The Problem With RWAs | Chris Yin - Plume

hello excited to be here at The Ether night stage handing it over to Christian from plume super excited about this panel the problems with real world assets excited to hear all about it awesome yo yo yo everyone here we go sorry I'm a little bit late A little sloppy I had to borrow the machine cuz I didn't bring my computer so uh you know that's that's the reason for all this but uh anyway problem and uh the Y AR are going to zero um cool well look we can go and get started uh this is us from last year around this time before plume got started you know today we're the the largest leading ecosystem last year because three of us in a motel you know sleeping on a bed covered in blood um and so things have changed but it's been good and so I think a lot of you guys like probably woke all it and this is me as I looked at the charts and I kind of got a sense of where things were going and it's really because of this right btc's down B right and it's G Clap the conference season crypto's gone jit but still feels bad right we're back down to a bad place right it's price bad you know everything's bad sentiment is all bad right now maybe jumping to sentiment really quickly you know we get a sense of what's going on here right here's a very simple chart right it shows sentiment over time and price right and we can see here that despite the fact that we are at nearly all-time high still right for Price sentiment is about the same place we were in August when BTC was down to about 50 right so despite the fact that things are actually empirically much better we all feel like [ __ ] right and so why is that what's going on here and what does this mean for us right it's because of this right earlier this year right we had our first presidential rug right followed by the first first first lady rug right followed by our second presidential rug right and so we had a slew of [ __ ] shows come in right and [ __ ] things up for everybody on shame and this is what's led to this negative sentiment it feels like wow this is Peak crime season we thought that Trump coming office us be a positive thing for everyone instead we're out here getting rugged by politician right and so things feel bad we're all kind of in a bad place right now the thing that has changed a little bit right and the thing that's positive about this for us in rwas is that there's this idea that we're going to Pivot and move back into fundamentals into utility into things that are Revenue generating into real things right and that's the idea and that's the Hope right and why is that right seems like it's already begun right now obviously this is a joke right um but in practice right we can take a look at this again another chart right um that shows one month performance of RW tokens of the last uh of the last month right and you can see here across a bunch of stuff whether it's defi or D or or um you know AI or memes or whatever the hell is or just BTC e right there's only one thing that's up while everything else is down it's called RWS right and the reason right is because we're all hyped about the future we're all hyped about all kinds of stuff right again we're hyped about real yields and real assets and right no unfortunately that's also not true right um the reason is right and so the so I guess the question is like what's is this going to save us and the answer is no um and so just maybe really quickly it's a quick primer on us right plume with uh Network out there in lead AR chain so obviously you know we have an opinion here and who are we you know there's uh there's three of us here that started the company together it's three Asian and you know we started this about a little bit over 18 months ago now we come from places like you know coinbase DDX um Robin Hood right and raise money from a bunch of great folks uh including folks like Han Ventures Galaxy superscript hashy and a bunch of great crypto Founders right so the folks uh the founders of of SE injective uh Wormhole ien bunch of those folks as well right um we raised a $10 million seed last year we recently closed our our series a about a couple months ago as well adding in folks like uh brv Global um excuse me brv Howard Paul Global laser digital a bunch of these folks as well right and so you know we've been able to to kind of grow and build the ecosystem build Network out here and get to where we are now before we get into why this is all going to [ __ ] right maybe let's talk this is right RW what definition that says rwas right are a receipt token basically you take something that's in the real world and you Min a physical Tok you me a token right as a receipt again so you could take it around and do things in crypto right that's what this is so this can represent things like currencies stocks Commodities bonds whatever it might be right so that's what rwas are supposed to be and the reason why people are excited about this is because because again is another chart you guys can tell I like charts right so it's a chart that just shows this thing going up right so you look at RB value over time has been going up a lot right today right this is a little bit at date we're at 17 billion and we can see the the big inflection point was when something happened last year as a unique moment in time January the btcf come out btcf came out then the EF came out and things started rip right and so people started buying into the stuff and it was really more of a spike in a fuel from the US Treasury right now if we take a look at that again right this started happening last year it's not a moment in time right it's not talked about as much because these coins are a little bit less boring than things like fcoin right and they're not as as interestingly named but RBA tokens again across all their sectors up as of last year right so R tokens are up and people seem to like them and the reason right again it's not because of real yields and this idea of treasures and doing things on Shain it's because of this right some of you guys might know him right uh he runs a company called Black Rock You know it's got1 trillion right and the idea is very simple we think in that by RW it means this guy's going to dump the crypto and we're all going to get rich right so that's what people actually think that's why RW are popular right and if you look at it it does make sense because the RW opportunity is quite large if you look at these different things you could take a look at every Subs sector of derivative th000 trillion real EST trillion so on and so forth right compared to Our Little World of rwa or crypto $2 trillion a class right so again the math is very simple let's take a bunch of [ __ ] in the real world that's worth a lot dump it into crypto all of the tokens are going to go up we're all going to live happily after right again unfortunately not true right the truth is right what's actually happening right is this guy is coming in here to dump his bags on us right what's actually happening is he's coming here to bring his money market funds bring his products bring them into crypto so we buy them right what's not happening is him coming in to buy far coin and buy our [ __ ] right what actually is happening is we're not growing the space right from a dollar in perspective right he is bringing more things to extract versus adding to the pi so that's the primary issue and distinction in what's going with r today now if you zoom out again the other side of it's very simple we take a look at the headlines it does seem like it's happening right we look black credit card now so you can walk around spend your car spend your crypto right it sure seems like a bunch of [ __ ] has right and so you can look at this and say wow that's cool great and going off this I recently asked a friend what's exciting that's happening in crypto right what's got you hyped right what's happening around real world assets that you talk about you tell your friends about and all that and this is what they told me I don't know if you guys saw this a couple months ago right um Avalanche had uh put out this release that says California DMV is now tokenizing car titles on chains you got 40 million 42 million I think 42 million title putting on the aax blockchain right and you know in theory it sound because you get to say things like you know you've got 42 million new users now or you have a real use case or the DMV it's some integration with some big government there's a lot of [ __ ] to come right wrong right because if you just dial it back a little bit one year ago the exact same consulting firm with the DMV do the exact same thing on different blockchain right made zero progress spend years doing research of the no progress picking random chains doing a bunch of random nonsense right it's this idea that like because the DMV is somehow involved right in hindsight sounds stupid at the time like oh the DMV is going to us right like the DMV is clearly just grifting us right and so it's this it's this idea that institutions are going to save us it's just not true right and if we dial it back a little bit more take it two years ago right there's a moment in time where Salesforce announced ft Cloud right you can do this whole thing about Enterprise blockchains and like sort of like uh you know nfts as loyalty points and all this kind of nonsense right and we can see this again we look back it's actually the exact moment everything started go [ __ ] right and so if you look at this again the institutions coming in today actually ruin things they don't usually save things right it doesn't it's wrong or good or bad if we take a look at this right I'm running out of time here and I'm talk through this I don't speed through the rest but we look at this right this is a phone right it's one of the best pieces of Technology out there and if you look at the reason why it's successful over other things right now some folks in the room might know what this is some folks might not this is BlackBerry right it's an old phone right people in the in the uh in the early 2000s and the '90s used to use this um and basically there was a moment in time where this was actually the primary Computing device for most people right what we're trying to do at the time was the iPhone came out right and people thought it was a joke right now today it's a foregone conclusion it's winter and the reason here's a quote from Steve uh Steve Balmer right the former CEO of Microsoft saying you know there's no um there's no email uh there's no keyboard so it's going a very good email machine right it's a it's a good representation of how technology works right you need to start and think about things from the bottoms up from the end user perspective not from the business perspective and the way we are thinking about RW today is primarily thinking about this from the business perspec let's start with the institutions let have them bring their funds on Chain versus thinking about this in a crypt native way let's start with the people start with the use case start with things that are actually happening and build up from there right and so if we Zoom forward right into all these things you can get a very quick sense of how this works right there are two modes for these things the existing rwa world right which is Black Rock OSG very tra products by ask people who are using these products I guarantee you most of you are not using these things today versus the other way of interacting with arys through maker through Pendle and things like that right there very clearly one is better product Market than the other right so when you build for the people you build for the crypto native audience it works much better than we build for the Trad world right that's what we need to start it's how we build this market right so that's why the existing world of rwas that we talk about today is not going to work we need to focus on things like maker things like die things like Pendle that speak and fit to the existing world today and then we go from there I'm a little bit out of time here long story short um if you guys interested in RW come check out PL find me after um and uh you know we're excited to to talk more about this with you guys but thanks for having me appreciate it [Applause]