Plume Network's mainnet launches with $150 million in real-world assets deployed

Plume Network, the RWA tokenization startup backed by Haun Ventures and Apollo Global, said Thursday its mainnet is launching with $150 million in real-world assets onchain, the company said.

The project is hoping to carve out a position among the top firms leaning into tokenization, including Securitize, Tradable, and Ondo, and diversify the growing RWA sector. The total RWA market is currently sized at over $23 billion , according to RWA.xyz. So far, private credit, U.S. Treasurys, and commodities appear to be the most popular traditional assets moving onchain.

Plume aims to bring billions of dollars of RWAs onchain including assets as diverse as solar farms, Medicaid claims, mineral rights, consumer credit, corporate debt, and more.

"RWAfi reimagines real world assets as composable, yield-bearing primitives that behave like crypto," Plume co-founder and CEO Chris Yin said in a statement. "By introducing new DeFi use cases to institutional-grade assets, we’re making RWAs as easy to use as any other crypto asset."

Plume is a modular, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer 2 network. The protocol supports "institutional-backed vaults" called Nest vaults that enable users to permissionlessly stake stablecoins and "establish positions in fully liquid and rigorously audited global assets," the team noted.

By staking assets in Nest vaults, users receive yield-bearing, composable RWA tokens that can be further collateralized on lending protocols or used to borrow additional revenue-generating stablecoins — a process known as "looping." 

A company spokesperson told The Block that Plume's testnet had roughly 280 million transactions over eight weeks. 

Apollo Global invests

Plume raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Haun Ventures and a $20 million Series A with participation from Brevan Howard and Galaxy. In April, alternative asset manager Apollo Global made a "seven-figure" strategic investment in Plume. YZi Labs, the family office spun out of Binance's venture unit, has also backed the startup. 

"The ecosystem includes a large constellation of RWAfi-native and blue-chip DeFi applications including Morpho, Curve, Orderly, Matrixdock, Lorenzo, Rooster, Solera, and Mystic, among others," according to a statement. In February, Plume partnered with Latin American trading platform Mercado Bitcoin to tokenize $40 million worth of Brazilian assets.