Original｜Odaily Planet Daily
Author: jk
When ETHDenver was in full swing this year, I met Chris, the co-founder of Plume, in a cafe in downtown Denver. He looked like a successful person in traditional finance, wearing a velvet coat and with his hair combed meticulously, but he talked to me about the epic crash at this time last year in the most crypto-punk way.
We booked the entire venue for Plumes first-ever big event, and it rained so hard that the roof collapsed. The six people left huddled in the leaky bar, and the bartender toasted to the hole in the roof and said welcome to the real world right in front of us.
This entrepreneur who tries to compile real assets into encrypted language always seems to encounter metaphors unexpectedly; just like the blockchain ecosystem Plume he created, it is also saying to the entire Web3 world: Welcome to the real world.
Let’s talk about starting a business
In Plumes public information, Chriss introduction is very professional: Chris is our co-founder and CEO, an experienced executive. Prior to joining us, he was a partner (Principal) at Scale Venture Partners. He also has an outstanding career in the technology industry. He has served as VP of Product at Rainforest QA and Director of Product at Coupa Software . Previously, he successfully founded Xpenser, which was later acquired by Coupa.
But it was not until Chris started telling his story that I realized he was a very sharp founder . He spoke very fast, almost at the limit of the speed that could be understood; he dressed like a Wall Street guy in the traditional financial industry, but he knew all about anti-Wall Street user needs and product concepts. What was incredible was that he always seemed to go off topic with a metaphorical story when answering every interview question, and just when I was wondering if he was the kind of founder who spoke without thinking, he was able to circle back to the original question, and then I was surprised to find that the seemingly unrelated story just now actually proved a certain point in his logic.
All in all, listening to him talk is a very tiring thing. After listening to his extremely information-dense narration, my most obvious feeling is that he must have been a rebellious teenager when he was young, giving his parents a lot of headaches.
The story of this Plume co-founder is also very much like a Silicon Valley-style rebellion script - from a young man who made dating software and campus applications, to accidentally achieving financial freedom through an expense management tool, and then to leaving the 200-person team he built, and finally diving into the deep waters of the crypto world.
At the time, we were thinking about the needs of college students: dating, homework, and bad food in the cafeteria. Chris was ruthless when talking about his entrepreneurial attempt in 2014. In the end, all of them failed because these ideas can be done by anyone, but no one really needs them. The turning point came when he and his team decided to build tools for themselves: a software that uses mobile phones to take pictures to record accounts and automatically classify expenses. This crude product, which was designed to solve the problem of who forgot to reimburse the coffee money, accidentally hit the outlet of corporate expense management.
The twist of fate was very darkly humorous: when the CEO of Coupa, an enterprise expense management platform, walked into their messy office in a suit, Chris and his engineers were huddled in a conference room filled with takeout boxes to modify the code. He asked about acquisition intentions right away, and we almost thought we were being scammed. The deal finalized at McDonalds eventually allowed the team to join Coupa with its products. Within three years, the entire company expanded from 200 to 2,000 people, and revenue soared from $5 million to nearly $100 million.
After leaving this huge team, he worked as an angel investor while co-founding the software testing platform Reinforce QA. It was the latter that gave him a glimpse into the possibilities of the crypto world: the platforms 60,000 testers are spread across emerging markets such as Latin America and Eastern Europe, but the high friction cost of cross-border payments makes immediate compensation a luxury. People in some countries have to wait two weeks to get $5 after completing the test, which led to the testers in that country collectively abandoning the product, further making cross-border software testing in that region impossible. So, he began to study Bitcoin payment channels.
Even after entering the venture capital industry, Chris still felt that VC was essentially selling money and it was difficult to create real value. Its hard to make the dollar greener. He was more fascinated by the underlying logic of the crypto world: permissionless financial agreements, global asset flows, and risk-resistant value exchanges. When FTXs collapse caused an industry earthquake, he instead pulled co-founder Teddy into the market against the trend: Everyone thinks crypto is over, but what we see is the historical cracks in real assets being put on the chain.
Looking back now, everything was foreshadowed - the young entrepreneur who wrote the failed dating app and the CEO who is now compiling real estate and bonds into crypto tokens are the same person at heart. In the past, we wanted to solve the pain of college students not being able to date, and now we want to solve the suffocation of asset liquidity. But this time, he pointed to Plumes ecosystem page, we no longer have only hungry college students as users.
Why do we need to do the RWA project?
The RWA (real-world asset encryption) project is just putting old wine in new bottles. Someone on the X platform once commented on the RWA project. But as a co-founder, Chris obviously doesnt want to repeat this routine. The Plume he leads is more like a real-world asset converter that aims to directly hit the most fundamental pain point of the crypto ecosystem: how to truly integrate traditional assets into the on-chain world and flow freely like native tokens.
Plumes solution is like a crypto compiler . It builds a complete blockchain technology stack - from the underlying protocol to development tools, from liquidity pools to community governance, and packages all links into a permissionless standardized process. Any organization or individual who wants to put real assets on the chain can compile these assets into a crypto-native form simply through Plumes standardized process. Traditional financial assets on the chain require layers of approval and rely on the endorsement of centralized institutions, but we want to make this process as permissionless and frictionless as sending a tweet. Chris said.
“Just like stablecoins put the U.S. dollar on the blockchain, we want all real assets to ‘speak the language of blockchain.’”
The success of stablecoins has already verified this logic. When people use USDT to fight inflation in Argentina, or use USDC to complete cross-border remittances, no one cares about the bank accounts and fiat currency reserves behind them - they are essentially on-chain dollars, but they perfectly inherit the freedom and anti-censorship of crypto assets. Stablecoins are the first lesson of RWA, but it should not be the only lesson. Chris tried to expand this model to a wider field, Why cant the future income rights of a building, a treasury bond, or even a cup of coffee be turned into divisible and programmable crypto assets like stablecoins?
This ambition requires breaking the black box of traditional finance: in reality, real estate transactions require intermediaries, evaluations, and lengthy legal processes; the bond market is monopolized by institutional investors; and the circulation and pricing of artworks are closed, small-circle games. Plumes ecosystem attempts to reconstruct the rules with smart contracts: an apartment in Miami can be tokenized into 1 million units, and retail investors in Tokyo can hold 0.001% of it with just a few clicks; every resale of a famous painting can automatically pay dividends to the initial investor through on-chain records. They want to free real assets from the gravity of the physical world and gain real liquidity in the crypto world.
In traditional finance, the value of assets depends on the certification of authoritative institutions, while Plumes ecosystem is closer to group consensus - smart contracts automatically execute rules, on-chain data is transparent and traceable, and liquidity is naturally formed by decentralized markets. Chris believes that if a countrys bonds plummet in the traditional market due to policy changes, holders can instantly exchange them for gold tokens or real estate shares through Plume, just as simple as exchanging ETH for USDC on Uniswap. This is the freedom supported by the crypto field.
The future of the crypto industry is not involution, but in swallowing up a bigger reality. Chriss ultimate vision is very grand - the worlds $400 trillion worth of real estate and hundreds of trillions of dollars of traditional financial assets, even if only 0.1% is on the chain, it will be enough to expand the entire crypto market tenfold. When real assets are truly integrated into the blockchain, the way finance is played will be completely changed.
RWA: An Influence Economy
When most people mention RWA (real world assets), they usually think of putting a pair of limited edition sneakers, a house or other physical assets on the chain and presenting them in digital form. But in Plumes view, the core value of RWA is far more than that. What is really important is not the tokenization itself, but how to make it easier for users to interact with the real world , and the objects of this interaction are not necessarily limited to a certain physical asset.
Chris gave an example:
A typical example is Worldcoin. On the surface, it is a biometric-based identity authentication tool, where users complete KYC through iris scanning. But if you observe the market dynamics of Worldcoin tokens, you will find that it is not just an identity authentication project, but more like a tokenized embodiment of Sam Altmans personal brand. When Sam Altman was fired by OpenAI, the Worldcoin token plummeted; when he returned, the price rose; when Worldcoin 2.0 was released, the token price rose again; and when Anthropic, a competitor in the AI field, launched a new product, the price of Worldcoin was frustrated again.
A similar phenomenon also occurs in financial products such as IBIT (iShares Bitcoin Trust). The price of IBIT is not only affected by the Bitcoin market, but also related to the decision-making and image of BlackRock and its CEO Larry Fink . It seems that what is bought is not cryptocurrency, but a highly volatile derivative of Wall Street rhetoric. Even in the traditional financial market, Nvidias stock price is regarded as a representative of the AI industry sentiment. The expectation of AI industry growth directly pushed up Nvidia, but this growth is not entirely based on fundamentals, but part of market sentiment.
This phenomenon is also evident in the native field of Web3. The meme coin market has become another form of real-world emotional expression, but the execution of these tokens is often very chaotic and lacks stability. Although people are willing to buy Worldcoin, it is often because it is linked to Sam Altmans personal influence rather than its underlying technology. And if someone wants to bet on the growth of the AI industry, buying NVIDIA may not be a good idea, because its stock price is affected by both market sentiment and AI industry fundamentals.
What’s worse is that in the decentralized world, this kind of interaction with the real world is often dominated by high speculation and scams. For example, before Trump released his own token, there were dozens of different Trump tokens on the market, but most of them were scams, and they might have been Rug by the project before users found truly valuable tokens. Even relatively mature tokens may not be able to truly reflect changes in the real world, and are often manipulated by the market.
People do want to interact with the real world through blockchain, but the existing ways are not ideal.
Chris concluded that the current RWA market mainly presents two extremes:
The closed traditional financial system - dominated by large financial institutions such as BlackRock and Apollo, is strictly regulated, has low transparency, and is difficult for ordinary users to enter.
The decentralized speculative market - filled with meme coins and unsecured high-risk contract markets, although open, lacks security and users often face huge losses.
Plume wants to build a bridge between these two extremes. On one end of the bridge is a BlackRock-style closed vault, and on the other end is a Trump token gambling table, and on the bridge run hybrid assets that have been encrypted and compiled: they include both traditional RWAs such as apartment rental income rights and abstract rights such as Sam Altmans industry influence index. Why cant Nvidias AI expectations be split into tokens? Or can the hawkish and dovish tendencies of the Federal Reserves interest rate meeting be made into a prediction market? It is also a need to enable users to interact with the real world more safely and efficiently while avoiding the limitations of centralized finance and the disorder of decentralized markets. Separating the two modes of technology and news can not only expand the application scenarios of RWA, but also make the performance of real-world assets on the blockchain more reasonable and transparent.
Why is Plume a RWA chain? Can’t Ethereum do RWA?
Putting real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain sounds like a simple task. But those who have actually done it know that the first step alone is enough to bring most projects down. Under the current industry model, an RWA project needs to invest at least 6 months, or even 18-24 months, to complete infrastructure such as asset verification, compliance management, and data synchronization. The team often needs to find multiple service providers to solve problems such as custody, legal compliance, and data oracle integration, which is extremely time-consuming and financially expensive. The existing blockchain architecture is mainly oriented towards crypto-native assets and is not optimized for RWA, so it cannot effectively handle these problems.
Plumes solution is simple: if every RWA project has to reinvent the wheel, then standardize and modularize the wheel and weld it directly into the bottom layer of the blockchain. They natively integrate several major functions at the protocol layer:
Asset verification system : Through the hybrid verification of off-chain institutions and on-chain oracles, it ensures that the real estate, bonds or commodities on the chain are real and have clear ownership;
Ownership management : The technology for putting assets on the blockchain must be convenient enough, and it must also automatically limit trading rights for specific assets (for example, only qualified investors can participate) according to the regulatory requirements of different jurisdictions;
Data synchronization : real-time tracking of changes in the status of real assets (such as rent payments, bond interest payments), and triggering smart contracts to automatically execute profit distribution.
This is the functionality that Plumes core modules Arc and Nexus can cover.
The existing public chain is like an assembly line that can only process digital building blocks, but we want to build a composite production line that can process steel, wood, and concrete. Chris used the example of real estate tokenization: In the traditional model, the project party needs to connect with the custodian bank to verify the property rights, contact the law firm to design a compliance framework, and purchase oracle services to track rental flows; with Plume, these functions are pre-installed as on-chain plug-ins, and developers only need to call the interface to complete the entire process from asset chaining to liquidity pool construction.
The business model of this logic is that it reduces the development of RWA from customizing a space shuttle to assembling Lego blocks . Chriss ultimate counterpart is AWS: This reminds me of software development in the 1990s. At that time, if a startup wanted to develop software, it first needed to raise $10 million, and the first step was not to write code, but to buy servers, databases and hardware equipment to build its own infrastructure. Only after completing these basic tasks can you really start developing products. Today, you only need to swipe a credit card and spend 25 cents on AWS (Amazon Cloud) to start a server, start writing code directly, and quickly bring products to market. This infrastructure innovation has spawned a large number of SaaS software and innovative products in the Web2 era. We believe that the process of RWA asset on-chain should be the same. When the cost of asset on-chain drops from millions of dollars to a few thousand dollars, you will see real explosive innovation.
Plume Ecosystem’s “Atypical RWA Experiment”
In Plumes ecological sandbox, there is a protocol that allows users to open 20x leverage for Pikachu cards. Chris used this protocol called Racks as an example to show how Plume can help projects use leverage on different asset classes.
Traditionally, if users want to open a 20x leverage on Pokémon cards, they first need to tokenize the cards and ensure that there is sufficient liquidity support on the chain. Racks takes a more efficient approach - it does not require the actual tokenization of Pokémon cards, but rather establishes a trading market based on data streams . In other words, the system only needs to introduce relevant data of the asset to the chain, such as market transaction price, scarcity and other key indicators, to provide users with corresponding leverage trading functions. This model greatly improves market efficiency while avoiding the high costs and complex compliance issues involved in traditional RWA asset on-chain.
Another example is Culture, whose core concept is to create an index based on data streams rather than directly tokenizing real assets. Chris explained that Culture has established data stream indexes for different regions. This project allows users to go long on Africa and short on Latin America . The reference indicators include GDP growth rate, Prime Rate, Consumer Price Index (CPI), public support rate and other factors. After weighted calculation, it finally generates an index token representing the regional economic prospects.
This approach can be extended to more areas, even popular culture, food trends, climate and environmental data, and so on. Suppose you are someone who is extremely optimistic about a certain food, you can buy the future influence of a certain anchor, the growth trend of a certain Asian cuisine in the global market, without having to find a complicated market agent. Chris said. He believes that these innovations represent a brand new market category and are highly consistent with Plumes overall vision. What these teams are doing is completely consistent with the narrative direction we are promoting, and we not only support them technically, but also help them grow in marketing and ecological integration.
There is no right way that is easy.
Compliance boundaries and market distrust
The birth of new concepts is often accompanied by resistance. Imagine the situation when Uber was first launched: it was illegal in many cities because the taxi industrys licensing system firmly controlled the market, and both the government and industry giants were hostile to it. However, what ultimately drove the legal change was the real demand of the market - people wanted a more convenient and flexible way to travel, and Uber just provided the tool.
Plume encountered a similar situation. The early RWA track was almost ignored. It was even difficult for us to arrange meetings with investors or exchanges. The only real concern was the blockchain protocol itself. This means that Plume not only needs to build infrastructure, but also needs to convince the market to accept its existence.
However, past failures in the RWA track have made the market skeptical of the concept. Chris told us that the history of RWA is not glorious, and the quality of past projects has been uneven, with many being immature concepts or even outright failures. More importantly, the path taken by Plume is completely different from traditional financial RWA projects. Many RWA projects want to operate in the way of TradFi (traditional finance), but Chris believes that this model is essentially a dead end because it ignores the actual needs of the crypto market. Plume does not want to let institutions enter the market, but to make RWA a truly crypto-native track that is freely accessible to all users, not just institutional investors.
This involves the issue of compliance.
Many people think of compliance as a binary choice – either you follow the rules completely or you ignore them completely. But Chris believes this view is too simplistic. “You do need to accept compliance requirements, but more importantly, you need to accept them intelligently.”
He used Uber as an example again. When Uber entered the market, it not only had to fight against regulation, but also had to create market demand. In many places, its operating methods did not comply with the laws at the time, but this was not because there was something wrong with Uber itself, but because the law did not keep up with the pace of innovation. When user demand is strong enough, the rules will change.
The essence of the law is to protect people, not to prevent innovation. Chris emphasized that regulation is indeed necessary, but it should not be an obstacle to development, but a framework to guide innovation in the right direction, just as the SEC has now modified the rules of encryption and stopped lawsuits.
Plume has chosen a pragmatic approach - ensuring compliance without sacrificing user experience. This is similar to how MakerDAO handles U.S. Treasuries. In the traditional financial model, if users want to hold U.S. Treasuries, they need to go through a compliance platform such as Ondo Finance, must complete KYC verification, become a qualified investor, the minimum investment amount may be $100,000 or even $1 million, and can only be redeemed once a quarter.
What is the worst experience? Imagine that you need to go through KYC certification, wait three days to pass, and also need to do liveness detection, identity verification, and even need to link a bank account. Chris explained that in this process, users may have already lost patience and turned to other solutions. The market often discusses the Intention Economy, but the reality is that if the process is too cumbersome, people will not do it at all.
MakerDAO takes a different approach: they allow users to indirectly obtain treasury bond returns through the DAI mechanism without having to purchase treasury bonds directly. This approach not only meets market demand, but also bypasses the complex processes of traditional finance, while meeting compliance requirements and providing a more convenient experience for end users. Plume adopts a similar strategy. It does not enforce a certain compliance framework, but provides tools that allow asset issuers to find the solution that best suits their needs.
Biggest challenge: Making the market understand the true value of RWA
Chris believes that the crypto markets enthusiasm for the concept of institutions in RWA is falling into a dangerous self-deception. When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink declared that Bitcoin is digital gold, people cheered that the floodgates of institutional funds were about to open and the crypto market would definitely soar. For them, this is the logic of investing in the RWA track, because they believe that these big institutions will bring huge capital inflows. But this is neither correct nor completely ignores the true meaning of the RWA track.
“Many people believe that if BlackRock and Fidelity enter the market, the RWA market should be built around them, which has led to many projects operating with the idea of “letting more traditional institutions in”, “compliance”, “obtaining regulatory approvals”, and even buying financial licenses here and there. But the problem is that these things do not create truly valuable assets in essence. They are just the market’s mechanical follow-up to the narrative of “institutional entry”.”
If we look back at all the successful products in the crypto industry, we will find that their core logic always revolves around product-market fit. Many RWA projects on the market believe that as long as they can tokenize $1 billion in assets, they have proved their value. But Chris told us that the TVL of these projects is usually less than $10 million, indicating that the actual market demand is extremely limited. In contrast, projects that truly meet product-market fit, such as Hyperliquid, have doubled their trading volume and coin prices in just two months, and have even received more attention than Binance. The reason why these projects are successful is not because they cater to the narrative of institutional entry, but because they provide products that the market really needs.
“If you remove the dates from the news headlines of each market cycle and rearrange them, you can’t tell which year they belong to, because the market narratives of each cycle are strikingly similar.” Chris poured cold water on the 600 attendees at the RWA conference hosted by Plume in Denver that day, “The entry of institutions in each cycle is basically a signal of the market top. But people always forget this and think again and again that the entry of institutions can save the crypto industry.” The fact is that most institutions have not brought actual changes to the crypto market; Google has repeatedly mentioned blockchain and RWA in recent years, but its impact on the industry is almost negligible.
What we really need to focus on is whether there is real demand in the market, not whether institutions are entering the market. We hope to help people avoid this kind of thinking trap, so that they can truly understand the actual situation of the market, rather than being swayed by short-term noise.
From TGE to mainnet launch, what are the team’s considerations for the timeline?
When Plumes TGE meets Trumps Meme Carnival
Plume’s token launch date was quite dramatic— the day after the U.S. presidential inauguration . It was originally intended to take off with the wind of loosening policies, but it ran into the collective carnival of Trump and his wife’s Meme coin. In those days, the K-line chart of the crypto market showed complete polarization. All exchange assets, DeFi assets, and on-chain assets quickly plunged. Only TRUMP and MELANIA rose like a rocket.
The crazy Meme coin drained the market liquidity, and the launch of Plumes token was like holding an academic lecture in a nightclub. But the team pressed the start button. They were betting on another reality: when Trump coin soared from $3 to $80 and then fell back to $20, someone would always remember that there should be something real behind the asset.
Chris told the team that after the party, those who got rich overnight and those who went swimming naked would have to find a place to save their money.
The data confirms this contrast. According to Coingecko data, the price of Plume has been fluctuating since its launch, but at a time when Memes weekly trading volume plummeted by 80%, Plume tokens have maintained a level 20% higher than the issue price. Compared with the curse of falling as soon as it was listed on a major exchange this year, Plumes performance is better than most projects that have achieved the Grand Slam on exchanges.
This storm also made Plume see its niche clearly, which is to be a reality converter in the crypto world. They found that the income forms of RWA and meme coins are almost completely opposite, just like the worlds of users who invest in Bitcoin and P-boys hardly overlap. Chris told us that thanks to the characteristics of RWA, he believes that the market turmoil of Meme will only help the long-term development of Plume.
Plume mainnet is expected to be launched soon
When asked about the mainnet issue that everyone is concerned about, Chris revealed that Plumes mainnet will most likely be launched soon, but he made it clear: This is just the beginning, and the real test is every day after the mainnet is launched. At present, the team is working hard to promote cooperation with a number of financial institutions and physical assets. Some cases have entered the final technical testing stage, and more details will be gradually revealed after the mainnet is launched.
“Rather than listening to us describe it here, it’s better to experience it yourself.” Chris told us that Plume’s value proposition is simple: “After the mainnet is launched, real income and capital flow will begin to enter the system. When users see actual income in their accounts, they will truly understand the value of Plume and its position in the entire industry.
Is the token the product, or is RWA the product?
A few months ago, when Movement chose to issue tokens before launching the mainnet, it was attacked by many community users on the X platform. One of the famous opinions was: The reason they issued tokens first is because they know that tokens are products, not the network itself. The implication is that in order not to miss the time window, tokens are issued first for users to follow. What will happen to the product later? The team and users dont care.
Since Plume will also implement this order, I specifically asked Chris this tricky question. Faced with this question, Chris said bluntly: We do regard tokens as part of the product, because Plume tokens may be the first RWA tokens that users come into contact with. In Plumes token design, real returns, on-chain economic utility, ecological index, network governance rights, etc. are all the core logic of the Plume ecosystem, but Chris believes that this is only part of the product, but by no means the only product.
This design does not encourage speculation. He explained that compared to the centralized decision-making method of Circles issuance of USDC, the path chosen by the team for Plume is somewhat different; in a decentralized system, they believe that the reasonable way to start the network is to first establish an ecosystem through the test network stage, guide liquidity allocation and decentralized governance through tokens, and ultimately let liquidity grow naturally in the community consensus, rather than letting tokens become chips for speculative gameplay.
