Plume Update: Q4 2025

Introduction & Highlights

Q4 2025 was our second quarter as a live chain and marked the beginning of the next evolution of Plume. After becoming the largest RWA chain in the world by users, we leveraged our growth to attract new institutional partners, expand our reach, and lay new groundwork to deepen our regulatory moat. We focused on growth. Growth in assets, growth in demand, growth in distribution, and growth in geography.

Onboarding the Institutions: Off the back of a strong Q3 2025, we accelerated our institutional pace with 14 tokenized WisdomTree funds, a partnership with Securitize to bring high quality assets including Hamilton Lane’s SCOPE to Plume, as well as Paxos USDG0 stablecoin consortium with Hyperliquid and Aptos.
Multichain Expansion: Since we launched Nest, we’ve seen incredibly strong demand from folks all over outside of the Plume ecosystem. We began our multi chain journey with our friends at Solana, bringing our RWAs to 20M+ users and deploying the first multi chain RWA yield layer
Plume to the UAE: Not only was Plume a featured member of Abu Dhabi’s Hub71 Digital Assets Accelerator to bootstrap our presence in the region, we also secured our commercial license from Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM)
New Tier 1 Listings: We were grateful to expand the $PLUME token to the Korean market with our KRW listings on Upbit as well as our USD listing on Coinbase, dramatically increasing our distribution‍
Ecosystem Maturation: Continued growth with sustained RWA TVL, maintaining market leadership position while expanding distribution channels and composability across multiple chains

Q4 was about laying the groundwork for the future. The RWA landscape is changing in front of us incredibly quickly with rapid progress from all dimensions – regulations are changing all around the world, users are demanding every asset in the world, and every company & country is rushing to get into RWAs. We are sitting at the precipice of the greatest update to the financial markets in the history of the world and we’re laser focused on laying the groundwork

Letter from the CEO

“Progress in a year often feels slow; progress in three years often looks obvious.”

When we started Plume, we couldn’t get anyone to care about US Treasury Bills. Fast forward to today, the progress that we’re seeing in tokenization is astounding. Legislation being passed, the biggest companies in the world talking about tokenizing every asset, and users all across the world demanding access to more and more things.

Given it is Q4, I spent some time reflecting not only the quarter but the entire year. We’ve seen incredible change and adoption this year in the overall RWA landscape. RWA value increased over 3.4x from $5.5B to $18.8B. RWA holders exploded over 7x from 83K to 536K. But really the story is around the rapid growth in private credit and institutional funds. We saw over 13x growth in institutional funds and nearly 30x growth in private credit. The data tells a simple story. As users get more comfortable with onchain assets, they are doing what all onchain users do best – search for more yield.

This takes shape in many ways, from users simply trying to find higher yielding assets to users experimenting with novel features like RWA looping. And you’ll find Plume leading in all of these areas. Q4 was a strong quarter for us bringing newer high quality institutional assets to Plume. Along with Apollo Global, we now have assets from the highest quality institutions from all over the world including Wisdomtree, Securitize, China Merchant Bank International (CMBI), Taikang, and others. Our Nest vaults continue to be utilized in Morpho vaults for various looping strategies. And we have several new products in the works that will open new dimensions to onchain RWAs.

It’s incredibly exciting and gratifying to see our original vision & mission begin to come true. As we’ve said many times, we started Plume with one simple belief – life is better onchain. We were one of the few that were focused not on bringing the blockchain to the real world, but bringing the real world to crypto. And as the rest of the industry begins to gravitate towards this message, this world becomes more real day by day.

Plume has always been bigger than just ourselves. Revolutionizing global financial markets is not something that can be done alone. And so we continue our work by taking what works on Plume expanding to other ecosystems, channels, geographies, and users.

We are truly still just at the beginning. Bill Gates said people often overestimate what will happen in the next 2 years and underestimate what will happen in 10. And as of January 2026m we’ve just crossed Plume’s 2 year anniversary. If the progress in these last 2 years was an underestimation of what can happen, I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.

gplume

- Chris Yin, Co-Founder & CEO

State of the Tokenization Market

Liquidity issues exposed vulnerabilities in yield-seeking strategies

This was an interesting quarter. On October 10th, we witnessed mass liquidations in tokens like we’ve never seen before. The largest liquidations in crypto history, with orderbook depth collapsing 90%+ and the vast majority of tokens down 80%-90%+. While prices temporarily recovered soon afterwards, things were never the same. Liquidity thinned and things were on a perpetually down motion afterwards.

The ramifications of that week had far reaching implications. One of the more notable moments was the - the early-November collapse of Stream Finance and Elixir. Stream revealed a $93 million loss by an external fund manager, setting off liquidations and leaving Elixir, whose deUSD was 65% backed by Stream, with a stablecoin that crashed from $1 to $0.015 and roughly $68 million in exposure.

The fallout erased hundreds of millions in value and drove nearly $1 billion in capital out of DeFi yield platforms, the largest outflow since 2022. The episode exposed ongoing failures in counterparty transparency and risk disclosure, forcing protocols like Compound and Euler to freeze markets and made the industry refocus on proof of reserves, audits, and clearer reporting of hidden concentrations.

Tokenized equities continued expanding across platforms

Tokenized equities expanded sharply in Q4, building on Q3 momentum as major platforms scaled offerings and volume. Ondo Finance entered Solana with 200+ tokenized stocks and ETFs, challenging xStocks’ long-held dominance, while Robinhood grew from 207 to 493 assets and increased daily volume from $69,000 to over $8.3 million.

Despite growth, Robinhood’s roughly $17 million in tokenized assets lagged far behind Ondo Global Markets’ $365 million, as exchanges including Kraken, Gemini, and eToro rolled out competing products. The sector gained institutional and regulatory attention, but liquidity fragmentation, regulatory uncertainty, and unresolved questions around shareholder rights continued to limit adoption.

RWA perpetuals emerged as a breakthrough product category

Q4 saw the rapid rise of perpetual futures linked to real-world assets, giving traders 24/7 leveraged exposure to equities, commodities, and treasuries. Platforms like Ostium, Avantis, drove new all time highs in volume, with weekly trading far exceeding spot tokenized equity.. However the crown largely continues to go to Hyperliquid, capturing roughly 80% market share and emerging as the dominant venue for RWA perps. While regulators signaled openness to incorporating these products into U.S. markets, the convergence of RWAs and perpetual derivatives introduced heightened risks around leverage, liquidations, and volatility.

Regulatory progress advanced but faced significant delays on comprehensive market structure legislation

Despite stablecoin clarity from the GENIUS Act, broader U.S. crypto market structure legislation stalled in Q4 as the crypto market structure bull (CLARITY Act) and Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA) faced repeated delays. The Senate Banking Committee deferred action until at least 2026 amid disputes over DeFi definitions, stablecoin yield, agency governance, and conflicts tied to President Trump’s crypto holdings, prompting Coinbase to withdraw support.

Benchmark analysts noted the delay would create a "structural risk premium" across the digital asset ecosystem, capping valuation expansion for U.S.-exposed platforms while favoring Bitcoin-centric infrastructure over exchanges, DeFi protocols, and altcoins. While SEC Chair Paul Atkins advanced regulatory groundwork through Project Crypto, faster progress in Europe and Asia increased pressure on the U.S. to catch up.

Plume's Q4 Review

Onboarding The Institutions

Off the back of a strong Q3 where we established ourselves as one of the leading RWA chains with the largest holderbase of tokenized assets in the world, we utilized that momentum to strengthen our institutional presence with several tier 1 partnerships, starting with WisdomTree.

WisdomTree is one of the largest asset managers in the world with over $160B+ in assets under management spanning fixed income, private credit, commodities, alternatives, etc. We’ve been speaking with their team for a while and not only teamed up for a great conversation on their podcast, Crypto Clarified, but subsequently then became their largest deployment ever with over 14 funds deploying onto Plume’s mainnet. We’re incredibly excited about this partnership and have much more planned with the great folks at WisdomTree over the next few quarters.

We were also excited to announce our partnership with Securitize. Securitize themselves had a great quarter by becoming the first company in tokenization to get listed in the public markets through a SPAC with Cantor. Softly after Securitize announced their partnership with Plume with a particular focus – utilizing the infrastructure that we’ve built at Nest as distribution. Through this we lined up over $10M+ to start through our friends at Solv Protocol to deposit into these funds through Nest and we’ll continue to meaningfully expand this partnership throughout this year.

Most RWA projects are very Western focused – Blackrock, the SEC, etc. However we’ve always seen the world of RWAs as a global endeavor. You can’t build a unified global marketplace by only focusing on half the world. We’ve always been very intentional about growing not only our American presence, but also our presence in APAC. And we’re fortunate to work with great partners like our friends at DigiFT, who were able to deploy tokenized money market funds from Taikang ($630B+ AUM) and CMBI ($20B+ AUM). In tandem with the work we’ve done with Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) in pushing regulation forward in Hong Kong, we’re incredibly excited to help continue to push RWAs forward in Asia.

Not only did we bring on new assets, but we strengthened our infrastructure with long lasting and durable relationships. We joined Paxos inaugural launch cohort for USDG0 alongside Hyperliquid and Aptos to utilize their regulated stablecoin as one of the primary stablecoins backing our native stablecoin, pUSD. In tandem we expanded our bridging coverage with Wormhole, allowing not only $PLUME but Nest tokens to flow freely throughout the entire onchain economy.

Multi-Chain Expansion & Nest Evolution

Our mission is to bring RWAs onchain. And that means for the entire onchain economy, not just a subset of it. So as we define the experience for onchain RWAs, we’ve always been open to expanding to new ecosystems and networks. If we can bring RWAs to all of crypto and the entire ecosystem grows, then we will all grow and benefit as a result.

Nest is a unique application. We built a new vault product designed specifically to handle RWAs all the way from user experience, composability, operations, legal, and more. So we’ve been grateful to see lots of interest from people all over that want Nest so their users can interact with RWAs in the Plume way – as onchain assets that look and feel just like the crypto native assets they’re already familiar with.

In December our cofounder Teddy and CSO Shukyee spoke at Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi announcing the expansion of Nest to Solana. We’ve always had a great relationship and respect for the Solana team and ecosystem and we’re proud to be able to contribute to their growth. We launched five RWA vaults in our initial deployment – nBASIS, nOPAL, nWISDOM, nALPHA, nTBILL – that make it easy for users to one click deposit stablecoins and get access to some of the best RWA assets in the world from Wisdomtree, Superstate, Janus Henderson, and more.

Each vault token is liquid, yield-bearing, and composable across Solana DeFi. Users can deploy nBASIS or nTBILL into lending protocols, liquidity pools, or structured products while continuing to earn underlying real-world yield. We’ve partnered with Squads, Solana's leading multi-sig and treasury management provider, Loopscale, and many other Solana native protocols to help contribute to the vibrant RWA ecosystem they are building on Solana and we’re grateful to get to work with and learn from these excellent builders.

Regulatory Expansion & Abu Dhabi License

On December 9, Plume secured a commercial license from Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), positioning the network to expand RWA tokenization across the Middle East. Alongside this, Plume was selected as a featured participant in Abu Dhabi’s Hub71 Digital Assets Accelerator, strengthening its on-the-ground presence while securing the regulatory authorization required to operate in the region. The UAE and the greater Middle East region is a strategic market with economies that understand real world yield. There is no better place to set up operations in Abu Dhabi, the premier financial market of the region and plays a huge role globally.

The ADGM license enables Plume to serve institutional clients and asset managers in the Middle East, support compliant tokenization of real-world assets under ADGM regulatory frameworks, and establish partnerships with regional financial institutions exploring onchain capital markets. The Middle East has emerged as one of the most proactive regions globally for blockchain-based financial innovation, with governments in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia actively investing in digital asset infrastructure. Plume’s licensing positions the network at the center of this regional momentum.

Combined with existing regulatory approvals in the U.S. and ongoing engagement with regulators in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other jurisdictions, Plume now operates within a truly global compliance framework. This multi-jurisdictional approach allows asset issuers to tokenize, distribute, and scale RWAs in markets where regulatory clarity already exists, while positioning Plume to expand alongside future regulatory developments.

Hong Kong Fintech Week & Hong Kong Monetary Authority

Global RWA Alliance

The GRA event convened institutions, asset issuers, regulators, and distribution partners to discuss the evolving regulatory landscape, emerging real-world asset (RWA) technologies, and the future of finance. Attendees included regulatory bodies such as the Malaysia Government and major institutions like Guotai Junan Securities (GTJA), fostering cross-sector dialogue on compliant innovation.

Web3Labs Bridge Programme Demo Day

The Web3Labs Bridge Programme Demo Day, supported by organizations including China Resources Science and Technology Research Institute, Cyberport, Animoca Brands, OSL, and China Renaissance Capital, brought together participants from political, financial, and technology sectors. Discussions focused on opportunities at the intersection of traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), with a strong emphasis on the digital development of RWAs. The event saw participation from global and Asia-based projects exploring regulated tokenization partnerships with Plume.

Hong Kong Regulation

On the regulatory front, Plume continues to make progress with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), working closely with stakeholders. OSL has obtained SFC approval to list PLUME on its Hong Kong and Global platforms, while Plume is advancing its application for a Type 1 license with a tokenization uplift.

Global Exchange Accessibility

This final quarter of 2025 brought $PLUME to major tier 1 exchanges, dramatically expanding accessibility and distribution.

Upbit Listing‍

On November 26, $PLUME was listed on Upbit with KRW trading pairs, expanding access to the token across South Korea’s highly active crypto market. As Korea’s largest exchange, Upbit provides both deep retail reach and strong institutional credibility, reinforcing Plume’s growing presence in Asia. The listing positions Plume to capitalize on Korea’s role as one of the world’s most engaged crypto communities, particularly as Upbit’s acquisition by Naver signals accelerating mainstream adoption. With Upbit also announcing plans to launch its own Layer 1 network, Plume is well positioned to deepen partnerships and further penetrate the Korean market.

Coinbase Listing

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On December 9, $PLUME was listed on Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, giving the token access to approximately 120 million monthly users across more than 100 countries. The listing significantly reduced onboarding friction, allowing users to purchase the token directly through Coinbase’s retail app, Coinbase Advanced, or Coinbase Exchange without bridging assets or managing external wallets.

The Coinbase launch reinforced Plume’s rapid expansion across major global markets. Alongside listings on Binance, Kraken, Bitget, and Bithumb, $PLUME now reaches retail and institutional investors across North America, Europe, Asia, and emerging markets.

This expanded distribution matters for two reasons:

It provides deep, diversified liquidity for institutions evaluating $PLUME exposure, and a strong credibility signal from listing on a top-tier, regulated exchange.
In the U.S., Coinbase also serves as a key institutional gateway, enabling engagement with Coinbase Institutional and creating potential pathways to bring Plume assets to Base over time.

The Plume Foundation continues exploring additional exchange listings to deepen global liquidity and accessibility in 2026.

Product & Engineering

Throughout the period, Plume’s product and engineering efforts were focused on building the core infrastructure required to make real-world assets truly multichain for the first time. Working alongside partners such as Circle and LayerZero, the team developed a unified multichain architecture that enables instant liquidity, seamless bridging, and consistent asset behavior across chains. This foundational work establishes the technical “rails” that allow RWAs to move freely between ecosystems, something that has not previously been achieved at production scale.

A major milestone was the launch of Nest’s multichain infrastructure, beginning with Solana. This required designing new vault contracts, integrating secure bridge mechanisms, and building cross-chain monitoring and reconciliation systems to ensure asset integrity, regulatory compliance, and operational consistency across networks. The result is a reusable framework that can now be replicated across additional chains with significantly reduced implementation overhead.

In parallel, the team expanded Nest’s vault offerings and onboarded assets from institutional issuers including WisdomTree, Securitize and BlackOpal. Each integration required close coordination across legal compliance, asset custody, smart contract audits, and end-to-end testing to meet institutional security standards. With the multichain foundation now in place, Plume is positioned to rapidly scale both asset coverage and chain support, accelerating the movement of RWAs across the broader onchain ecosystem.

Marketing & Brand Growth

Q4 was Plume's most globally visible quarter to date, with the team participating in major industry events and expanding media coverage:

Hong Kong FinTech Week

Plume participated in Hong Kong FinTech Week, one of Asia’s largest financial technology gatherings. At this flagship event, the Plume team represented real-world asset infrastructure to institutional delegates, regulators, and ecosystem partners, engaging in strategic discussions on tokenization, cross-border digital finance, and regulatory innovation.

Binance Blockchain Week‍

Plume joined Binance Blockchain Week 2025 in Dubai as a Gold Sponsor, with our Co-Founder Teddy taking the main stage to speak on the future of RWAs at one of the industry’s premier global events.

Plume’s presence strengthened relationships with the broader Binance ecosystem—including YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs), an early investor in Plume—while positioning the brand alongside global stakeholders driving mainstream institutional engagement and next-generation Web3 products.

Abu Dhabi FinTech Week

At Abu Dhabi FinTech Week, held by the auspices of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and positioned as one of the Middle East’s most important finance and innovation summits. Following the ADGM license, ABFW served as a jumping off point for the Plume team to further strengthen relationships in the EMEA region, engaging with senior regulators, institutional investors, and ecosystem partners.

Media Coverage & Industry Recognition

Featured in coverage from Messari, CoinDesk, The Block, and other leading crypto media outlets
Published thought leadership on multi-chain RWA distribution and institutional DeFi adoption
Expanded the Global RWA Alliance (GRWA) with new members across issuers, platforms, and infrastructure providers

Community & Ecosystem

In Q4 2025, Plume’s community development efforts were anchored by the execution of Ascend, a dedicated accelerator designed to support high-quality real-world asset builders. The program attracted more than 40 global applications and selected seven teams building across asset origination, infrastructure, and RWA-focused financial products.

Ascend was supported by a strong network of ecosystem partners and mentors drawn from leading infrastructure, investment, and policy organizations, including:

Anchorage Digital
Galaxy Ventures
OKX Ventures
Centrifuge
Keyrock
Tokenized Asset Coalition
RWA.xyz
Odisea

Mentorship was provided by operators and investors with deep experience across crypto and traditional finance, including:

Nick van Eck, CEO and Co-Founder of Agora
Teddy Pornprinya, Co-Founder of Plume
Bhaji Illuminati, CEO of Centrifuge
Nicola Wang, Investment Director at YZi Labs
Jeroen Offerijns, CTO of Centrifuge
Jihoz, Co-Founder of Sky Mavis
Representatives from Coinbase Ventures, LayerZero Labs, Bankless Ventures, and Sentora

The inaugural Ascend cohort reflected the depth and quality of early-stage RWA innovation:

AXC Labs, focused on expanding access to illiquid alternative assets across Asia-Pacific markets
Canary, providing dedicated oracle infrastructure securing more than $30 billion in assets across major partners
DeSyn, delivering cross-chain liquidity-as-a-service with over $1.4 billion in total value locked
Glider, simplifying automated portfolio strategies through blockchain-abstracted execution
Paimon, democratizing access to institutional-grade assets including private credit and pre-IPO equity
Tradible, combining digital collectibles with onchain liquidity
Voltaire, bringing institutional asset management strategies onchain

By prioritizing founder quality, institutional alignment, and long-term ecosystem development, Ascend reinforced Plume’s role not only as core RWA infrastructure, but as a community growth engine for the next generation of tokenized finance.

Looking Ahead

As we said in our introduction, Q4 was about laying the groundwork for the future. The RWA landscape is changing incredibly quickly with rapid progress from all dimensions – regulations are changing all around the world, users are demanding every asset in the world, and every company & country is rushing to get into RWAs.

Our priorities for 2026 are clear:

Distribution – We are deepening our multichain distribution strategy by expanding into additional venues, including centralized exchanges, while partnering with leading applications aligned with real-world assets such as neobanks and fintech platforms. This approach is designed to bring in off-chain capital and increase access to onchain RWAs beyond crypto-native users. In parallel, we are targeting integration with the largest onchain asset today, Treasuries, to anchor growth around deep, existing liquidity.
Regulatory Advancement – We are continuing to advance our U.S. regulatory narrative while expanding engagement with international regulators, including the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and building out a comprehensive EMEA strategy. This multi-jurisdictional approach is focused on creating clarity and durability for issuers, developers, and institutions. The objective is to align product expansion with regulatory frameworks that enable compliant scale across regions.
New Assets & New Protocols – We are expanding into new asset classes and protocols by addressing the RWAfi trilemma of liquidity, compliance, and composability. Based on learnings from building Nest, we recognize that DeFi-native products often fail to translate cleanly to real-world assets, requiring purpose-built infrastructure. As a result, we are developing a fully integrated, full-stack ecosystem for RWAfi protocols and preparing to launch a second core product designed specifically for RWA workflows.

Token Utility – Protocol fees will begin to accrue through Nest and subsequent products, creating sustainable onchain revenue. As fee generation ramps, we will deploy capital strategically through token buybacks, ecosystem incentives, and funding new growth initiatives. This establishes a direct link between protocol usage, revenue generation, and long-term token value.