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Plume, Layer-2 blockchain for real-world assets, gets $10 million in seed funding from Haun, Galaxy
As blockchain vies for mainstream acceptance this week in the halls of the US Congress, a growing number of compliance-oriented crypto projects are hoping that a more favorable regulatory environment could soon lead to a surge in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. RWA, or real world assets.
One such startup, Plume, has raised $10 million in seed funding for what it says will be the first layer 2 blockchain built specifically for RWAs. The round was led by Haun Ventures and saw participation from Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, A Capital, SV Angel, Portal Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures.
The Ethereum-based Plume blockchain is billed as a one-stop shop for easily bringing off-chain assets onto the blockchain, meaning the protocol helps people navigate the morass of paperwork, custody requirements, and other practices needed to bring things such as real estate, art and certain assets. types of financial instruments on blockchain.
“RWA is one of the fastest growing verticals in cryptocurrency today, but a critical gap remains: To date, there has been no permissionless blockchain with a full-stack RWA infrastructure to deploy any asset class in a way compliant,” the company said in a statement. shared with CoinDesk. “The robust DeFi ecosystem on Plume allows users to do anything with RWAs: earn returns, borrow/lend, trade, and speculate with leverage.”
Plume’s core technology is based on Arbitrum Nitro, a framework for building layer 2 “rollup” chains that write transactions to Ethereum quickly and with low fees. The technology should make it easy for the chain to interoperability and exchange resources between other chains in the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem – a constellation of other rollups built using the same framework.
“When we started talking about protocols, everyone said the same thing: ‘It takes six months, a year, a year and a half, two years to actually put this resource on chain before you can even write a single line’ of code for our protocol,” Plum co-founder Chris Yin said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It’s just a ridiculous way of doing things: it’s just duplicate work on every single protocol. We say: let’s standardize it.”
On Plum, “you have a very comprehensive set of features to actually tokenize an asset, i.e. setting up your entity, storing stuff, taking custody of assets, creating wallets, auto-configuration, cap table management, on/off-ramping , [know-your-customer] – all these things are integrated,” Yin said. “We just take these products, integrate them and put a nice user interface on it and make sure it’s well modular.”
According to Yin, Plume currently has more than 80 projects deploying real-world assets on its private test network. “Everything from collectibles, to private credit, to real estate — all of these things are spreading to Plume,” she said.
Yin says Plume plans to open its testnet to the public within “a month or so,” with a full release to follow later.