Plume Secures Bermuda Digital Asset Licence Launching the World’s First Regulated Vaults
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Today, we are announcing that our Bermuda subsidiary, Kimber Digital Assets Bermuda ISAC Ltd. (KDAB), has been granted a Class M Digital Asset Business Licence by the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) under the Digital Asset Business Act 2018. KDAB will be the first regulated onchain vault manager, combining the transparency and accessibility of decentralised finance with prudential oversight from a globally respected financial regulator.
We are now among a small group of globally recognised firms, including Circle, Coinbase, and Kraken, that have selected Bermuda's DABA framework as the regulatory home for their global operations, a peer group that reflects the BMA's reputation as one of the most rigorous digital asset supervisors in the world.
The Regulated, Global Onchain Vault: A Milestone for Open Finance
When the first exchange-traded fund launched on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1990, it introduced a simple idea: diversified, professionally managed exposure that anyone could trade. It did not invent asset management but made it widely accessible. Over time, ETFs grew into a 14 trillion dollar industry, expanding market access, lowering fees, and shifting focus toward investors.
KDAB's regulated onchain vaults evolve the ETF model: users deposit assets, receive proportional shares, earn yield, and redeem at NAV. Unlike traditional funds, everything runs on immutable smart contracts instead of administrators or custodians. A curator manages and rebalances assets within fixed, hardcoded rules, preserving investment judgment without the ability to override structural protections or contract logic.
KDAB is the first regulated vault curator licensed to create and distribute vault tokens under AML standards modeled after those applied to stablecoins under Bermuda law and the U.S. GENIUS Act.
Where the ETF made asset management accessible to anyone with a brokerage account, KDAB's vaults make it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, provided they meet KDAB's best-in-class AML wallet screening technology. No brokerage account is required, and no intermediary stands between the investor and the product. There are no market hours or settlement delays, just professionally structured, reserve-backed exposure that is accessible permissionlessly, globally, and around the clock, with the added ability to be used as composable collateral in DeFi.
"The ETF was the last great structural innovation in asset management. It took the same underlying exposure, e.g., equities, bonds, commodities, and made it radically more accessible by changing the wrapper. We are doing the same thing onchain. The KDAB vaults will be backed by regulated funds and high-quality assets sourced from the US, Hong Kong, and other major jurisdictions. Public funds like these KDAB vaults are not new. What is new is that a lawyer in Lagos, a freelancer in Manila, or a small business owner in São Paulo can access that yield in seconds with a smartphone and a stablecoin, with the same regulatory protections that a pension fund in London expects. The BMA licence makes this real. It means this is not an experiment. It is a regulated financial product, supervised by a regulator that has been overseeing global financial services since 1969, operating on infrastructure that is more transparent and more auditable than anything that exists in traditional finance. The ETF democratised investing for anyone with a brokerage account. We are democratising it for everyone else." — Chris Yin, Co-Founder and CEO, Plume
Bermuda: The Regulatory Standard
We chose Bermuda because the BMA has built the most sophisticated regulatory framework for digital asset and real-world asset businesses in the world. The Class M DABA Licence subjects KDAB and each of its incorporated segregated accounts to rigorous prudential supervision, including:
Asset-liability management. Each KDAB vault operates through its own incorporated segregated account ("ISA") under the Incorporated Segregated Accounts Act 2019, providing statutory ring-fencing, separate legal personality, and full bankruptcy remoteness. Vault reserves are held onchain in non-custodial smart contracts with continuous, cryptographically verifiable proof of collateral attested to by Bluprynt. The BMA's prudential standards impose net asset requirements, liquidity risk management, and wind-down planning that ensure each ISA can meet the expectations of vault token holders at all times.
Cybersecurity. KDAB operates industry-leading security infrastructure, including robust smart contract audits, real-time threat detection, smart contract exploit monitoring, and wallet-level risk analytics. The vault smart contracts are immutable and non-upgradeable at the smart contract asset control layer, eliminating the administrative key vulnerabilities that have driven the majority of recent DeFi security incidents.
Anti-money laundering. KDAB maintains a world-class comprehensive AML/ATF programme supervised by the BMA, including continuous transaction monitoring, AML/ATF screening at the vault-token level regardless of what blockchain protocols vault tokens are bridged to, and freeze-and-seize capabilities embedded directly in the vault token.
"The framework that the BMA has applied for KDAB represents an important milestone in the developing global onchain capital markets. Most importantly, BMA has adopted the latest technologies to deliver a regulatory outcome that is in parity—or in many instances exceeds—the goals of its policy mandates." — Salman Banaei, Plume General Counsel
Securing an Open Financial Future
"With this BMA authorisation we are looking forward to an acceleration in our open finance agenda. With this level of regulatory alignment we will be able to distribute high-quality assets to a broad audience globally, removing high barriers to entry and fulfilling the original promise of onchain finance of accessibility. We are ensuring that removing the walled-gardens of traditional finance will still ensure the highest level of safety and compliance." — Teddy Pornprinya, Plume Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer
The legal pathway for U.S.-registered master funds to be accessed by non-U.S. feeder structures has existed for years under established SEC staff guidance. KDAB is the first vehicle built to operationalize that pathway at onchain scale—pairing a BMA-supervised feeder structure with a programmable, globally distributable vault token. U.S. asset managers now have a credible route to reach investors in markets they have historically struggled to serve, without standing up parallel fund infrastructure jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
We will be announcing the new BMA-regulated KDAB vaults in the coming days and weeks.
Plume is the compliance chain, with protocol-level AML/ATF screening. We have successfully deterred illicit actors, achieving a 0.000005% blocked transaction rate compared to approximately 1% across other public blockchains.