Q2 Investor Update

Overview

We had an exciting and a strong overall quarter with both the launch of our mainnet, hitting several milestones, and setting some records in the overall RWA space. The macro situation was also favorable not only for crypto but for RWAs as well with the passing of the GENIUS act, and the introduction of several new regions, institutions, and companies coming into crypto to explore RWAs. We’re now at the beginning of an exciting sea change in crypto where both the crypto native markets are beginning to embrace RWAs as well as the traditional world embracing the blockchain. While there’s still a lot more to do on both fronts to fully live into the vision we have for RWAs, the sounding gun has certainly been fired and we are both in the right time and the right place to take full advantage of this momentous change. An incredible amount to share and and update in the report below!

Highlights

• Launched Plume Mainnet Genesis with over 3M in daily transactions, $200M+ in RWA TVL, and surpassing Ethereum and Solana combined to become the largest chain in the world by number of RWA holders (167k+)
• Made strides on the regulatory front with deep meetings with the US Treasury, SEC’s Crypto Task Force, President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and other policy makers in the Greater China region. Plume was also featured in the White House’s Report on Digital Assets
• Announced partnerships with major stablecoin projects including World Liberty’s USD1, Agora’s AUSD, and many more
• Onboarded new RWA protocols including tokenized Tuk Tuks, Durian farms, cross border lending, and tier 1 DeFi protocols like Morpho, Curve, and more
• Opened our new NYC office and held our first team offsite!

Contents

1. Background
2. Overview
3. State of the Market
4. Plume’s Q2 Review
   
   • Plume Mainnet
   • Policy
   • Go To Market 
   • Ecosystem
   • Product & Engineering
   • Community
   • Company
5. Looking Ahead

Background

• Founded in 2023 by Chris Yin, Teddy Pornprinya, and Eugene Shen
• Raised $30M in total from leading investors such as Haun Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Apollo Global, YZi Labs, Brevan Howard, Superscrypt, Hashkey, A Capital, Portal Ventures, and many others
• Headquarters: NYC
• Notable Updates:
  
  • Unveiled Plume to the world in Q1 2024
  • Announced $10M seed round led by Haun Ventures & Galaxy Digital in Q2 2024
  • Launched testnet in Q3 2024 with 18M+ unique wallets and 280M+ transactions
  • Launched Plume’s predeposit campaign which garnered over $100M+ in TVL in Q4 2024
  • $PLUME launched in Q1 2025 on over 40+ exchanges
  • Plume’s public mainnet launched in Q2 2025 with over $200M+ in TVL/AUM and quickly rose to the #1 chain in the world by number of RWA holders, surpassing Ethereum, Solana, and others

Overview

As a reminder, Plume is built around a very simple idea – life is better onchain. Simple to use, permissionless, 24x7, global, and composable. The open nature of crypto has already led to incredible growth & innovations with over hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of people living onchain all over the world utilizing novel innovations like DeFi, stablecoins, and many more.

But crypto is still small. Crypto is a $3 Trillion asset class, which sounds big. But compared to the scale of the real world that has multiple thousands of trillions of dollars in it – from equities, bonds, debt, real estate, and much more – we are still in the early days. A single large financial institution, Blackrock, has over $12 Trillion in assets under management. And so a single company in the real world is 4x larger than all of crypto today. 

There are many approaches to bringing the real world onchain. We take our inspiration from the original and the most successful RWA – the stablecoin. While today the stablecoin is one of the best onboarding tools and one of the most useful products in crypto, it had much more humble beginnings. The stablecoin began as a tool for crypto natives. And the stablecoin didn’t feel like a tokenized dollar – it just felt like crypto. Open, permissionless, composable. And because of that, the stablecoin has ballooned to what it is today.

So while many are trying to rebuild the traditional world on crypto rails, we take a different approach. We focus on redesigning RWAs for a crypto first and crypto native audience. We focus on where the market is today so that RWAs can not only grow, but also evolve. By making these assets feel like crypto native assets, we can make these assets better than they were offchain – programmable, liquid, and composable. We’re not simply replicating the existing world on a new stack, but designing a new one where crypto native assets and real world assets coexist and people can rotate between these assets with just a few clicks.

That’s the future that we are building at Plume. Because carbon copying the real world and putting it onchain would not only be limiting, it would be wrong. Assets change when they come onchain and we should do everything we can to let each them take full advantage of being crypto first. And with this in mind we can build a better future. One where things are better for users, asset issuers, capital providers, and everybody involved.

State Of The Market

This quarter has been spectacular for RWAs as so much activity that has been brewing became front and center. We have new laws passed, new asset classes coming onchain, set new records for tokenized onchain assets, and also have many new exciting entrants into this sector.

We made material strides on the regulatory front in multiple jurisdictions, notably with the Stablecoin Bill in Hong Kong and the GENIUS Act in the US. This has been a massive quarter for regulatory wins. Starting with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Stablecoin Bill was passed which created a comprehensive framework for issuers interested in joining the stablecoin game. Subsequently after months of deliberation, the GENIUS Act also made its way through Congress with President Trump signing it into law just a few weeks ago, and the SEC Crypto Task Force published a roadmap for digital assets markets and tokenization. While each have their own nuances, the structure of these follow a similar framework, some of which are detailed out below:

• Stablecoin issuers must be insured depository institutions or financial firms approved by their respective regulatory body
• Stablecoins must be fully backed by approved currencies (HKD, USD, US Treasuries, etc) or other safe assets with 100% reserve backing
• Issuers are required to make regular public disclosures about the composition of reserves and undergo regular audits
• Stablecoin issuers must comply with local regulations around anti-money laundering and other certifications

These historic pieces of legislation lay the groundwork for an explosion in tokenization by starting with clarity for the most successful RWA – the stablecoin. By providing a framework around stablecoins, it opens up the floodgates for existing issuers to permeate their stablecoins into more parts of the global economy and also creates the space for new entrants to come into the picture. In all cases, these laws encourage innovation, adoption, and competition in the stablecoin world which will benefit not only consumers but also businesses that want to utilize the stablecoin everywhere. Notably for both bills, they restrict stablecoin issuers from passing yield back to the end user which limits some functionality for issuers but is a huge opportunity for DeFi to provide different sources of differentiated yield to users through RWAs and the like.

Tokenized equities took front and center stage. Following statements from Larry FInk around the tokenization of equities, we’ve seen a massive explosion in interest for the tokenization of equities. Kraken announced the deep integration of Plume partner, Backed, into their ecosystem and offering tokenized equities in the form of xStocks on their platform. Several other exchanges followed suit. Another Plume partner, Dinari, secured the first license from the SEC for offering equities onchain. Ondo has continued to push on their Ondo Global Markets offering which they say will offer hundreds of equities, ETFs, etc to users. And finally, Robinhood announced their entrance into the RWA arena with the launch of their new L2 chain which is focused on offering equities, both public and private, to onchain users. Despite the attention onchain equities have garnered in the press and with the public, unfortunately onchain volumes are still light and there are questions about what the true demand for onchain equities actually is. And in tandem, Robinhood’s launch also garnered some controversy around whether or not tokenized versions of private shares, such as OpenAI, constitute real ownership in the company.

The tokenized fixed income world moves beyond just US Treasuries with private credit and CLOs leading the way. Whereas the last several quarters were dominated by news around tokenized US treasury bills, the onchain audience begins to evolve their interests and search for yield in new areas. Private equity giant and Plume investor, Apollo Global, launched their private credit fund ACRED onchain and saw early success from the adoption of ACRED on a few networks with the promise of yields upwards of 9%. In tandem, Centrifuge launched a new CLO product, JAAA, that yields ~6.5% also gain significant traction with a massive $1 Billion investment from Grove, a new sub DAO from the Sky ecosystem. While both of these products are still small relative to the success that US Treasuries have seen, it’s clear that there is increasing demand in other asset classes as people see looming rate cuts affecting US Treasury yields.

New entrants from both the private and public sector show the incredible interest and demand in tokenization. This quarter saw a huge uptick in the number of companies and governments opening their doors to tokenization. On the public side of things, with the regulatory side moving in favor of tokenization, we saw not only the US, HK, UAE, and other jurisdictions leaning heavily into tokenization, but other countries such as El Salvador teamed up with the crypto task force to officially explore tokenization with the introduction of a new sandbox. Argentina quickly followed suit with the approval of their own sandbox to test tokenization of securities. And Central African Republic announced their intention to tokenize 1700 hectares of land on the blockchain. On the private sector side of things, we saw traditional financial institutions like Van Eck offer their new treasury bill product, vBILL, to crypto users. And we saw a flurry of activity from tech companies with HELOC firm Figure introducing Figure Connect to tokenize private home loans, Robinhood launching their new chain, and Stripe pushing forward with the acquisition of Privy.

All in all, there has been more news this quarter than we can cover but it’s clear that the seal has been broken and the race to tokenize the world has begun. Exciting times for us that live and work in RWAs!

Plume’s Q2 Overview

Now honing on what really matters – what have we been up to this quarter. This quarter was a blur with mainnet launching, and all kinds of shit related to it.

Plume’s Mainnet Launch

Q2 was all about mainnet. In early May, we unveiled Plume Alpha, the first step in our journey to launching our mainnet. Plume Alpha was a gated experience in which we were onboarding our ecosystem partners, capital partners, and infrastructure partners.

Less than a month later on June 5th, we unveiled our public mainnet, Plume Genesis. We launched mainnet with over 50+ dApps deployed on day 1 Curve & Morpho, Plume native protocols like Rooster & Mystic Finance, and ecosystem owned protocols like Nest. 

We quickly saw an incredible adoption and growth in our ecosystem across TVL, users, transactions, and a new metric, the number of RWA holders. While we launched with just over $150M+ in RWA TVL, we’ve seen momentum continue to grow with over $200M+ in RWA TVL onchain today. Because of how RWAs are counted on DeFi Llama, we use a combination of them and RWA.xyz to tell the story of what’s onchain. Today we now over $200M+ in TVL on DeFi Llama and over $160M+ in RWA assets on RWA.xyz. This spans multiple protocols including:

• $60M+ in Nest
• $55M+ in Superstate
• $45M+ in Morpho Vaults
• $45M+ in Mercado Bitcoin
• Assets from Blackstone, Invesco, Carlyle, PIMCO, Superstate, Mineral Vault, Apollo, Ares, Golub, Midas, Janus Henderson, and more

Furthermore, we’ve seen incredible adoption in usage on Plume. We now have 400K+ addresses that have completed over 55 Million transactions on mainnet and steadily increasing with ~6M transactions a day today. More importantly, within 2 weeks of launching we flipped Ethereum to become the #1 chain in the world by number of RWA holders. As we’ve always said, our goal is to actually integrate RWAs into the crypto native world. And while lots of chains might have high RWA values, oftentimes there is a very limited set of users actually holding & utilizing those assets; some of the largest onchain tokenized funds have less than 100 holders. We’re proud to not only have become the largest chain by quantity of holders, but we’re also very excited to have more than doubled the size of this market since we’ve launched our chain, increasing the total holder count from 150K to more than 330K today, with about 50% of the entire market on one place – Plume, more than the number 2 & 3 (Ethereum and Solana) combined.

All in all, we’ve been excited to see the incredibly positive reaction to Plume’s mainnet and have a ton more coming here soon. And while many of the updates for the quarter are encapsulated in the overall update on Plume’s Mainnet , a bit of detail on each area below.

Policy

You can’t talk about RWAs without talking about regulation. We’ve always taken compliance and regulation incredibly seriously, and with Salman Banaei formerly of the SEC, Uniswap, CFTC, and Chainalysis, joining Plume recently, we’ve made some incredible strides on the regulatory front not just in the US but all over the world. 

In May Teddy, Salman, and myself were fortunate enough to be invited to speak with the US Treasury and the SEC’s Crypto Task Force to talk about crypto, tokenization, and RWAfi. It was an incredible moment where we were able to build a real relationship with the great folks working there and we were glad to not only contribute to their thinking but get a rare opportunity to learn from them on how they are thinking about the future of tokenization in the US. Shortly after, we headed back to DC to meet with President Donald J. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent, and many others to further discuss tokenization and the incredible impact we see it can have on the markets. 

Shortly after we submitted a formal letter to the SEC Commissioner and Crypto Task Force Leader Hester Pierce where we detail our recommendations calling for safe harbor exemptive relief on core RWAfi products like Nest Credit and the like. We were ecstatic to then see SEC Chairman Paul Atkins follow up with a directive to his staff to consider an exemptive innovation relief framework to bring onchian capital products & services to the market. And finally just a few days ago we were grateful and excited to see Plume featured in the White House’s Digital Financial Technology Report where our contributions and input were cited in the tokenization section. 

In tandem, Teddy, Salman, and Shukyee spent time with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) on a tour around the Hong Kong and Greater China region with multiple institutions, regulators, and the like speaking about tokenization and how to lay the groundwork for an explosion in innovation for the region. We have the strongest Asia presence out of all the RWA projects and are building relationships to become the de facto RWA platform for liquidity, tokenization, and distribution amongst all the different types of asset issuers in APAC.

Ecosystem

As mentioned earlier, we launched our mainnet with over 50+ dApps spanning all types of things from tokenized gold, equities in private companies, durian farms, mineral rights, tuk tuks, and the like. What we find important about our ecosystem is to not only make sure that we are not only on the assets or distribution side of RWAs, but also the builder side of things. 

We saw great attention and early adoption for projects like Colb Finance that offer tokenized share of pre-IPO companies, DatoDurian that offer tokenized durian farms onchain, Pesabase, which bridges real-world remittances in Africa, and Harvest Flow that offers tokenized fleet of Tuk Tuks across Southeast Asia. 

Underpinning the ecosystem is our infrastructure network with over 100 partners across critical categories. This foundation ensures security, scalability, and seamless integration, featuring projects such as Stargate, Anchorage, Fireblocks, Centrifuge, Chainlink, LayerZero, and Forta.

Go To Market

Our go to market team has been expanding Plume’s reach all over the world from new infrastructure partners, DeFi protocols, RWA issuers, and more. Highlights included integrations with major players like World Liberty Financial for USD1 as an official reserve asset for pUSD, Nick Van Eck’s Agora for AUSD stablecoin native integration, Morpho for DeFi infrastructure, and Curve for a stablecoin DEX, and Chainlink for interoperability. We expanded SkyLink to 18 chains including TRON, enabling cross-chain yield streaming. 

In tandem with deals, the Plume team traveled around the world to continue to reach different ecosystems and connect with our community all over the world. The Plume team was active at over 20+ global events in Q2 from ETH Taipei, Web3 Festival in Hong Kong, Token2049 Dubai, and more drawing massive crowds and fostering key partnerships that amplified our RWAfi vision. 

One of our more notable events was Plume's RWA Eco Day at Token2049 Dubai which served as a preview of our Genesis mainnet, drawing over 2k sign-ups for an ecosystem showcase that highlighted the initial cohort of projects live on mainnet. The event featured presentations from 18 ecosystem projects, including Midas, Kasu, D3, Midnight, and more showcasing diverse RWA applications like global payments, domain tokenization, and fine art marketplaces. A high-profile Q&A panel with industry leaders from Serafund, Cypher, Chairman Bowdre, Sonieum, CBI Bank, and Laser Digital sparked engaging discussions on RWA innovation and adoption. The live stream extended the event's reach, bringing along 30k+ remote viewers, reinforcing Plume’s leadership in driving the RWAfi movement forward. We’re grateful for everyone who presented, judged, and attended this great event and we have many more to come at upcoming conferences!

Product & Engineering

Our product & engineering teams have had an incredibly busy quarter keeping our chain, our products, and supporting our ecosystem projects to ensure the smooth release & scaling of our chain. While everything we see on mainnet has this team’s fingerprints all over it, a few notable areas to call out:

• Plume Portal: The unified hub for the RWAfi ecosystem, to serve as the gateway to all aspects of the Plume ecosystem and making it easy for users to onboard, including a Daily Spin that provides the lowest barrier to entry for users to participate in RWAfi to win real-world rewards.
• Nest: Our flagship RWA yield product that distributes high quality RWAs to crypto native users. We launched with several blue chip vaults including nALPHA, nTBILL, nBASIS, nCREDIT. These vaults are comprised of US Treasury Bills, basis trade tokens, private credit, alternative assets and others from some of the best issuers in crypto including Blackrock, Blackstone, Area, Golub, Janus Henderson, Superstate, Carlyle, PIMCO, Hamilton Lane, and more.
• PLUME staking: Staking for PLUME was enabled, providing real yield and exclusive rewards to tokenholders, while contributing to security of the chain.
• Genesis Validators: Secured the network for real-world capital with 10 initial, global validators. Beyond the security model, the selected validators are strategic partners to Plume in various ways. The cohort includes SBI, Republic Crypto, DSRV, Bioeconomy, Hellomoon, Coinsummer Labs, Korea Web3 Embassy, PNP Max, and Nano Labs.
• pUSD & pETH: Launched pUSD, the native stablecoin on Plume, backed by USDC; and pETH, the native ETH-variant on Plume that is yield-bearing and composable. 
• Royco Markets: Democratized access to RWA vaults across the Plume ecosystem.
• Enso Cross-Chain Deposits: Simplified RWA vault access with seamless, full execution capabilities to optimize user incentives.

Outside of this, the product & engineering team are working on several new initiatives that will further cement Plume as the leader in RWAs and we’re excited to share more in future updates!

Community 

The community continues to thrive through various forms of engagement. Beyond transaction volume and online activity, it’s always rewarding to receive the positive feedback that our ecosystem is providing value back to our Goons. 

• With 25 million transactions by the end of Q2, Plume's onchain activity one month post-launch ranks highest among chains introduced this year.
• The Plume community dominates in Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Indonesia, illustrating our global reach and adoption. 
• Our community is highly engaged and continues to grow in activity – we averaged ~33k unique viewers on our educational broadcasts and Plume Room ecosystem project spaces in Q2

Company

We also had a number of company wide developments this quarter. We were excited to finally open our new office in NYC and reiterated our commitment to furthering innovation in crypto and bridging relationships between the on and offchain worlds. We held an opening party and the event was a smashing success with tons of attendees from all over the NYC crypto ecosystem.

On top of that, we also held our first company offsite in Mexico where we brought together our team members from all over the world to collaborate, hang out, and cook up new plans for the rest of the year.

Looking Ahead

The enthusiasm surrounding RWAs is undeniable, and Plume is leading the charge. We are now definitely the largest RWA chain and ecosystem in all of crypto with the largest number of RWA holders, the biggest ecosystem of partners & projects, the most diverse assets, and most importantly – the greatest & largest community.

The path is long and filled with challenges – but we couldn’t be more grateful to be able to build in this market alongside everyone in the greatest market of all time. So much more to come and excited to share more in the next update!