Chris Yin I RWA's, Another Rug Or Is This Time Different I Plume Network I Pragma Denver 2025

[Music] let's get ready for our very first talk of the day and for this I'd like to bring on Chris from plume to tell you about what's happening with our W please give him a big round of applause all right all right hey everybody great to uh to be out here in Denver today with everybody talking about uh you know crypto and all kinds of things today um and so we're going to get a little bit into RW today right and RW mostly are an acronym that nobody cares about or nobody really understands or so we'll talk a little bit about it and the prompt really was what are RW uh a rug or this time actually different and we'll get into all of that right so maybe really quickly this is me you know this morning and I'm sure the same for a lot of you right looking at the phone right and realizing that we're tanking here right and btc's kind of comeing down the wrong way right and so that's kind of the starting point of kind of where we are today right and so you know that just sets the tone in sort of a bit of a somber mood for all this but the positive stuff is this right like the sentiment stuff is actually still it's a strange uh sort of um Discord between the sentiment and the price right this is the sentiment uh of crypto over time and you can see right now we are at the same place as we were in August right except the difference is at August we were at 50k for BTC and right now we're still like 85 is right so price is up but sentiment could not be worse right now why is that right and I think everybody knows this already but we can bring this up and talk about it number one right it's this right Trump sits here and you know right before the inauguration rugs us has his wife come in and do the exact same thing the day after right and then of course then we get the Argentinian president doing a different one as well right and so this has just led to a lot of um like I think people are tired and people are not feeling great about where things are going and this is not what we thought would happen when Trump came into office right we thought that it would be a opening factor for crypto not a sort of free pass to do crime on Shane right um and this is kind of one tweet I think that summarizes the whole thing right people in Denver right have been talking about how we're tired of central talking of meme talk tired of memes tired of vapor tired of nonsense people want to go back to what we're supposed to be doing it's real things right it's something that matters it's real yield it's all these things right which is the rotation into RW which is happening right now right now obviously this is a joke right the actual rotation is this right so if you look at this this is a sector performance over the last uh the last month right and so if you look at things like you know AI right or um infrastructure you look at you know D5 D whatever it might be even BTC everything is down right RBS are up right and why is that again right it's because people are rotating back into real things it's because people are hopeful and want to do things that are real and and come back to sort of the ideals of crypto right wrong right the actual reason is because of this right because people have seen this guy on screen this guy is a guy named Larry fin he's a Founder he's a CEO of a company called Black Rock right it's A1 trillion asset manager he talks a lot about tokenization right and everyone is excited because he wants to bring things on chain right and the reason is very simple the r opportunity is massive right you look at things like derivatives you look at things like real estate right stocks you know debt alternative assets every one of these things is multiple hundreds of trillions of dollars thousands trillion dollars right it's big and crypto is two to three trillion still very small right so idea is very very simple when people think about R what they're thinking is Larry is going to take that 12 trillion dump it into crypto and we're all going to get rich right um and obviously it's just not true right um but doesn't mean that it isn't it doesn't mean that it is nonsense there is something real happening here right and if you look at all the stuff happening here you can get a feel here are all the headlines of recent right of late excuse me right things like you know Black Rock tokenizing stuff State Street coming out with the credit cards you can now use your crypto right you have things like Visa introducing a network right people are doing all kinds of stuff around token there's a bunch of big names and blah blah blah right the only thing is if you pull back this one layer deeper right the thing that you'll find is that the headlines of today right read very much of the headlines of yesterday right so this is an article from just a couple months ago right it's about improving operational efficiency gains right um it's about you know doing real estate on chains you can buy a fraction of a house or whatever right or you can do things like buy fractions of a venture firm on chain right and if you look back two three years ago you know this is the exact same nonsense that we were talking about last time right 2022 right we're doing tokenized real estate we could buy fractions of a house right increasing liquidity transparency simplifying operations of management the whole thing right and even then we're talking about doing venture capital on chain right it's the same nonsense as last time right except the difference is last time didn't work very well you know um still most things went to zero these things are down 90 80 80 90% right no usage right another one gold pinch right again both these are our partners and friends right and many of these folks are investors In Bloom as well so I'm not knocking them but just to say right as a statement of reality last cycle we tried this stuff and we're taking the exact same as last time and expecting things to be different this time right and it's not going to happen right again so what is this right things are up right now how can this materialize and how does this actually come into what it needs to be right now again if we go back to it right the reason why rdbs are popular right now is because they think people on Twitter think that Wall Street is going to come in and buy our bags right whereas the truth is Right Wall Street is making us buy theirs right that's what's actually going on right if you look at you know maybe another point on it right it's buy side and the sell side right if people who have been in finance right you kind of know what this is but just say it again there are two sides of this one is The Bu which means you come in and you're bringing assets to get people oh sorry the buy side is you're coming and bringing Capital right it's it's us right when you buy tokens you're the buy side right you're like you know putting capital in the sell side is the side that brings the Assets in right they're bringing assets they're looking for Capital today right and people don't really understand distinction that's why on CT today everyone thinks oh trad's coming this means tons of liquidity right everything's going to be great and blah blah blah what they don't realize is the buy it's only the sell side right and again if you think about it again this guy right is coming in to dump his onto US there's no way he's buying this nonsense right and so the idea that he's going to come in right and dump a bunch of cash into crypto and make us all rich is ridiculous right now if we go back to it right what are we actually doing here right again this is just more on like how this actually happens look at all these headlines right the chintai and and R3 right which is you know a Griff from last cycle right is um talking about dumping an $800 million fund on chain so you can buy some ESG nonsense right I can buy some tokenized Middle Eastern assets right or some real estate on chain there or I can buy some I can I can get scammed by Nigerians on chain too now right right like all this stuff is just like nonsense that is bringing stuff on chain to allow you to get rugged right that's all this is right doesn't mean there's not value here right but just to be clear about what's actually happening and what isn't happening right and if you look at again today take a look at Black Rock right today $650 million in value this is the bidle fund this is a money market fund they've tokenized and put on chain this means they've sucked $650 million of crypto into their world they've not given a yet now they've done some BTC and ETF ETF uh stuff so I won't give I'll give them some credit for that right but there's that right you're looking at 52 holders you look across these things monthly active addresses nobody's using this right that's number one right you look across here onto again good partner of ours so is Black Rock You Know friends of ours are not knocking him right but same thing right you look across the same thing you know monthly transfer account you're looking at the 40s it's a little bit more but still it's very very small right on a relative basis people are not using these things and it shows a very Stark difference between these products and what actually is useful so maybe let's zoom into what actually does work right if we look at this cycle today I'm sure everyone here knows there's a product called hyper liquid right and Hyper liquid is very very successful what does hyper liquid do right this is the last two months right I know it's not apples apples this is a cumulative um trading volume in just the two months H $20 billion that's real usage that's people want to see right even if we look at something you know the next the next grift of the cycle right we look at Sonic right like even if we look at Sonic right $900 million in tvl starting in January they were sub30 right and so that means in from January to now in two months they've added more tvl than the last two years of Uno and black raw combined right just to give you a sense of what's actually going on here right and it shows that there's a mismatch between what people are doing what people want right and this is why because all of The Branding around rwas and and um Trad fion chain and all this nonsense is this Wall Street 2.0 right I didn't like Wall Street 1.0 very much right so let alone to do with the next version of this right and this is a drab kind of like you know muted thing it's not a very interesting article right and so this is the reason why you have a lot of Trad five folks coming into crypto to do Trad five things on chain and what they're missing and not understanding is that the audience on chain right are crypto people right we are not try we're not trying to do the same nonsense I could do offchain onchain right and people that are actually going to come buy these assets are not going to come buy the same things you can get offchain onchain right I can get t- bills offchain today I could just go to my brokerage and buy it why would I take smart contract risk come in here take extra fees and buy on those stuff doesn't make any sense that's why comes gri but because some people cannot get out and so that's fine but it doesn't add anything new to what's going on here right and so again going back to this idea onchain Trad FY limits adoption so again the number flight had a date sorry I was drinking last night so I didn't get to update it um but um the rwa stuff right if you look at black rocks bidd and O USG right this is the number of tvl this is the T this is the number of holders again very small right contrast it to defi right and a Crypton native feel for this right how else do you get access to the treasury on chain if you don't want to go through some ridiculous kyc KYB QP process right you can buy Dy right and Dy today right has a bunch of holders a bunch of tvl right and and same with pendall it's another way of doing yield stripping it's another trfi concept right so again it's not Apples to Apples what does it say when you format one thing in this way right it doesn't match who's here it doesn't match what's going on versus when you format things for the audience that is today you get a bunch of usage right and so that's kind of the distinction and where we are today and what's happening right and so what we want to do is get away from building for this guy and letting him dump on us and build for this guy right if we go back to another analogy in in the uh in the real world right there's a guy named ran Kitty I forget his real name to be honest um but if we remember in the last cycle we had uh gme right and GameStop and AMC and all these things and the rise of mem stocks right and when we think about actual change and growing things and bringing people in this is what brought people in last time right it was this idea going to Robin Hood gamble on a bunch of in the equities world before we came to do it in Doge and and shib and these kinds of things right we had Wall Street bets it was a Bottoms Up Fields a community right and was coming in here to rug these guys Melvin Capital right a huge 8 billion hedge fund that was trying to short this thing and we just kept running it up and bankrupted them right that's what changed last time that's what brought net new people in that's how actually grew the space in finance last time right so it's about a new audience it's about new things it's about focusing on the bottoms up side the people first right and so we're not trying to build this right we're trying to do this right so plume we not Wall Street 2.0 right we're Robin Hood 2.0 right the idea is very simple we still work with all the large TR asset managers right uh black rocks UBS dinar you know we've got raise money from folks like brevan Apollo um excuse me Wisdom Tree Galaxy all of that but we always focus on the people and the Community First which is a very Crypton native feel and a crypto native thing right and that's why we have this it's all these people right who've built in this community who are focused on artas who are focused on crypto who are focused on plume right and you can see here someone got a tattoo right which is pretty Next Level right um excuse me um and this is how we start right um and we can see again like these people are nuts they're just doing tattoos right and so the way this works right is very simple we use that Community as the buy side we bring Assets in Plume tokenizes those things and makes them usable for a Crypton native audience once we're there we begin to combine these things between crypto and the real world and then you create net new things right and these net new things are how we actually get the buy side on and how we get net new growth and New Capital new users into the ecosystem right and that's what we're doing here and that's why the approach and what people talk about today if we continue down the path that we are we will think that things are happening but we're getting rugged by think versus if we focus on this we'll actually grow and change things right and so that's what plume is right we're we're the leading art chain for crypto natives right this is who we are right um you know there's three Asians um that run the company um and uh you know we come from places like coinbase dydx Robin Hood right very tra places and also on the um a little bit of money last year around this time from you know great folks like Han Galaxy of course a capital as well and a bunch of folks as well as a bunch of crypto native people right the founders of injecto the founders of SE I folks blah blah blah right um we raised a series a last uh few months ago now right and so you know we're really building this ecosystem building this community building this growth right and the quick overview is this you know when you think about rwas right what we focus on is three things it's ecosystem right we have the largest community of projects that are building on plume number two it's Community excuse me number two is community right so we have the most wallets the most transaction the most users the most people on social blah blah blah all that right and we focus on liquidity and capital and the technology right so to Breeze through it really quickly another more tangible example right the only stable the only RW that matters is the stable coin right and we've seen a lot of growth in rbas in general right but if you look at this right this is slightly out of date now rbas are now at 17 billion right great chart Everyone likes it we're going up blah blah blah we feel great right the truth is though right again these things right are all the things that we cannot touch you have to be qpd up you've got to be kybd these are the assets that we don't touch most this is private credit a lot of this is Corporate bonds and government bonds and things like that right and when you know these again this is trafy stuff put on chain in a trafy context versus when you focus on doing this in a Crypton native way we come up with a stable coin right and if you just look at the stable coin today right if you look at arbas versus stable coin it's a very Stark difference in adoption and growth right the stable coin is not just taking the US dollar and slapping on a chain it's building the US dollar EXC me in a crypto native way so I can use it just like crypto the reason why people forget about the stable coin as an RBA is because it's just crypto to me I just is going into a pool I get it I swap into I do what I got to do right it's composable across the whole ecosystem I don't even think about it right versus RW today are a basket of things that I don't really understand right it's Pokemon cards it's cars right it's financial instruments it's much of that's never put into the same group together right and so that's what this is right and how to think about this right and so instead of building that we're building this right uh for people don't know this is Farmville right and the idea is pretty simple right you should be able to click buttons and interact with the real world right I should be able to gamble on if I want and hold a bunch of vcoin and when I do want to I can then rotate into and own a bunch of crops and print money that way right or I can then roll it into a fleet of Starbucks and earn yield that way or a bunch of or whatever it might be right and so it's not this right it's this and that's kind of what we're focused on right the way to do that is by combining all these things together right projects Community liquidity into this full stack purpose buil ecosystem right for crypto natives where the use case of these assets are fit to things that we all were to do one yield farming two trading 30 speculation that's what we already do on chain so we find assets that fit those things versus right trying to um you know find something that we don't do today right and so anyway here are a couple examples of things that you can do on plume right but again the whole point is to design this entire ecosystem from a Chain's perspective right to make this easy so you can tokenize anything by bringing on chain right through a thing called plume Arc we have plume Nexus which is our data provider our Oracle and then the custom chain itself right we put all these things together so Plum is the easiest place to bring things on chain and the best place to utilize those things on chain right and the reason why we need a chain because that's the real question why the hell do we need a chain there's so many already out there right it's ridiculous you know and I hate having to bridge around because each chain has its own feel its own Community right what we're talking about is bootstrapping this ecosystem right and bringing these net new things on chain right and if you look across today right there's a very distinct feel between soul and base as an example right soul today is a little bit tainted because now it's the Mele chain right but historically right it was memes right um and you know you're really looking at pump.

fund there's a reason why pump. fund works so well on Soul versus other places right because the Soul Community and I'm one of those people right is the person that DCA five bucks into a 20K market cap right and so there's a great alignment between the product the ecosystem and the liquidity there right to make that work right um and if you look at Bass as an example bass has more of a feel that comes from uh the sort of Normie social the Normie web 2 world because it's kind of coinbase adjacent right and so that's where all the social stuff has come up right you had friend Tech you have warp cast you have all these different things you have Jesse running around trying to get people to buy pizzas right like it's a very different feel right than salana right and so these things have all backed into what the feel is right even if you look at barah right barah has its own thing as well right and again each one has its own feel it's not good or bad right but you do need this entire thing right and the market has proven and shown that that's what they want right this is from a protocol right who is deploying on base um before we were around right they did a whole thing had a big partnership with Jesse and blah blah blah right right and they launched crickets no users no buyers nothing right versus they came to plume granted was just testet on there we gave him over 300,000 transactions over 100,000 new wallets right and we put them in touch with a couple LPS Clos a $10 million deal and now they're doing stuff on plim right on the other side from the asset management completely offchain stuff today right these folks today have tried to do this they say look we've talked to every tokenization provider right every chain every protocol every ecosystem out there right and nobody can do this and the reason is because there's so many things to do in tokens I got to tokenize the asset I got spin up liquidity right I got to then put this thing into uh the community someone's got to buy I have to then make sure that there's an ecosystem that actually can use it and make it composable right and so they've tried to do this with other places and it hasn't worked until they came to plume right because we've designed the whole ecosystem top to bottom to focus on this use case right and so that's what this is right you can tokenize anything capitalize and then distribute it through defi right this process sounds simple not easy right and everyone's taking forever to do this versus what we have built is this full stack system to do this right so I'll Breeze through this stuff because I don't want to keep saying the same words but you know we've got a big ecosystem you know we've been purpose bu for rwa really focused on his community right and ultimately you know we're very excited for the next cycle right to really make sure that we can bring real things on chain so it's not about being an RB Maxi right it's about being able to rotate in and out of these things in a very seamless way so you can use crypto as you want and when you want to use the real world you can so anyway that's it thanks for taking the time [Music]