Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author | jk
During the bustling ETHDenver this year, I met Chris, the co-founder of Plume, in a café in downtown Denver. He looked like a successful figure from traditional finance, dressed in a suede coat with meticulously styled hair, yet he spoke to me in the most crypto-punk manner about last year's "epic failure" at this time.
"We rented the entire venue and held the first large-scale event in Plume's history, only for a torrential downpour to collapse the roof. The six remaining attendees huddled in a leaky bar, and the bartender raised a glass to the hole in the roof, saying 'Welcome to the real world.'"
This entrepreneur, who attempts to "compile" real assets into crypto language, seems to always encounter metaphors in unexpected situations; just as his blockchain ecosystem Plume is telling the entire Web3 world: "Welcome to the real world."
Starting from Entrepreneurship
In the public information about Plume, Chris's introduction is very professional: "Chris is our co-founder and CEO, an experienced executive. Before joining us, he served as a Principal at Scale Venture Partners. He also has an outstanding career in the tech industry, having been the VP of Product at Rainforest QA and the Director of Product at Coupa Software, and previously successfully founded Xpenser, which was later acquired by Coupa."
But it wasn't until Chris began to tell his story that I realized he is a very "spirited" founder. He speaks extremely quickly, almost at the limit of what can be understood; he dresses like a Wall Street figure from traditional finance but is well-versed in anti-Wall Street user needs and product concepts. Strangely, he seems to divert every interview question into a metaphorical story that is miles off-topic, and just when I am puzzled about whether he is one of those founders who speaks without thinking, he manages to circle back to the original question, and I am surprised to find that the seemingly unrelated story actually supports a point in his logic.
In summary, listening to him speak is quite exhausting. After hearing his densely packed narrative, my most obvious impression is: he must have been a rebellious teenager who gave his parents a lot of headaches.
The story of this Plume co-founder resembles a Silicon Valley "rebellious script"—from a young man creating dating apps and campus applications to unexpectedly achieving financial freedom with an expense management tool, then leaving the 200-person team he built to dive headfirst into the deep waters of the crypto world.
"At that time, we were all focused on the needs of college students: dating, homework, and the terrible food in the cafeteria." Chris speaks bluntly about his entrepreneurial attempts in 2014, "In the end, they all failed because anyone could do those ideas, but no one really needed them." The turning point came when he and his team decided to "build tools for themselves": a software that allowed users to take photos of receipts and automatically categorize expenses. This rough product, aimed at solving "who forgot to reimburse the coffee money," unexpectedly hit the sweet spot of corporate expense management.
The twist of fate came in a very darkly humorous way: when the CEO of the corporate expense management platform Coupa walked into their messy office in a suit, Chris was crammed in a meeting room filled with takeout boxes, coding with engineers. "He opened with a question about acquisition intentions, and we almost thought we were being scammed." This deal, finalized at McDonald's, ultimately allowed the team to join Coupa with their product, and within three years, the entire company grew from 200 to 2000 employees, with revenue skyrocketing from $5 million to nearly $100 million.
After leaving this massive team, he engaged in angel investing while co-founding the software testing platform Reinforce QA. It was the latter that opened his eyes to the possibilities of the crypto world: the platform had 60,000 testers spread across emerging markets in Latin America and Eastern Europe, but the high friction costs of cross-border payments made instant rewards a luxury. In some countries, testers had to wait two weeks to receive $5, leading to a collective abandonment of the product by testers in that country, further making cross-border software testing impossible. Thus, he began researching Bitcoin payment channels.
Even after entering the venture capital industry, Chris still felt that VC was essentially about "selling money," making it hard to truly create value. "It’s hard to make the dollar greener." He was more fascinated by the underlying logic of the crypto world: permissionless financial protocols, global asset flows, and risk-resistant value exchanges. When the FTX collapse triggered an industry earthquake, he and co-founder Teddy went against the tide to enter the market: "Everyone thought crypto was over, but we saw the historical cracks of real assets going on-chain."
Looking back now, everything had long been foreshadowed—the young entrepreneur who wrote a failed dating app and the CEO now trying to "compile" real estate and bonds into crypto tokens are essentially the same person. "In the past, we wanted to solve the pain of college students not being able to date; now we want to solve the suffocation of asset liquidity. Only this time," he pointed to Plume's ecosystem page, "we no longer have just thirsty college student users."
Why Pursue RWA Projects?
"The RWA (Real World Asset Tokenization) project is just putting old wine in new bottles." On platform X, someone once commented on RWA projects like this. But as a co-founder, Chris clearly does not want to repeat this routine. Plume is more like a "real-world asset converter," directly targeting the fundamental pain points of the crypto ecosystem: how to truly integrate traditional assets into the on-chain world and allow them to flow freely like native tokens.
Plume's solution resembles a "crypto compiler." It builds a complete blockchain technology stack—from underlying protocols to development tools, from liquidity pools to community governance, packaging all aspects into a "permissionless" standardized process. Any institution or individual wishing to put real assets on-chain can simply follow Plume's standardized process to "compile" these assets into a crypto-native form. "Traditional financial asset tokenization requires layers of approval and relies on centralized institutions for endorsement, while we want to make this process as permissionless and frictionless as sending a tweet," Chris said.
"Just as stablecoins bring the dollar on-chain, we want all real assets to 'speak the language of blockchain.'"
The success of stablecoins has already validated this logic. When people use USDT in Argentina to combat inflation or use USDC for cross-border remittances, no one cares about the underlying bank accounts and fiat reserves—they are essentially on-chain dollars that perfectly inherit the freedom and censorship resistance of crypto assets. "Stablecoins are the 'first lesson' of RWA, but they shouldn't be the only lesson." Chris attempts to expand this model to broader fields, "Why can't the future revenue rights of a building, a government bond, or even a cup of coffee be transformed into a crypto asset that is as divisible and programmable as stablecoins?"
This ambition requires breaking the "black box" of traditional finance: in reality, real estate transactions require intermediaries, appraisals, and lengthy legal processes; the bond market is monopolized by institutional investors; the circulation and pricing of artworks are closed games within small circles. Plume's ecosystem aims to reconstruct the rules using smart contracts: an apartment located in Miami can be tokenized into a million shares, and retail investors in Tokyo can hold 0.001% of it with just a few clicks; every resale of a famous painting can automatically distribute dividends to the initial investors through on-chain records. They want to free real assets from the 'gravity' of the physical world and achieve true liquidity in the crypto world.
In traditional finance, asset value relies on certification by authoritative institutions, while Plume's ecosystem is closer to "crowd consensus"—smart contracts automatically execute rules, on-chain data is transparent and verifiable, and liquidity is naturally formed by decentralized markets. Chris believes that if a government bond crashes in the traditional market due to policy changes, holders can instantly exchange it for gold tokens or real estate shares through Plume, "as simple as swapping ETH for USDC on Uniswap; this is the freedom supported by the crypto space."
"The future of the crypto industry is not about internal competition but about swallowing larger realities." Chris's ultimate vision is grand—$400 trillion worth of global real estate and hundreds of trillions of dollars in traditional financial assets, even if only 0.1% goes on-chain, would be enough to expand the entire crypto market tenfold. "When real assets truly integrate into the blockchain, the way finance operates will change completely."
RWA: An Influence Economy
When most people mention RWA (Real World Assets), the usual understanding is to put a pair of limited edition sneakers, a house, or other physical assets on-chain, presenting them in digital form. But at Plume, the core value of RWA goes far beyond that. What truly matters 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 certain physical assets.
Chris gave an example:
A typical case is Worldcoin. On the surface, it is a biometric identity verification 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 verification project, but more like the tokenization of Sam Altman's personal brand. When Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, the price of Worldcoin tokens plummeted; when he returned, the price rose again; when the Worldcoin 2.0 version was released, the token price increased once more; and when AI competitor Anthropic launched new products, the price of Worldcoin would suffer.
Similar phenomena also occur with financial products like IBIT (iShares Bitcoin Trust). The price of IBIT is not only influenced by the Bitcoin market, but is also related to BlackRock and its CEO Larry Fink's decisions and image, as if what is being bought is not cryptocurrency, but a high-volatility derivative of Wall Street rhetoric. Even in traditional financial markets, Nvidia's stock price is seen as a representation of AI industry sentiment. The expectations for growth in the AI industry directly boost Nvidia, but this growth is not entirely based on fundamentals; it is part of market sentiment.
In the native realm of Web3, this phenomenon is equally evident. The meme coin market has become another form of expressing real-world sentiment, but the execution of these tokens is often chaotic and lacks stability. While people are willing to buy Worldcoin, it is often because it is linked to Sam Altman's personal influence rather than its underlying technology. And if someone wants to bet on the growth of the AI industry, purchasing NVIDIA may not be a good idea either, as its stock price is influenced by both market sentiment and the fundamentals of the AI industry.
Worse still, in the decentralized world, this interaction with the real world is often dominated by high speculation and scams. For example, before Trump launched his own token, there were dozens of different Trump tokens on the market, most of which were scams, and users might have already been rug-pulled by the project team before finding a truly valuable token. Even relatively mature tokens may not accurately 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 methods are not ideal.
Chris summarizes that the current RWA market mainly presents two extremes:
A closed traditional financial system—dominated by large financial institutions like BlackRock and Apollo, heavily regulated, low transparency, and difficult for ordinary users to access.
A decentralized speculative market—filled with meme coins and unsecured high-risk contract markets, which, while open, lack security guarantees, leaving users facing significant losses.
Plume aims to build a bridge between these two extremes. One end of the bridge is a BlackRock-style closed vault, and the other end is the gambling table of Trump tokens, while the bridge itself carries "crypto-compiled" hybrid assets: including traditional RWAs like apartment rental income rights, as well as abstract rights like Sam Altman's industry influence index. Why can't we tokenize NVIDIA's AI expectations? Or create a prediction market based on the Federal Reserve's hawkish or dovish tendencies? Enabling users to interact with the real world more safely and efficiently while avoiding the constraints of centralized finance and the disorder of decentralized markets is also a demand. Separating the technical and informational models not only expands the application scenarios of RWA but also makes the performance of real-world assets on the blockchain more reasonable and transparent.
Why is Plume an RWA chain? Can't Ethereum do RWA?
Moving real-world assets (RWA) onto the blockchain sounds like a simple task. But those who have actually operated in this space know that just the entry barriers are enough to cause most projects to collapse. Under the current industry model, an RWA project requires an investment of at least 6 months, and sometimes even 18-24 months, to complete foundational work such as asset verification, compliance management, and data synchronization. Teams often need to find multiple service providers to address issues like custody, legal compliance, and data oracle integration, resulting in high time and financial costs. Moreover, existing blockchain architectures are primarily designed for crypto-native assets and are not optimized for RWA, making it difficult to effectively address these issues.
Plume's solution is simple: if every RWA project has to reinvent the wheel, then standardize and modularize the wheel and directly weld it into the blockchain's underlying layer. They have natively integrated several key functions at the protocol layer:
Asset Verification System: Ensures that the real estate, bonds, or commodities on-chain exist and have clear ownership through a hybrid verification of off-chain institutions and on-chain oracles;
Ownership Management: The technology for asset tokenization must be convenient enough while automatically restricting trading permissions for specific assets based on regulatory requirements in different jurisdictions (e.g., limited to qualified investors);
Data Synchronization: Real-time tracking of changes in the status of real assets (such as rent payments and bond interest payments) and triggering smart contracts to automatically execute profit distribution.
This is what Plume's core modules Arc and Nexus can cover.
"Existing public chains are like assembly lines that can only handle digital building blocks, while we want to create a composite production line that can process steel, wood, and concrete." Chris uses real estate tokenization as an example: under the traditional model, project teams need to connect with custodial banks to verify property rights, contact law firms to design compliance frameworks, and procure oracle services to track rental flows; through Plume, these functions are pre-installed as "on-chain plugins," allowing developers to complete the entire process from asset tokenization to liquidity pool construction simply by calling interfaces.
The business model of this logic is that it reduces RWA development from "customizing a space shuttle" to "assembling LEGO blocks." Chris's ultimate benchmark is AWS: "This reminds me of software development in the 90s. 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 purchase servers, databases, and hardware, building its own infrastructure. Only after completing this foundational work could they truly start developing products. Today, you just need to swipe a credit card and spend 25 cents on AWS to launch a server and start writing code, quickly bringing products to market. This infrastructure innovation has spawned a plethora of SaaS software and innovative products in the Web2 era. We believe the process of putting RWA assets on-chain should be the same. When the cost of tokenizing assets drops from millions to thousands of dollars, you will see real explosive innovation."
Plume's "Atypical RWA Experiment"
In Plume's ecological sandbox, there exists a protocol that allows users to leverage Pikachu cards by 20 times. Chris uses this protocol called Racks as an example to demonstrate how Plume helps projects use leverage across different asset classes.
Under the traditional model, if users want to leverage Pokémon cards by 20 times, they first need to tokenize the card and ensure there is enough liquidity on-chain to support it. Racks adopts a more efficient approach—it does not require the actual tokenization of Pokémon cards, but instead establishes a trading market based on data streams. In other words, the system only needs to bring relevant data about the asset on-chain, such as market transaction prices and scarcity, to provide users with corresponding leveraged trading functions. This model greatly enhances market efficiency while avoiding the high costs and complex compliance issues associated with traditional RWA tokenization.
Another example is Culture, whose core idea is to create indices based on data streams rather than directly tokenizing real assets. Chris explains that Culture has established data stream indices for different regions. This project allows users to "go long on Africa and short on Latin America," with reference indicators including GDP growth rates, prime rates, consumer price indices (CPI), public approval ratings, and more, weighted to generate index tokens representing the economic outlook of the region.
This method can be extended to more fields, even popular culture, food trends, climate, and environmental data, etc. "Imagine you are extremely bullish on a certain food; you can purchase the future influence of a certain streamer or the growth trend of a specific Asian cuisine in the global market without having to find a complex market agent," Chris says. He believes these innovations represent a whole new market category and align closely with Plume's overall vision. "What these teams are doing completely aligns with the narrative direction we are pushing, and we are not only technically supporting them but also helping them grow in market promotion and ecosystem integration."
There is no single correct path that is easy
Compliance Boundaries and Market Distrust
The birth of new concepts often comes with resistance. Imagine the scene when Uber first launched: it was "illegal" in many cities because the taxi industry's licensing system tightly controlled the market, and both the government and industry giants were hostile towards it. However, what ultimately drove legal changes was the real demand of the market—people wanted a more convenient and flexible way to travel, and Uber simply provided the tool.
Plume has encountered a similar situation. The early RWA track was almost ignored, "We even found it difficult to schedule meetings with investors or exchanges." The only ones truly concerned were the blockchain protocols themselves. This meant that Plume not only had to build the infrastructure but also needed to persuade the market to accept its existence.
However, past failures in the RWA track have left the market skeptical of this concept. Chris tells us that the history of RWA is not glorious; the quality of past projects has been uneven, with many being immature concepts or outright failures. More importantly, the path Plume has taken is completely different from traditional financial RWA projects. Many RWA projects hope to operate in the same way as TradFi (traditional finance), but Chris believes this model is essentially a dead end because it ignores the actual needs of the crypto market. Plume does not want to "bring institutions in," but rather to make RWA a truly crypto-native track that all users can access freely, not just institutional investors.
This brings us to the issue of compliance.
Many people believe compliance is a binary choice—either fully comply with the rules or completely ignore them. But Chris thinks this view is overly simplistic. "You do need to accept compliance requirements, but more importantly, you need to accept them intelligently."
He again uses Uber as an example; 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 Uber itself had issues, but because the laws had not kept pace with innovation. When user demand is strong enough, the rules will change.
"The essence of law is to protect people, not to stifle innovation." Chris emphasizes that regulation is indeed necessary, but it should not become an obstacle to development; rather, it should be a framework that guides innovation in the right direction, just as the SEC is currently modifying rules for crypto and halting lawsuits.
Plume has chosen a pragmatic approach—ensuring compliance without sacrificing user experience. This is similar to how MakerDAO handles U.S. Treasury bonds. In the traditional financial model, if users want to hold U.S. Treasury bonds, they need to go through a compliant platform like Ondo Finance, complete KYC verification, become qualified investors, with a minimum investment amount possibly being $100,000 or even $1 million, and can only redeem once per quarter.
What is the worst experience? "Imagine you need to undergo KYC verification, wait three days to get approved, and have to do live detection, identity verification, and possibly even link a bank account." Chris explains that during 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 simply won't engage.
MakerDAO adopted a different approach: they allow users to indirectly gain treasury bond yields through the DAI mechanism without needing to purchase treasury bonds directly. This method meets market demand while bypassing the complex processes of traditional finance, complies with regulations, and provides a more convenient experience for end users. Plume's strategy is similar; it does not enforce a specific compliance framework but provides tools that enable asset issuers to find solutions that best fit their needs.
The Biggest Challenge: Helping the Market Understand the True Value of RWA
Chris believes that the crypto market's obsession with 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, believing that institutional funds were about to flood in, and the crypto market would surely skyrocket. "For them, this is the logic of investing in the RWA track because they think these large institutions will bring in massive capital inflows. But this is neither correct nor does it capture the true significance of the RWA track."
"Many people believe that if BlackRock and Fidelity enter the market, the RWA market should be built around them, leading to many projects operating under the mindset of 'bringing in more traditional institutions,' 'compliance,' 'gaining regulatory approval,' or even acquiring financial licenses here and there. But the problem is that these actions do not inherently create truly valuable assets; they merely reflect the market's mechanical following of the narrative of 'institutional entry.'"
If we look back at all the successful products in the crypto industry, we find that their core logic always revolves around product-market fit. Many RWA projects in the market believe that as long as they can "tokenize $1 billion in assets," they have proven their value. But Chris tells us that the TVL of these projects is often less than $10 million, indicating that actual market demand is extremely limited. In contrast, projects that truly align with product-market fit, like Hyperliquid, have seen their trading volume and token price multiply within just two months, even garnering more attention than Binance. These projects succeed not because they cater to the narrative of institutional entry, but because they provide products that the market genuinely needs.
"If you remove the dates from the headlines of each market cycle and rearrange them, you wouldn't be able to tell which year they belong to because the market narratives of each cycle are astonishingly similar." Chris poured cold water on the 600 attendees at the RWA conference hosted by Plume in Denver, stating, "The entry of institutions in each cycle is basically a signal of the market top. But people always forget this and repeatedly believe that institutional entry can save the crypto industry." The reality is that most institutions have not brought about actual changes in the crypto market; Google has frequently mentioned blockchain and RWA in recent years, but its impact on the industry is almost negligible.
What truly needs attention is whether there is real demand in the market, not whether institutions are entering. "We hope to help people avoid this cognitive trap and truly understand the actual state of the market, rather than being swayed by short-term noise."
From TGE to Mainnet Launch, What is the Team's Consideration of the Timeline?
When Plume's TGE Collides with Trump's Meme Frenzy
The launch date of Plume's token was chosen dramatically—the day after the U.S. presidential inauguration. They initially planned to take off on the tailwind of policy loosening but instead collided head-on with the collective frenzy of Trump and Melania's meme coins. During those days, the K-line chart of the crypto market showed complete polarization, with all exchange assets, DeFi assets, and on-chain assets rapidly plummeting, while only TRUMP and MELANIA soared as if propelled by a rocket.
The madness of meme coins drained market liquidity, making Plume's token launch feel like hosting an academic lecture in a nightclub. But the team pressed the start button with determination. They were betting on another reality: when the Trump token skyrocketed from $3 to $80 and then fell back to $20, there would always be someone who remembered that there should be some "real substance" behind the assets.
Chris told the team, after the party ends, both the overnight millionaires and the naked swimmers need to find a place to store their money.
Data confirmed this contrast. According to Coingecko, the price of Plume at launch fluctuated, but at the moment when meme coin weekly trading volume plummeted by 80%, Plume's token maintained a level 20% higher than its issuance price. Compared to the curse of falling below the initial price upon launch this year, Plume's performance was better than that of most projects that had grand slam launches on exchanges.
This storm also clarified Plume's ecological niche, which is to be the "reality converter" of the crypto world. They discovered that the yield patterns of RWA and meme coins are almost completely opposite, just as the users who dollar-cost average Bitcoin and the world of P are nearly non-overlapping. Chris told us that thanks to the characteristics of RWA, he believes that the market turbulence caused by memes will only aid Plume's long-term development.
Plume's Mainnet Expected to Launch Soon
When asked about the mainnet issue that everyone is concerned about, Chris revealed that Plume's mainnet is likely to launch very soon, but he made it clear: "This is just the beginning; the real test lies in every day after the mainnet starts." Currently, the team is fully advancing collaborations with multiple financial institutions and real assets, with some cases already entering the final testing phase, and more details will be gradually revealed after the mainnet launch.
"Rather than listening to us describe it, you should experience it for yourself." Chris told us that Plume's value proposition is simple: "After the mainnet launch, real yields and capital flows will start entering the system. When users see actual returns in their accounts, they will truly understand Plume's value 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, they faced considerable backlash from community users on the X platform, with one famous viewpoint being: "Issuing tokens first is because they know the token is the product, not the network itself." The implication is that to avoid missing the time window, they issued tokens for users to chase first, while the subsequent product? Neither the team nor the users cared.
Since Plume will also implement this order, I specifically brought up this tricky question to ask Chris. In response to this skepticism, Chris was frank: "We do indeed view the token as part of the product because the Plume token may be the first RWA token that users encounter." In the design of Plume's token, real yields, on-chain economic utility, ecological indices, and network governance rights are all core logic of the Plume ecosystem, but Chris believes this is just part of the product, not the only product.
This design does not encourage speculation. He explained that compared to Circle's issuance of USDC, which only requires centralized decision-making, the path chosen for Plume is somewhat different; in a decentralized system, they believe a reasonable way to launch the network is to first establish the ecosystem through the testnet phase, guide liquidity allocation and decentralized governance through the token, and ultimately allow liquidity to grow naturally within community consensus, rather than letting the token become a chip for speculative gameplay.
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