing, right? There's a two and a from you swap and you're in and out. You're good to go. Now you hold that token. Right. We're trying to make that experience for RWA. Whereas today, it's this whole process behind the scenes, setting the entity up, the whole thing, KYC and QP, blah, blah. The entire, it takes months to do that. Right. What we've done is taken that entire thing, abstracted it away. So now as an end user, you can go to nest, right. And you can literally go and see the mineral vault vault, right. And then decide to say, look, I'm going to take, you know, 10 stables, $10 stake it in here and I'll get $10 worth of mineral tokens back. And then every single month I'm now accruing yield against that coming. from a button. So I've clicked one button and now I own a share and I'm getting money from an oil well somewhere in Texas. So that's kind of the idea. It's to use cryptography, to use crypto, to use these different structures to create a trust and provable way to access these things through just clicking buttons. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I'm envisioning really a two-sided market. On the one side, you've got kind of like the tokenizing operations, which is really a very complicated process, includes operations, legal, et cetera. And to get the tokenized assets on chain, which includes creating an SPV for it. And then on the other side, you've got people that want to trade those assets. Is that about right? When I think of uh Plume, okay. That's right. That's very, very interesting. I've talked to other projects in the RWA space and they really run the gamut from uh tokenizing like physical stuff and then, but they don't quite get into the trading. um And then there's some that tokenize physical stuff like, uh you know, life insurance. then they create some kind of tokenized version of it uh that becomes tradable. I met with a project called alo.xyz and um they're very interesting because they have SPVs for everything. And then you can then invest in the SPV. And one of the interesting, uh more interesting use cases that they had an SPV for was uh they created a special purpose vehicle. They tokenized it and then people could invest in it. And the... primary purpose of that SPV was to buy really, really old olive trees in Israel. uh I'm curious if you've seen anything like that for Plume, like just really unique ah kind of tokenized assets. of, yes, all kinds of stuff. mean, um two things I think that always come to mind that I talk about. um Number one is camels. I use this one a lot because it's more esoteric. But camel farming is the whole thing. um Camels, you know, it turns out there's like a yield on camels too, right? Both from a built, but like a racing and stuff like that. And so like, anyway, you know, we've seen this thing where like, you know, you can access and hold a portion of a camel token, right? That sort of represents a share of a camel farm. You can even go down to the individual camel. And then again, there's different yields based on like their race and the person they're getting, and then also different things they're producing. So there's all kinds of stuff around camel farming. That's like one thing that we didn't really get into before. That's one that I think is kind of interesting. Number two is durians. know, there's a data durian is another project. Data durian is, they do durian farms, you know, and uh durians are apparently highly profitable. so like they worked very well and you know, pretty straightforward. And it's not something easy to get access to. So if you're just like bullish durians, I don't even know how you get exposure today. You know, but now through plume and through these things, you push a button and get access to durian farm and hold a share in that thing, right? Same thing with camels. If you were just like, look, I just think camels are the next horse, you know, or whatever it might be, or maybe they already are. Now you can hold a hold of part of that. you think, a camel racing is a thing. I want to get into some of the action. You know, now you can't, you know. So like there's a bunch of stuff like that. That's like super esoteric that I always love talking about because it's just hilarious. And I think it's also like you just learn so much about other things you never had and never never knew before, you know. So definitely. I can think of so many. I mean, the durian farm example is super interesting. And I was thinking of a joke to make about durians, but it escaped me. anyway, um let's talk about the architecture of Plume. um I think it's been described somewhere that it's a modular layer too. But maybe if you can explain that for us, um or if I get that wrong. So no, no. So the story's evolved over time and we continue to add to it, right? As we discover new things in the market, we continue to add. So today, there's multiple parts of Plume, right? The initial piece is an L2. Yes, it's an Arbitrum-based L2, right? We sell it down to Celestra. It's a whole thing, right? The classic way of doing things. And it's our execution layer, right? In tandem, we've also built an L1. Mmm. we have not fully like released yet, right? It's in a private test net right now that we're working on um and there's a bunch of reasons as to how that works. But the idea is to sort of, it really is two things. One is there are a lot of things that are inherent in custom to RWAs that need a lot of customization for, right? If you look at things like compliance, you look at things like KYC, and to do these things in an actual trustless, right? um And a decentralized way. is a thing that hasn't been done before. If you look at Tether, the biggest article is the stablecoins. If you look at Tether, you look at Circle, these are centralized operations today. They are not decentralized products. If you look at things, most of RWA is just fetching something from the real world and bring it on chain, which involves a tremendous amount of coordination and trust. And today, so we lean on big names to be sure. That's why you lean on BlackRock. to sell you the T-Bail fund because they're probably not gonna rug you, right? But they could anytime. The truth is you'd never know, right? ah Today, and so how do you coordinate this stuff? And so it's the integration of the token and the network and all kinds of stuff. um That to me is uh what the focus is and how we have this L1 is coming to play as well. We'll share more about that in the upcoming months, right? Because our view has always been very simple, right? We think life is better on chain and we want to grow crypto. I think most ecosystems and networks are really focused on growing themselves. And our view is that we want to grow all of crypto. And ideally, if we do that, Plume grows as well. And so that's why we're very interested in building this architecture in a modular way that allows other networks to use them. I think we're one of the few networks, if not the only one, that are very interested and focused on working with lots of networks. We're close with a bunch of teams. We're one of the only chains, I think, in the beginning to come out with a bridging product. with a partnership with Layer Zero to do something we call Skylink. And allows us to sort of bridge these yields to different ecosystems. So Solana, Injective, I think over 70 different chains, we have another 15 in the pipeline we haven't announced yet. But we've got a bunch of them that are coming together for this reason. And it's to make it easy to access everywhere. And so part of that architecture is the L1 as well, to kind of put these two things together so people can not only access the underlying services. but actually get access to the assets as well in the use cases, right? And packaging up in a way for people to get. If you are just deep in the Solana ecosystem, right? There's no point for me to try and take them and bring them to Plume. You should stay there and do your thing. And if you want to be there, now let me bring it to you. And let's also do it in a way where Solana gets the value. They can get the TV, they get the, that's fine with me, right? Again, we want to grow crypto, right? And that's the point. And I think too much of crypto today is people fighting over the same 10,000 users, or whatever it might be, right? We're very focused on the entirety of the world. and bringing everyone else on. And so if we could be the front door, bring people in and they come to Plume and they stay here, great, God bless. And if we want to come in and them everywhere else, that's okay with me too. Like to me, it's about just really greasing the tires and making it easy. And I'm a big believer that this is one of the few areas that's a very, very net positive versus zero sum. And so that's our focus and how we think about the architecture for what we're building. It's to serve this larger purpose and to serve all ecosystems and not just us and it requires the coordination of the L1, the execution environment, the L2 and allowing this asset to flow around many places while still providing the security and guarantees of crypto today. So a lot more to come on that and we'll share more in the upcoming months. But we have multiple environments that's I think not as clear as it should be to the market, but multiple environments that we interact with today. Yeah, it sounds like, know, as currently as a layer two, you've kind of hit some bottlenecks or constraints and which is leading you to think maybe like having our own L1 could better serve the customer. And especially as we grow and work with other ecosystems, this layer one might be the better architecture for that. That's right. we we we've been planning on it for some time. Right. And so so, definitely. I agree with you. You know, we've I think we realized fairly early on that we needed to do this. And so the thing that we came to was having this interplay between both and having ultimately, you know, L2L1 truly doesn't matter. Right. What we're trying to build is an R2B ecosystem and have this embedded into Plume and embedded into all of crypto and using the best tools at hand. Mm-hmm. work. And today I think it is a combination of both, so for sure. So we have both. We'll be talking lot more about the L1 shortly. ah But yes, that's what it is. And I like that approach because it's coming from a real need. Like you had this key insight that having our own chain will help us better serve our customers. And approaching it from that perspective versus just out of thin air, just creating an L1 for no reason, uh I think motivations matter. And I think the motivation that you guys are uh working from. is really from a customer need. And I think that's really admirable. um I noticed you were in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago and uh the Genius Act passed yesterday. Tell us maybe your view on that and how the Genius Act potentially could change RWA going forward. Yeah, huge moment. I I think it's hard to really encapsulate how, like what's happening in words, you know, without having seen it myself. And like you hear about it, you get a sense. But, you know, Teddy and I were fortunate to, in our GC, Salman, who recently came, he was at the SEC before. uh And so, you know, we recently went to uh DC to meet with the crypto task force, to meet with Treasury. You know, we put out some stuff here. So we actually got to meet Secretary Besant and JD Vance and talk about these things as well. and talk about future of crypto in America and how these things are going to play out and how this goes. And I think, you know, it's always, you know, refreshing to like, you know, not go there because you're you're getting a Wells notice, but because you're actually talking about how to do these things in tandem with the US, you know, and the stable act, or the genius, excuse me, is is a huge part of it and a huge beginning piece of it. I think it's I think it's multiple things to get. think the strategic reserve is one the stable act markets. Sure. All these things kind of come together, really paint a story about where we're going. Right. Which is allowing crypto to to be a centerpiece in the US, um and stable coins to be the starting point. I think it's one of the few places we've seen the government really um begin to understand how to think about the future and not a regulatory capture first way, which is American dominance. The US dollar is uh an incredible product, and allowing that to flow through the stable coins and to follow user behavior. And then to enable policy to kind of flow with that, think is a really, really big deal. You know, and when you talk to these folks, think the thing that was striking to me was I think they're very wary and cognizant of making sure that we are breeding an environment that enables competition, that favors new things versus protecting incumbents, right? And allowing new things come to market. So I think it's just really hard to understand. And again, I sometimes forget how big of a change it is. Today, crypto is a three trillion dollar asset class. It's just not that big. you know, relatively speaking. And of that two thirds of it is BTC that just sits there and does nothing for the most part, right? And so you're looking at about a third. So let's look at one trillion in assets today, right? In crypto. And it's this whole industry that we've been, we're all a part of, right? And I always say, BlackRock alone is a $12 trillion asset manager. So one company is 12 X all of those sort of movable assets within crypto, four X all of crypto in one company. Right. And, you know, in the US, have hundreds of thousands of these companies, you know, like, and so it's hard to really encapsulate when we allow that money flow to come in. We allow those users to come in. We allow them to interact in in crypto. Like, it's very hard to put it towards how insane it's going to get, you know, and where we are in the cycle. You know, like today, it's easy to get caught up in the day to day mechanics of price and where things are. But if you zoom out just a little bit and just look at the broad dynamics, and it's the reason why I think crypto is exciting. It's the only area with Alpha left in my opinion. You know, like it's a very simple dynamic. There are very small amounts of stuff encrypted today and the rules around this are all fucking sending in more things in. It will only get bigger, you know, and so you just have to get positioned and get ready for and crit your teeth through it. Today we've got all kinds of nonsense going on. War and tariffs and all kinds of stuff. And it creates a lot of short term turbulence. But at end of the day, like I could not be more bullish where things are going with the genius act passing right with market structure on the corner with the strategic reserve, all these things out there like it's very it's very much signaling and from my conversations, they're acting directly and aggressively to make this happen and think about us in a global way. Because I think the secondary effect, which has also been very profane to see, Plume has always been a very global company as well. We have people in the Middle East and in Asia, all over the place. work with these different geographies. And the thing that's happened with this is with America getting their act together around this and being more aggressive, all these other governments have really sprung into shape as well. Right. So you see Abu Dhabi, you see Dubai, which has always been on the leading edge of it, really also get very aggressive about it. You see Hong Kong, I may you see Singapore, I may ask, you see these different areas and these different countries really start to push for the stable coin bill in Hong Kong passed on the long go. Right. And so you're seeing all these things begin to happen in a very aggressive way. Right. Because they're all trying to get to the ball first. And I think that's going to be huge. You know, like the sort of the confluence of all these things coming together is just it's hard to to to articulate like what's going to happen here. But, know, we're really turning on the spigot here. And that's going to just cause all kinds of stuff when you combine that with the sort of open sort of innovation of crypto, a bunch of developers all around the world doing things, a bunch of humans everywhere clicking buttons, and man, it's going to be nuts, you know, and it's going to be very, very positive. And what role do you see plume playing in that future world going from, three trillion asset class of crypto to whatever, maybe doubling or tripling in the next five to 10 years? Yeah, I mean, I think we're go much bigger than that. But I agree with you, like, what do we play in this? Right? Like, I think there's two ways to look at this. Number one is, I a lot of people think there's gonna be like one chain that rules it all, or like one dominant chain. Right? And people tend to people tend to think that today, right? They're sort of like, you know, there's Solana, there's this and this, like, it's like a handful of things, right? My view is this, where it's like, I think you're gonna have hundreds of thousands of millions of chains in the future. You know, and it's going to be everywhere. Right. And how do we want to where do we want to be in that we want to help enable this future to be in there. We want to be somewhere in between both. We are people our whole company are people that come from crypto. Right. So we understand the nature and we understand what's going on in crypto and how to build products for the audience. That's why today, if you look at RWA XYZ, we've been out for a little bit less than two weeks on Maynet. Right. And we have uh we flipped Ethereum as like two or three days ago as the number one holder, the number one chain for RWA holders right out there. So Ethereum has about 70,000, I think we have 95,000 now. And number three is 7,000. And then after that, it drops down tremendously. So because we've designed this way, we understand what the crypto user wants. We're able to actually get people to use these products and hold these products. And so when you think about that, that's what we want to do is help the real world understand how to design things for crypto versus trying to mold crypto to the real world. And so that's a mix of regulation. helping them shape policy. That's why we have Salman and RGC who comes from the SEC, comes from Chain Analysis, comes from Uniswap who knows how to do these things. Right. Number one, I guess building great products, right. Being international in that sense. Right. And I think number three is that not just working on our own ecosystem, our own ecosystem is meant to bootstrap these things, but then also work with every other ecosystem to help get these asses in the right place. It's very, very early still for most people. I think like you said, most people don't even know what RWEs are. Right. And that applies. to crypto people and applies to the crypto builders in our database a lot of times. It's still very early. People are just figuring out the contours of our database are not the same as crypto. So how do you put these things together to build protocols that work for both? There's still a lot to do there and that's where we wanna come into play as a constituent that understands both sides very well. I can go to Capitol Hill, but I can also, I can be a Discord and TG, aping, aping shiters with the rest of you. And the idea is to be able to do both and thread the needle to really bring this all together. You alluded to a chart that you shared on your Twitter. So the RWA holders, of June 16th, two days ago, there were 79,159 RWA holders. What does that mean for the layperson? What is a RWA holder? yes, totally. Look, when we talk about holders today, when we talk about adoption, right, for RWAs on chain today, I think a lot of people talk about dollars, right, which is how many dollars are flowing into this ecosystem, right? And how many RWAs are here, right? Now, the thing about dollars is this. It doesn't map to adoption at all. ah It's a proxy, right? But you can have, and we know this with crypto, you can have one person spit up 100 wallets. and dump $100 million into these assets. And now it looks like $100 million, right, on chain, but it's still one person, right? And so it's a mixture of these. None of these things are perfect metrics, just to be clear, right? But it's a mixture in a combination. It's both dollars, but utility and wallets and transaction. You look at all those things. And I think for us, it's going to evolve as well. The first phase of what we care about at Plume is number of holders. One, we got to get these products into the hands of people. Number two, then make them use them in the right way. and help them understand. Number three is to get builders to then build with them. So there's multiple phases. in the first one right now. And so the intention by building this network and customizing the ecosystem to fit this way is to get real RWAs in the hands of users today. Most people in crypto do not hold RWAs at all. They're holding ETH, BTC, they're holding crypto native assets. They're not actually, if you count, you factor out the stable coin as an example, the stable coin definitely has great adoption. But RWAs, T-bills, CLOs, know, a mineral vault, whatever, like all these things out there, right? All of that alone, there are no holders. So if you go to that same chart and go RWXYZ and click through, everyone is just holding T-bills. You know, you've got 2,000, and it's a surprising number. Every single chain somehow has 2,000 people holding T-bills, you know? And so it's just smells a little strange, know? Versus us, I think the idea is to have a plurality of people, right, using this thing, small, large, and all kinds of assets, not just T-bills. You've got T-Bills, but we have mineral vaults. I mean, one of our projects, Mineral Vaults, we got yesterday, there are 600,000 holders of oil royalties in America. And on chain in two weeks now, we've got 40,000 now. They're almost 10%. And so that's just the beginning of how this can evolve. And that's why this is exciting. And so today on Plume already, we've got people holding private credit, you've got people holding mineral vaults, you've got people holding CLO funds, you've got people holding PayFi instruments. Right. And doing our jobs between these different places. So like you have all these different products that people are holding, right. Because we were able to customize the experience to what people are used to doing on chain. Right. It's not just TradFi on chain where you're doing the same thing. You log into a portal, you got a KYC. It's not that, right. It's the same experience that we used to go there, state stables, earn yield. Right. And if you want to take that with you and do something else, go into Morpho, which is also on Plume, right. Go there and take out a loan against it, do something else or loop against it if you want. All these things are possible or go to Satori or Wifi or PerpStacks and use that as collateral, right? And then go take out a position somewhere else. But this way you're always able to hold and rotate in and out of these things in a very simple, easy and accessible way, right? And so that's why I think it matters. And that's why I care about these holder numbers is because if we've done the experience right, right? Then people will come in. You and I both know this. I used to work in Web2 as a PM, right? And as a product manager. And every single click is a huge drop off. right in adoption, right? And the number one thing that really ruins adoption is KYC, you know, and these like onerous forms and all this stuff. if the bar to actually use any RWAs is you have to have $5 million liquid and you got to sit through a two hour like process to get on chain, right? To sort of qualifying, get your KYC up. Like you're going to lose 99 % of the world, you know? And so that's the intention for us is to mold these products in the way that cryptical can consume. And I think we've been really excited and glad to see that I think we've struck that. You know, in the beginning, you know, now we, you know, again, I think we're at 90, 90,000 plus today. We're going to cross a hundred by the weekend. I'm sure, you know, and so, you know, that means if we look at the number of RWA holders in totality on chain, we'll be over half, we'll just be on Plume alone, right? And then the rest scattered across a hundred networks, you know? And so to me, that's the important thing. If we want to focus on adoption and usage, then we have to start with the number of holders and who's doing what, right? And the reason why adoption usage is important is this, is Ultimately, what you're trying to do for the asset issuer, right? And if you want to bring great products on chain, make them useful because there's an adverse selection issue, right? Historically, bringing things on chain have always been the worst products. You couldn't find money, you couldn't do in the real world, right? So you brought it here. That's why the last cycle was all a bunch of nonsense, know, like things that would just bad deals or whatever, right? It was like things that you couldn't get, right? Like people didn't want, so they tried to shill it here, right? Now, if you want good products to come here, to make use of it, you need to provide value to those businesses. It's very simple. If I'm BlackRock, the reason I'm deploying Biddle and my money market fund on chain is because I want to access new customers. I want to grow my AUM. I want to have new flows. I want to make money in new ways and access and reach new people. And so that's the first step. If, sure, BlackRock can say, look, we got $100 million from XYZ chain, but it's one user that sits there and does nothing. It's just not enough. They don't care. For us, it's really about how do we show them that you can access a whole new set of people um and do it in interesting and new ways that they couldn't do before. That to me is how we really build the flywheel. Now on the site, and I think this is probably related, and by the way, I agree with you. It's like getting those holders is super key and is one of the more important metrics I think in the RWA space. Another one that I'm looking at is under ecosystem on plume.org, you have 200 plus uh partners with some of the biggest names in both crypto and TradFi. So Nest, Ondo, which is you know, highly respected on Wall Street, SuperState, Centrifuge, Mercado Bitcoin, Paxos, Layer Zero. uh Tell us from their perspective, Anchorage Digital, uh why would they work with Plume? I think it comes down to this. think one, ultimately, it's focus, right? You know, for each of these folks, um you know, we are focused on this area, right? Which means, and how does that manifest itself? It ultimately leads to distribution. That's kind what we focus on, right? We make it easy for people to get these products in hands of other people, right? People, I think we're still in phase one of this where people just used to be capital commits, right? um But again, this number proves and shows how we can get these people out here. is like you can actually be able to hold this and build your customer base and build a user base for this thing. And so each of these constituents has different reasons as to why. Leia Zero has its own reasons. We believe in an omnichain future as well and a sort chain abstracted future, really, despite us building multiple blockchains. We think that's going to disappear. So working with them is for a reason. Anchorage, providing customers and their holders some way to access differentiated yields is a whole thing. um you know, and other networks, know, like SuperState is for them to reach different products. SuperState today, right, has a few holders, right, but through us, we've embedded SuperState products, both oh their basis product and the Teeble product into our vaults. So, you know, through our N alpha vault today, which is a combination of things, which includes a SuperState product, right, Teeble product, we've got over 30,000 holders. And so now they've got, you know, 30,000 holders of that product, you know, in a way that they haven't done before. So really distribute that much more broadly, right, to get that out there. So that's the reason why. that we have and we're able to work with these folks. think there's many to come. know, I'm taking it for granted. We're very grateful that we get to work with them and learn from them as well. I think just like I said, I think crypto, especially RWA is a net is not a zero sum business, right? So we're really focused on continuing to grow all this and working in tandem, learning with them and building new things together. You know, so ah I think there's just a lot to do here and then we're grateful to get a chance to do it. You know, we've talked about the various audiences, right? So you've got the traders on the one side. You've got the, you know, for lack of a better term, kind of a backroom operations where you tokenize real world assets, get it on chain, which is really a very complicated process. um And then you've got these partners that offers, you know, to a degree you've kind of white listed these partners on the Plume site. so that traders can have access to their products. How do you think about the crypto community that does not fit in any of these uh pockets? know, maybe they're just big fans of Plume, maybe they own the token, but they're not necessarily participants in any of the areas that I've already described. How do you think about them and... uh And how do they play in the kind of a, I don't know how to describe it, but I guess what's their role in the ecosystem. I mean a couple things everyone has a huge role to play in all this and so I think you You don't have to be interacting on chain to hold these assets to be a big part of it You know um there are multiple dimensions to doing this right because look what we're talking about is transforming capital markets and transforming a lot of the real world right um And bring it on chain It's a tremendous amount of stuff to do across everything across education across go to market across brand building across this and even um Even just like simple user feedback and experience like all these things matter, you know, so sure building on plume is something we appreciate and we respect and love all people building with us. Infrastructure is great, users are great, account providers, asset issuers, all of that is great. Because holding the Plume token is also great. Because the Plume token is also meant to be a microcosm of the ecosystem. And so we are embedding a bunch of the features and things that happen within Plume into the token as well. Right. So being along for that journey and helping us design that as a group is also super, super important. And over time, using the token, like I said, with the L1, there's a bunch of stuff coming around, staking around, validating around all these things that are coming as well, right. And providing security things that also super useful. So just by simply holding and staking, it's actually adding a lot of to the network as well. Right. um And then even that just being around, just look again, like I think again, we are probably one of the few that are open to to to many others that like quote unquote are alongside us. Right. Meaning you know, people talking about RWAs and learning about it and sharing it and just engaging and experiencing stuff like to me, that's enough, you know. Um, and so to me, that is the point. Uh, and like, that's how people can, can engage in participating with us. Like I think asking us questions, you know, talking about what's going on, throwing out ideas, calling out things that are not great, calling things that are, that should be better or whatever, like all those things contribute and help, you know, and we take all of it in stride and we're very grateful for anyone to even give a shit, you know, and, and, and participate in help, you know? And then, there's multiple layers to it. There's that. going deeper is holding the token, going deeper is bridging and going deeper is building, right? Then it's like, Evangeline, all these things are just one part of the big one part of a funnel that we all work together on. And so every single part, you know, we, we value, and I think there's multiple ways to do it. And again, there would be plume. I think it was the way like, we are we are plume is is focused on RWA's, you know, and so a big part of the story is growing RWA's in totality. It's not about just growing plume, right? And I think building anything and you know this, right? Like building anything is about picking the right markets. right and picking the right areas and making sure that it's a rising tide. A rising tide lifts all boats, you know. And so for us, it's about making sure that we grow this whole market and everybody wins, you know, versus just talking about plume all day. So anyone, whether you're bullish on other art of being stuff or us or whatever, like, we're grateful to have it all. And then all of that is contributing positively to everything we do here. Yeah. So what keeps you grounded? you're, I mean, you're building something real. You're building, you're doing something incredibly hard, working with the TradFi world tokenized assets, make those tokenized assets tradable on Plume, working with these ecosystem partners, which are all building their own ecosystems, but then working with them so that their products are available to traders and users of Plume. Like you're building something real for the longterm. um How do you stay grounded and focus on the long term and how do you balance that with hype cycles and crypto is very hype driven? um How do you balance things? Probably not well is real answer. I'm probably all over the place and I'm like definitely, you know, I'd be lying if I said I didn't like feed into the pipe cycle and like, you know, live into it. You know, I'm definitely around it for sure, you know, and we understand it. I think to me, the thing that really keeps us grounded and keeps me grounded, right, are having conversations both like this, but also like, just when we're on Capitol Hill, not that long ago, like really getting to sit there and just bask in the bigger picture and really understand where we're going. right, which is we are not even 1 % of the way there yet. And it's already getting nuts. You know, like it's already getting there. You know, we're not, we haven't even begun and it's going to go absent nuclear when it hits. I think that is like, okay, cool. Like let's not get distracted by up and down this or that or whatever's going on. Let's stay laser focused on the future and what we're actually building on. Because if we do even a 10th of what we're saying we're going to do, it's going to be astronomical for everything. Right. And I'm not just like for the whole industry. Right. And so like, think to me, that's what we stay focused on, which is like, look, we got into this because we're committed to growing crypto and growing this whole ecosystem and growing this market. And we believe that our base are a conduit for that. seeing all these things come together just furthers the conviction. We've seen all of our other partners get hyper bullish on this. Like two years ago, we started this. Nobody gave a shit. You know, nobody cared. You know, I couldn't get anyone to pay attention. You know. ah And today, everyone seems to be doing RWA's, right? And so that's kind how it goes. It comes and goes in waves, you know, and I think you play into it as much as you can, right? When the market's up and when people are hyped about it, you lean into it if you can, right? When things are down, you try to ignore it, not let it you, you know, and just do your thing. And I think constantly just zooming out to focus on the north star, the big picture, which is if we zoom out just a little bit, not even that much crypto, just a surprising, there's a rare form of ADD that circles the crypto crowd. to. But you just can't remember anything past 10 days, you know, or like doing a couple hours, you know. And so like, you have to fight that and focus on like, you know, the long term in the regular world is like five, 10 years, I think we're talking two, three max here, you know, and it's still going to so we just focus on the long term here, two, three years out, it's going to go crazy, you know, like it's just inevitably having every country in the world has started to every big company started to organize end users are asking and trying to hold these things, you know, stable coins are going nuclear. You know, and that's the first article that really mattered. You know, and so to me, like all the signs are there. You just have to stay focused and stay grounded and like, hold on for the ride. You know, you know, it's very much like the quote from, um, I think it was, think Marissa, I think they told us to Marissa, when she joined Google, which is like, you know, it's not about wearing the rock shirt. We just got to hold on. Like as long as you hold on, you'll be fine, you know, and it's easy to get distracted and get caught up in little things here and there, you know, and I happen to, everyone happens to me. But focusing on the big picture, I think we're able to stay locked in and focus on where we're going, just because the size of the opportunity is just something to behold. Yeah. On that note, what inning, if there are nine innings in a baseball game, what inning are we in, you think? I think we have not even started one, honestly. I think we're just, I think we're practicing. I would have said two or three before, you know, I would have said any two or three, you know, perhaps getting halfway through, you know, nearing that 20, 30 % of the way after going to meet the regulators, after going to meet people all around the world and talking to these people in more depth and seeing the bigger picture. We're not just talking about tokenizing, we're talking about changing the landscape of how capital markets work across the entire world, right? That we've barely begun and it's like it's happening. The stable coin thing is a foundational piece, right? And even the stable coin game is still early, you know, like it's still not a thing. It's very clear stable coins are going to be the future, you know, and so that's a foundation piece to everything. So I don't even think we've begun and that's why I get like I think it's very helmet. Just like, okay, like let's focus because if we hit any one we're going to it's going to sing, you know, let alone any not, you know, like it's hard to really, really internalize it. So I think we're so early that people just don't see it. It's easy in hindsight, you know, I think we're looking at You know, if we compare this to the internet, you know, we're looking at the first versions of the internet where you're still just reading research papers on an ASCII screen, you know, it's black and green text, and you're just sending research papers to each other in the library. That's where we are, right? The idea to say that everyone's got a phone and all of the world's information is one place, I push a button and anything in the world gets delivered to me, right? Through the internet, it's just not something that was comprehensible before, right? I think that's where we are. We don't even know where this is gonna go. I think anyone who tells you is lying and full of shit, you know? We have no idea what's gonna happen, but we do know. that all the signs are coming together in an incredible way. And so ah we're just so early and I think it's easy, again, it's easy to get caught up in numbers and price and candles, but the future's around here. Well, Chris, you've lived up to your name. You certainly are one of the best door-to-door salesmen of RWA FI. And I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and educating us on real world assets and what Plume is doing. I'll be sure to share all the URLs and other pertinent information in the show notes. Any final words you'd like to share with the audience before we get off? No, I mean, first off, thanks for anyone who's been paying attention to listening, give us a chance. like you said, you know, knocking on doors, someone has to answer, you know, if you're doing that. So like, I think that's the first thing I'm thankful to you and your community, your audience for having us. I think that's one. the second thing, and then the thing I'll leave with is Mainnet's out there for us right now. Right. And, I people see Mainnet as the end point for a lot of as a starting point for us. There's a lot more to come here. Right. And so I think for us, we are building a community and ecosystem. It's not a chain. We have a chain, of course, but we're building an ecosystem. That's what we're trying to do here. And that's everybody. That's people who are just curious. It's builders. It's marketing people. is people who want to join. It's all these things. And so every dimension, I think we are building a way for us all to come together and work in there. So if anyone's interested and curious and everything, I've been very heads down the last couple of months just getting man out the door. And a couple of things haven't, of course, since I've been busy. We're back in the streets now and like I really am focused on it. So any questions, comments, ping me anytime. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Telegram, right? uh You know, our company website, plume.org is there, join our community, right? And just, you know, get involved and say whatever you want. We're open to anything. And so, you know, we're very much about shepherding this innovation to everybody. And I think the best comes from bottoms up, from people who just want to do things. So we want to build uh an ecosystem of that is allowed and possible. So uh yeah, find us on Twitter, find us online, find us in our channels and our Discord and all that and ping us anytime. We're always around. Well, you guys are doing very exciting things and excited for what you guys have coming up and for the vision that you've shared. You know, we're not even ending one yet and we're still very, very early in the game and I can see Plume playing a really important role in helping crypto move forward into, you know, multiple trillions in market cap. So thank you. percent. Love it. Thanks so much for having us. Appreciate it.

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