Plume Network: Modular EVM Layer-2 Company Secures $10 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • May 27, 2024

Plume, a modular EVM Layer-2 built to bring any real-world asset (RWA) on-chain, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Haun Ventures with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, and others. And prominent angels include founders and executives of leading projects such as Anthony Ramirez of Wormhole Labs, Calvin Liu of Eigenlayer, Zon of Initia, Andrew Kang of Mechanism, Jeff Feng & Jayendra Jog of Sei Network, Adam Lawrence of rwa.xyz, Austin King & Tyler Tarsi of Omni, and more.

The RWA industry is one of the fastest growing verticals in crypto, but there is a notable gap: there has not been a permissionless blockchain equipped with fullstack RWA infrastructure to deploy any asset class compliantly. Plume was created to address this challenge of real-world asset integration by providing the necessary infrastructure for traditional financial participants to engage, while also offering innovative products that appeal to the crypto-native community.

By integrating asset tokenization and compliance into its chain along with RWA-specific chain-level modifications, Plume simplifies the deployment process and offers a dynamic ecosystem for cross-investment and diversification. The robust DeFi ecosystem on Plume enables users to do everything with RWAs—from earning yield to borrowing/lending, trading, and speculating with leverage.

For testnet alone, Plume has already seen rapid growth with more than 80 RWA and DeFi projects building on its private testnet with everything from collectibles, alternative assets, synthetics, luxury goods, real estate, borrow/lend protocols, perpetual DEXs, and more.

Plume’s team has top talent from Web3 and traditional finance who joined from leading firms including Coinbase, Binance, Robinhood Crypto, dYdX, JP Morgan, and LayerZero.

KEY QUOTES:

“We’re excited to have Haun Ventures lead our round as our approach to RWAs signifies a pivotal shift. While many are attempting to solve tokenization through permissioned environments, Plume stands out by prioritizing a crypto-first approach. We operate as a permissionless chain, offering seamless compliance tooling as a notable feature. Our modular EVM based L2 and end-to-end tokenization engine makes both onboarding and interacting with assets and capital easy for everyone from the biggest institutions to retail.”

– Chris Yin, CEO and Co-founder of Plume

“The Plume team’s vision for tokenizing assets extends beyond tokenizing treasury bills. Plume Network provides custom tooling and an ecosystem specifically designed for RWAs of any type. Plume will reshape the way the world interacts with and derives value from real-world assets.”

– Chris Ahn, Partner at Haun Ventures

“The traditional view of tokenized real-world assets is no longer interesting in today’s markets – what people seek today are crypto use cases that involve RWAs. Plume makes it easy to trade, earn yield, and speculate with any real-world asset so people can benefit from both the advantages of crypto and exposure to RWAs.”

– Teddy Pornprinya, Co-founder of Plume, formerly at Coinbase Ventures and Binance