An increasing number of compliance-focused cryptocurrency initiatives are optimistic that a more hospitable regulatory landscape may eventually result in a boom of blockchain-based RWAs, or real-world assets, as blockchain competes for widespread acceptance this week in the corridors of the US Congress.
A firm called Plume has successfully received $10 million in initial funding for their project, which aims to create the first layer-2 blockchain specifically designed for RWAs. Haun Ventures led the investment, with participation from Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures.
The Ethereum-based blockchain developed by Plume is marketed as a one-stop shop for conveniently transferring off-chain assets onto blockchains. In other words, the protocol assists users in navigating the complex documentation, custodial requirements, and other administrative work necessary to transfer assets such as real estate, artwork, and specific types of financial instruments onto blockchains.
“The RWA industry is one of the fastest-growing verticals in crypto today but there remains a critical gap – to date there has not been a permissionless blockchain equipped with fullstack RWA infrastructure to deploy any asset class compliantly,” the company explained in a statement shared with CoinDesk. “The robust DeFi ecosystem on Plume enables users to do everything with RWAs – from earning yield, borrowing/lending, trading and speculating with leverage.”
The foundation of Plume’s functionality is Arbitrum Nitro, a framework for creating layer-2 “rollup” chains that swiftly and inexpensively write transactions to Ethereum. Interoperability and asset swapping between the chain and other chains in the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem—a constellation of other rollups constructed using the same framework—should be made simple by the technology.
“When we started talking to protocols, everyone said the same thing: ‘It takes us anywhere between six months, a year, a year and a half, two years to actually get this asset on-chain before we can even write a single line of code for our protocol,'” Plume co-founder Chris Yin said in an interview with CoinDesk. “That’s just a ridiculous way to do things – it’s just duplicative work across every single protocol. We say, let’s standardize that.”
On Plume, “you have a very comprehensive set of features to actually tokenize an asset – meaning setting up your entity, filing the stuff, taking custody of the assets, doing wallets, automatic set-up, cap table management, on/off-ramping, [know-your-customer] – all of those things are baked in,” said Yin. “We just take these products, we integrate them and put a nice UI on it and make sure that it’s nicely modular.”
Over 80 projects are presently using real-world assets on Plume’s private test network, according to Yin. “Everything from collectibles, private credit, real estate – all these things are deploying on Plume,” he explained. According to Yin, Plume intends to launch its testnet to the public in “a month or so,” with a full release to come after.