What are Real World Assets (RWA) and Why You Should Pay Attention.

Transcript

coming off of like FTX, right, and Terra and all that stuff, right? And just the world just couldn't be worse. There's two sort of ways this goes. Number one, it was all a scam and it's all going to zero. Or number two, if you're actually going to do a company, now is the best time to do it. No one's here anymore, so competition is low and like there's probably some kind of change that's happening in the market because usually big events lead to change. And like I said, that's the job of the founders to find change. Everyone was trying to take the blockchain quote unquote and like bring it to trify. Let's do this like JP Morgan chain, right? Or let's do like a Goldman Sachs chain or whatever. And I remember thinking like this sounds terrible. You know, why would we do that? What we really should do is

actually bring the real world to crypto. That's one of the main things we are focused on at Plume is making sure that we build the pipelines and the rails that bring them in in a manner and in a in a way that benefits us versus just replicating the same [ __ ] we have offchain today on chain. Welcome to epicenter of the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Kuchure and I'm here with Chris Yen who's CEO at Plume. They're an asset management platform focused in the RWA space. Is an L1 that allows uh issuers to issue RWAS and they have an interesting yield product. And so we're going to be talking about real world assets. Is it over inflated the

institutionalization of crypto and a whole lot of other things but first here's a word from our sponsors this week. This episode's brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. Rapidly, it gained over 200,000 GitHub stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Why? Because OpenClaw makes it easy to create an AI agent that actually does stuff like manage your emails, browse the web, schedule appointments, and remember contacts across weeks of interaction. But where do you securely store and run an always on agent that needs persistent access to your most sensitive data? Local deployment means you have to manage expensive hardware at home and traditional cloud means surrendering full access to your data to some cloud provider. Nearai cloud solves this problem by running openclaw inside

trusted execution environments. These are hardware level secure enclaves where your agent operates in encrypted memory that even near AAI can't inspect. It's not a promise that they won't look. It's cryptographic guarantees that they can't. With OpenClaw on neari cloud, you get cloud convenience without data exposure. There's no hardware to manage and no trust assumptions required. You can learn more at near.ai. >> Chris, thanks for joining me. Uh, thanks for coming on the show. I'd love to chat a little bit about your background because I, you know, you, uh, were a founder, uh, and then were in VC and went back to being a founder. Uh, that trajectory feels like a little bit unnatural. Um, but I I do like what was

the impetus for going back in the founder seat after having worked with you? >> Yeah, totally, totally. Thanks for having uh thanks for having me and uh you know, looking forward to getting into it all. Um so yeah, look, like you said, you know, my background is very simple. Um you know, I I came out of school and I was mostly just kind of bouncing around uh and doing technology stuff. Um which sort of manifested in doing a like a you know, basically doing software startups. Um and you know, I was mostly doing kind of financial stuff, meaning um you know, we were doing like invoicing and you know, like very exciting, you know, uh enterprise software. Um but it was kind of right, my place, right? Um, and then from there I went to venture after, right? So we were managed to, you know, sell the

company then take the next public and it was a whole thing and learned a lot about about that. But then we went to venture. Um, and that's kind of like what you're supposed to do I guess, right? You sort of like, you know, do do the startup thing, you get tired and and you're like, "Hey, look, like let me let me go do and uh do the venture thing and and um, you know, invest instead, right? Because it's, you know, seen as like a high status job perhaps. you know, there's sort of like this uh this veneer of like you very like know a lot of things and you know and like you get to meet a bunch of people which I think are all true to some degree. Um but the truth is like look I I had been an angel investor. That's how I got into it. Like

I just kind of fall for great founders. I'm not bold enough to think I'm actually like that smart of things. And so I was mostly just like you know writing early stage checks into my friends and like founders that I just thought were like interesting um and doing fun stuff. And from there like actually you know a bunch of them did really well. And then that's how I sort of like got sucked into classic venture. I like maybe I should go like learn how to do this properly, right? And turns out it's, you know, you're selling money. Uh, and and it's the same thing no matter where you go, you know. So, like that was my lesson from it all. But, um, like the venture side of things is basically I liked it a lot. I liked many aspects of job a lot. But I also

thought a lot of it was just absolute like mind-numbing stuff, you know, because at the end of the day, you sort of have this like philosophical veneer around most things. Um, but the truth of it is that like at the end of the day, you're selling money. That's what it really is, right? The people that need the money, right, you don't want to give it to and the people that don't need the money, you're trying to give it to, right? And so you're selling cash. It's very hard to turn your cash more green, right? Um and and then someone else is, right? Like my money was always less green than Sequoa's um and and and or Paradigms as an example, right? And so like, you know, sort of my thinking at the time was, you know, one it is um sort of two kinds of people in venture,

right? There's people that sort of chase and people that get chased, right? Um and uh you know, in some categories, you know, people would come to me because I sort of knew a lot about the market or whatever. And so that was great, but it was it was it's not quite the same thing. is like, you know, there's there's certain people that really can suck in all the deals. And so I was like, look, like the more fundamental path here is to, you know, basically improve improve like your own your own ability, right? Um, and that's how you sort of like you to flip the script uh and and you know, progress back down that path. And so that was really why I was like, look, let's like come back and and uh you know, one is like, you know, I felt like I I had sort of like the

juice and energy to run it again um and to to run it back in so many words. Um and there's plenty of time to like, you know, write checks and just sit around and do nothing. Um and so let's uh let's you know, roll the dice again. Um, so that's that's where I came about to. >> No, that's interesting. I mean I I also was a founder and then started a VC fund and um I think there was also when I started the fund some some aspect of this veneer and this kind of high status uh very intellectual sort of job but like you know uh you we have fairly fairly small fund and I found that >> although it was really great it is really great and really interesting to to talk to founders it's it's a hard like it's a much harder job than most I

think think it is because you have to be like fundraising constantly. Yes. >> And that that takes a huge toll on you. I mean like the trolling and the meeting investors and you know you have to talk to a thousand investors for you know 10 to possibly invest in your fund. And and the other thing that most people don't realize is like running a fund is a lot of compliance. And um and I find that you know I think I think there's actually like a really good business opportunity here for like all of that to get just automated and AI like automated just the [ __ ] out of and um >> for sure.

>> But but for the moment it's like not that well automated and and um and doing that like is just you know soul sucking work. So um >> so like you said running running a fund and actually investing are two very different things. I mean, you're actually running a fund. Like 90% of the job is running the fund, you know, when you start a fund versus actually investing and so you're not really doing any of it, right? But you but but like they feed into each other. So you have like try and invest to help you run to like fund raise, but you're always doing that instead of investing. So it just ends up being a [ __ ] show. So yeah, I get it. >> Yeah. Um, no that's that's uh I mean that resonate that certainly resonates with me and as I'm thinking now you know

now the fund's been deployed and um you know thinking about what to do next building something is is definitely definitely feels more appealing than like starting another fund. Um, and so at what point did you get in interested in this idea of putting real world assets and I'm I'm going to I'm going to want to deconstruct that term with you later, but putting real world assets on channel. >> Terrible acronym. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Because I mean like it's just assets like there's assets and there's rails, you know, like e like you know we we we didn't reinvent commerce by putting them on the internet. It's the same products. It's just different rails. And I I sort of see real world assets in the same light where we're just putting assets on a different you know different infrastructure is a it's

a buzzword but yeah how how did you get in interested in putting uh treasuries and and private credit uh on chain and what was the genesis story for plume? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was it was pretty simple. I mean we had uh you know I was I was coming off of like FTX right and Terra and all that stuff right and just the world just couldn't be worse. Um, and it was I remember I was I was sort of like it was still nudge at the top and I started thinking to myself there's two ways there's two sort of ways this goes. Number one, it was all a scam and it's all going to zero, right? And like we should just and it was it was fun while it lasted, you know? Um, there's that.

Or number two, if you're actually going to do a company now is the best time to do it, right? Because like no one's here anymore, so competition is low and like there's probably some kind of change that's happening in the market because usually big events lead to change. And like I feel like that's the job of the founders to find change, right? Um and uh and ideally the change is big and positive and that you capture the right way. But it was it was very clear to me like some change is happening. Whether it was change to the downside or the upside was unclear, right? But at that point it's like you know it's it's sort of like the conditions are right to do something. Um and I had I had sort of been in around like I looked at a bunch of things um in in in uh in crypto at

the time. I I thought about we thought about doing like BTC stuff and DeFi stuff and blah blah blah, right? Um, and BTC at the time was this like, you know, grand new world, right, of all the things we could do with BTC and like run back the sort of DeFi playbook on on Bitcoin. Um, but, uh, you know, you know, Teddy, my co-founder, and I, we just kept getting pulled back to this idea that, you know, if there's change happening because of all this stuff, what is that change, right? And how would it express itself? Uh, number one, and then number two is, you know, we'd always sort of seen that like look, you know, I live like most of my life's on chain and like, you know, we were like very like cryptonative people. Um, and you know, it just felt very limiting.

There was only so much you could do. It was awesome. Everything that we could do. Uh, but you you sort of like contained. There was this the real world and there was crypto. And there were just two separate things at the time, you know, and you couldn't interact with them very much. And, you know, we just sort of felt like there was a a the market was changing where those two things were coming together, right? I had angel missed to a bunch of like RWA companies at the time ahead of time, right? Um, and you know, they all I think most of them went to zero, okay? It was just not the right thing at the right time, but it's sort of like I was interested in this idea of like onboarding and bringing new things in and growing crypto, right? Um, and Teddy was a B&B at the time. Um, uh, sort of

like doing a bunch of BD work. He's a B&B chain and that was like a big thing for them as well, right? And so both of us were sort of like centered around this idea of growing crypto, right? It's sort of like if if all we're doing here is like hyper gambling on [ __ ] um, it's not a bad thing, but it seems like an underutilization of what it should be, you know, and what we could do with it. Um, and you know, if there's change now, it could be the right moment where these pieces come together where you could actually bring real things here, right? And our view at the time, which I think was different than everyone else's, right? And everyone was told, everyone told us who we were like very stupid at the time to do to think about this was everyone that everyone was

super uh dismissive of RWAs at the time, right? They sort of like this is not a real thing. You know, nobody really cares. Uh you know, blah blah blah, right? Um I mean, can't tell you every every I I bet everyone out there, nobody cared, right? Except except a few folks that that ended up backing us. But there was that. And then number two is the people that did get it were hyper focused, right? They were very like you know you got to be you know Goldman suit compliance private chain blah blah blah right and we were the only people at the time to be very like I think still crypto right our view was that I don't think of these as like real world assets and and and crypto these are like like you said to me they're all the same thing they're just assets I just want to

swap between these things that I don't see a distinction in these two worlds meaning I used to always say when the world's up right I want to be full poor fartcoin right like that's just the reality of things and when things go down I probably rotate the T bills right but but it's the same it's the same type of thing right they're both um you can do both at the same time and that was our view which is like that isn't this like I should only do crypto only do it we should have both exist in the same dimension right um and that was it and we have felt that sort of everyone was trying to take the blockchain quote unquote and like bring it to tradfi uh and bring it to the real world right let's like let's do this like JP Morgan chain right or let's do like a Goldman

Sachs chain or whatever and I remember thinking like god this sounds terrible you know why would we do that um And what we really should do is actually bring the real world to crypto which is that you know and and it felt like to me there was a real demand for that for real demand for it. It just wasn't expressed very well because all the people doing art was at the time were like trad people who didn't understand crypto. So they would come to this thing with like heavy KYC and stuff for mission chains, you know, there's no interoperability. You can't use it, right? But you could see that like the the appetite for real world assets was already there. It expresses different ways. We always looked at the stable coin, right? As the inspiration for Plume, which is like the stable coin is it's not a real world asset. It's just

crypto, right? Even though it is the original real world asset and the only one that actually matters today, right? Um and it's because the stable coin, it just disappears into into the fabric of crypto. You don't need to think about the fact there's anything under the hood, right? Well, tether for years, we had no idea there was anything under the hood. Doesn't even matter. You know, the idea that it could be possibly backed by a dollar was enough, you know, for us to like full poor tether, right? And so this idea, everyone's always says, well, we just really want to know you want, it's about ownership. It's about compliance. It's not about any of those things. It's about the usability. It's about the experience. It's about solving a problem for the market that's here today, which is cryptonatives, right? And starting with that and building on

top of that. Um and so that was kind of the focus for us which is like you know to really focus and bring this like uh you know we call it the artifi which is you know you know admittedly it's not my favorite phrase either but um you know it's this idea that like you know you should be able to kind of move in and around between robot assets and crypto you should be able to use these robot assets just as you would use crypto just like the stable coin right and there should be no distinction about what's going on and we build the rails and the tooling and the infrastructure to automate all of that stuff right um and make that very easy and seamless to use and that's kind of where like plume came to be it's where Nest came to be right

um and why we why we do things the way we are today. >> So look looking at the RWA space today, what is the um what what are the big categories of sort of like yield generating assets that uh ex that exist on chain? Where where is most of the liquidity going? Is it like T- bill? Is it private credit? You know, and private credit, you know, falls within like several different categories. Is it like rare earth metals or, you know, other types of commodities? um what's what's the kind of you know uh landscape look like?

Yeah. >> Yes. So I always get this question a lot and I think I always think the the the answer actually is less about the asset itself and it's more about who's here and what the sentiment and what the pe and what is the mood at the time right um and the reason I say this because that's going to change over time as more people come to crypto and the sort of types of people come and change the the ads will change right like you know in crypto today it's not like we already have we just have like one user it's not just that the the the the maybe like the um the like serial aper who just like you know apes a bunch of memes and that's you know we have many different profiles users. You've got the BTC holder who's bear buy and hold. You've

got DeFi farmers. You've got like payments type people. You have uh privacy folks, right? You have a lot of different types of people. So, what asset is is popular right now is 100% dependent on what is in uh who's here, right? And right now, right, if you look at the market today, you know, people think and people talk about the institutions are here like you trad. It's all nonsense, right? The market here right now is 99.9% crypto people still, right? And so that so so that's like the first thing. So, who is here? And then what is the mood at the time, right? And what's going on? Because crypto people are still crypto native. So that's the first thing, right? Um and so where do they actually go into these things right now is you know the truth is if you go around and ask people what

they hold it guaranteed like 90% 95 is in the room is none of these things, right? Um right because people don't actually use these things today. Um and so the market for these assets, the biggest one is T bills right now, right? Um and T bills um you know it's not even a user friend a userfacing product right the T bill right now is a foundation product right um that's like 90% of what the T bill is right you go to a big foundation and then they ape like you know 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever into a set of money into a money market fund and they earn off that right but these are inaccessible to regular people right this is not what crypto retail is using right the same goes for private credit people talk about private credit as a thing I I mean I ask you do you

hold any private credit like onchain No. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And I I guess if you don't hold Bidd, you don't hold all USG, you don't hold any of these things, right? And it's not even hard to say if you just go to RBF and look at this user stats for these things. It's, you know, all these are subundred user count um at products, right? Um and so so like there's sort of this like fixation now on moving up and away from T bills into this next category, which is as people became more comfortable with the onchain T bill, right? Um now they want to do what you normally do in this world right which is chase more yield and people sort of see oh where's their yield oh the the private credit yield is higher than T bills so let's go down the private

credit route right what people don't understand is private credit is risky right and and it's longer duration and it doesn't work in DeFi very well for many reasons but like that's kind of where the direction energy is going right now but I would say there's two there's two layers to it one is what people are saying and what a veneer what what like a sort of thin veneer of liquidity appears to be doing and what people are actually doing right and the reality is people are not doing this stuff, right? People are not really doing anything. If you want to talk about like what's the real world actually using I think the only two things that actually sort of have real usage right now is still USD right and Athena right that to me is is still like a very clear um a clear sort of like RWA

that has real adoption real usage. I think maple and syrup is another one, right? Um, you know, that's our studio like that's another one that like people actually can use and buy and hold because it's in the red pendal it's lug and like it's actually backed by real things. There's a lot of other ones that sort of like claim to be RWA that have nothing backing it right now that are sort of like you know uh that are promises for the future. Many of them may work, maybe they might not. Who knows? But that's kind of what that's like what's really going on right now, right? So when people talk about TBOs and private credit and all that kind of stuff, they they point to these numbers it's it's great and I'm glad it's happening. I think it is happening but like where is there any where is the

energy actually going it's actually in none of those places >> and so be beyond T bills um like you know if you project out now that we have like this full sort of institutional um um push for crypto where crypto is going institution institutions want to come on chain what what do you think is the part of sort of like the trady you know if we stick within this uh framework that it's just like assets on in like on rails and we're just switching out the rails.

>> Which types of tradi assets um are best suited for sort of crypto rails or could benefit the most from crypto rails in terms of interoperability you know uh sort of transfer sort of swapping um times uh access to markets etc. Like where is the biggest innovation coming from in the future? >> So there's two ways to look at this question. Number one is which assets going to like what things are going to benefit most by like getting swapped on like basically moving from like sort of trades to crypto rails, right? Um and and the answer is like almost all of them, right? Like a lot of these assets are going to be materially better on chain than not, right? I talked to the biggest institutions in the world all the time, right? And I was on with one

of the biggest asset managers yesterday and they're sort of explaining to me what they do and how they run this thing today. And just purely the forget the efficiency and like the process type stuff, just the pure cost of doing things the way it is is tens and hundreds of millions of dollars for just like cuz somebody just automated in two seconds on share, right? Um and with sort of the same level of uh of like, you know, um of trust around it, right? So, I think a lot of these assets are going to be great on chain. Um, and most of them are going to benefit. Now, the reality though is that just because it's better on chain doesn't mean it'll work on chain, right? We've run this sort of STTO RWA story many times in crypto, right? And the reason why it hasn't

taken off before is because, you know, people were a little bit too fixated on which asset is going to improve by being on chain without thinking about the other side, right? You know, Plume, we've always been mostly focused on the demand side of things, which is I actually don't care about the asset. The asset will change over time. What matters is demand. What do people actually want right now, right? And if we go back to that question, the question is what assets is going to do well on chain right now? You know, I you have to look at like what is the what is the comp set on chain, right? What what what what are people doing right now on chain and like what is going to be better than that, right? Um onchain today, right? your um you know you can get sort of like six to 8% APY right in

a pretty safe way without a bunch of looping just running some basic stuff right um and even when USD was hot you could get 20 30s right and that's before looping and before a bunch of stuff before you pendled up and blah blah blah right and so you could really get to you know really meaningful APIs 30 40 50s right now were they real were they stable and all that kind of stuff is a different question right but that's sort of the comparison set and so then you compare to that the question is what trad assets actually compete with that right um and the question and the answer is not very Right. Um where you >> is that though because is is that though because it's harder to com like to do composibility with Tradfi than it is in crypto? Like you know in crypto you can

create a contract loop stuff. I mean there's infrastructure to do this whereas like if you want to do that in TRDFI you got to like you go to your broker get the asset and then you know borrow against it and it's it's a lot of pushing paper probably rather than just pushing contract code. It >> yes and no. That is part of the problem. It's actually not the real bottleneck. The real bottleneck is the assets in Shroudy are not suitable for looping and not suitable for composability. So just the the idea that you can move them around doesn't do anything right because the end of the day if you think if you look at like composability today composability it means a lot of things but really at this point in the market composability means looping right that's like that's like what everyone does in DeFi at this point right um and if you

look at looping right looping has a couple key attributes that really matter but number one is you have to have an APY that is above the borrow rate right like that's the first thing that matters right if you are borrowing money at and that's why when everyone talks about RW looping and borrowing and looping T bills It drives me nuts because the borrow rate is 8%. Right? So you have to pay 8% to borrow money and then and to so then borrow money 8% to buy something that yields 5% doesn't make sense. It doesn't work, right? Eight is more than five. Very simple, right? And so that's one thing, right? Um the second piece around looping is you need um you need rapid pricing updates because you're always trying to figure out are you in the money or you not in the money, right? You need the yield to come back

very quickly, right? Because you need to unwind up and down very fast. private credit. Most these assets are like we work with a bunch that are custommade. So I have assets on plume that are down to 7-day duration, right? Very short. But your average private credit asset is 3 months at the minimum, right? Uh most these things are one to two to three years, right? And so you can't loop an asset where you put money in and it just doesn't come out for a year because there's no unwinding, right? Um, and so that's the thing around these assets is like the reason why there's like a a lack of like, you know, real adoption is not the fact that it's inefficient from a from a from like a processing standpoint. It's the fact the asset at a fundamental level does not fit into the use case that the market today wants on

chain. >> Does that make sense? >> Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. I mean I yeah I think you know if you have an asset I I hadn't considered that if you have an asset where time to liquidity is super long right like like press credit debt uh that's very hard to loop >> it's not possible >> it's I mean yeah it's not possible you yeah you can't I mean you you can but you're like your your risk you'd have to be like very over collateralized right to make sure that you you don't get liquidated um so you know in the case of you know, just to kind of like look at I'm looking at Nest here. You know, there's like, you know, you have Nest Alpha here that has a 7-day redemption.

Um, how do you make that possible? Like, how do you take credit card receivable financing and get that time to redemption down to seven days? >> Totally. Yeah. I mean, and this is why I I think less about assets and more about the like the the APY and like what the dimensions of the asset are, right? You have to do a composite vault. That's what Nest Alpha is. So, right, so Nest today is one of our vault is is our like yield distribution product. So through Nest, we make it this is the easiest place in crypto to take stable coins and turn them into real yield, right? That's the whole point. And so whereas most things in crypto that that come to RWAS have heavy things like um minimum time uh minimum like deposit amounts, right?

Like there's a bunch of funds out there, T bill funds, $5 million minimums. So that's inaccessible to 99% of people right there, right? Um you have to be KYCBazu, right? And like you know your redemption is, you know, even for T bill sometimes it's quarterly or monthly. It's it should be fast. It's not right. And so Nest is a place where you can come in and take your stables, deposit into these vaults, and immediately get uh RDB build. Um and from there, the way we do that, um and and we make those receipt tokens composable and loopable. So you can go into morpho and loop against these things, get extra exposure and all that stuff. The way to do that though is through a composite vault where you're blending many things together to improve the contours of that asset at the end of the day, right? Um and so that's why we

can get higher higher higher liquidity, right? Because you have a bunch of short duration assets in there, right? But also you have a bunch of longer duration that have higher yield that balances things out and also mitigate the risk. So this way your profile is done a certain way and we also have to balance out which assets can price fast enough so you can real time adjust that so you can loop against these things right and so that's what it is today. So Nest Alpha today is a collection of many things. We have um we have credit card receivables, right? Brazilian ones. We have oil in there, right? So we have a fund that does oil, right? Um and oil the great thing about oils is very simple, right? You you dig a hole in the ground and uh and money comes out, right? Um and and uh it's as simple as

that, right? And so being able to use that in combination, your credit card receivables, having some tables, we have some yield bearing ETFs in there, right? They're also super liquid, right? And so balancing all these things out, you get a nice blended APY that's above the hurdle rate, right, of 8%. um you have good liquidity against it and you have good exposure. So your risk tying to one thing is also much more diminished, right? And so that's like how we do it with uh with with with Nest offer today. >> Um so I think like one of the things that we're touching at here is that like um you know crypto is a highly leveraged um a highly le leveraged ecosystem. like a lot of the yield in crypto comes from leverage that also carries like a ton of risk and you know in in recent months uh

there's been like yet another you know major unleveraging event uh you in October you before that there was like another big one like you know in August of the year before there's like there's these unleveraging crises that happen in crypto like every 12 to 18 months you know and the effects of that is like it concentrates liquidity within and you know like very large institutions that are tra like cryptonative institutions y >> uh it also I think has the effect of um creating a lot of bad press for the for the crypto space and sort of making people sort of anxious because people don't understand right they just think like oh crypto's down like it must be [ __ ] right it's just that you know people were overleveraged and they got

liquidated so you know I think there's there's a couple of things here that I want to touch on but like one is you know is is that sustainable is it Is this sustainable for crypto if if it wants to become you know sort of like an institutional a place where institutions can come? Can you can cryptonative institutions continue to operate with this like high leverage mindset of of generating more yield with more and more risk uh and and attract those institutions and the other thing maybe we can talk about this sort of in the second part is like you know does the curator model work long term um because I think the you know curators in in in >> in the last six months have suffered

huge reputational damage for having had assets in their portfolios and in their in their strategies that were not highquality assets. Y >> um and there there's a lot of transparency issues there that I think have not been properly sort of addressed and >> correct >> you know hopefully will get addressed over time but yeah just your your thoughts on like overleveraging and like are we putting too much trust in curators and you know do they deserve our trust especially when AI right I think especially when AI I think can probably do a lot better job long term than you know, individual for sure is >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of talk about curious because I do think that it's like it's insane some of the stuff's going on there, but um you know, going into u maybe starting off the first point, um leverage I I think maybe

just maybe to make sure I'm like answer the question is like the question is like is leverage good or bad basically, right? And and does it basically, you know, by engaging in too much of it scare away some of the new stuff coming in that could be beneficial to us all, right? The external stuff. Um in so many words, it's kind of yes and no, right? And I don't mean to give a sort of like in between answer in the sense that you know you can't stop people from doing what they want to do right at the end of the day right and so the is the leverage good or bad is almost in my opinion like you know a question without an answer because it's going to happen no matter what at this point like the cat's out the bag you know you can't unring that

bell right um and uh and it's a thing right um and and uh and to be honest it's great when it's done correctly right um and that's the nature of an open market that shit's nuts you know, and like sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Um, but things move the ball continues to move forward, right? Um, and and that's just the the sort of nature of of innovation and change. So, I'm like positive about all that. I think leverage is is generally a good thing. It just like it can manifest in strange ways sometimes it hurt us here and there, right? Um, so there's that. I think the second question is, is it like good and bad for instance scare them away? It certainly does to some degree, right? Um, like it's it's impossible to look at like FTX and maybe like the Terra stuff, right? or even 1010 or

stream or whatever, right? And think that was good for us, you know, like it was definitely like a net negative, you know, like it definitely scared people off and like even reputationally small things like it just it there's there's still a bad taste of people's mouth from FDX right today even though has almost nothing to do with what we're talking about anymore. Um but the it does it really affect us? I don't think it does at all. Um from what's happening at this point, the institutional side of things is not really they don't they don't they don't see crypto in the same way we do at all. Right. And I think that's also one of the sort of fallacies of the RWA stuff right now is people think that the institutions are coming and it's going to interact with us, right? And it has something to do with crypton. It has

nothing to do with us is the real answer, right? That's one of the main things we are focused on at Plume is making sure that we build the the sort of like pipelines and the rails that bring them in in a manner and in a in a way that benefits us, right? Versus just replicating the same [ __ ] we have offchain today onchain, right? which is exactly what's happening right now in many places, right? And I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, right? But it's also not amazing, right? Um to very literally do the exact same name before, right? And bring it here. What's the what's the point, right? And permission to private this thing up like there's it's it's the same thing. Um uh and all the benefits of the efficiency acrew back to the red seekers, right?

Not to us and not to the not to an open ecosystem. That's mostly what's going on today. And so it, you know, that means what that does mean, I guess, is like all the stuff that's happening in cryptoland, right? um they just don't even see they don't care. It doesn't matter, right? They're coming in and doing the thing regardless. The only thing they see around crypto is the stable coin. That's like that's like the main thing they think about. Um everything else that we deal with is irrelevant for the most part. And so they don't in actuality I don't think uh it has any negative effect um towards us. I think the bigger negative effect is can we can we get our [ __ ] together in so many words, right, as an industry to make sure that we have um we maintain ball control, right, as we move forward,

right? I do think decentralization, permissionless, open, composability are all important principles of uh being in crypto and um like you I think we were talking about earlier, you can see those things beginning to uh beginning to fade a little bit, right? Um and beginning to take a backseat to some of the things that we were deriding before centralization, right? Um and and intermediaries and all these things, right? Uh and it's because everyone's down bad and we're in search of a new far in search of like a new daddy basically. We need someone to come save us. And so, you know, we're willing to take anyone, but we're sort of letting the fox in into the hen house, I guess, is the is is the uh is the is the way I would say it. And so, I think it's on us to make sure we do it right because it

is genuinely better, right? Um and and more importantly, it would just be a massively missed opportunity to like go down this way and just and just blow it. Basically, we have an opportunity to change the entire nature of the financial ecosystem, right? And build a singular global market around the world that's open, composable to anyone, anytime, right? It's incredibly powerful stuff. and and we have a chance to do it now and if we just literally do the same thing as last time, we've we're going to have blown it, right? Um and so that to me is like the comment there. So I guess you know as it relates to like maybe the curator side of things I I think the curator stuff like overall I think I'm still very positive on curators and I think the curator model is essential and critical, right? I think it's the same

thing as leverage. People are going to do what they're going to want to do, right? And like um you know unfortunately like the nature of it being an open world is you're going to have some curators that are that are just terrible right and there's some that are great um and over time the best ones will survive and do their thing and and they'll they'll deserve our trust and the other ones won't. Um, but you know, as much as you want to blame the curators and as much as I've blamed the curious for a lot of things that have happened, it's also on us, right? At the end of the day, right, the curator to me is almost just it's a mirror, right? People didn't care about risk. People just wanted the highest number, right? And so the curator delivered what people wanted, which is

here's the highest APY number and that and and it's it came right back to them, you know? And so >> why you're the drug pusher, man. You're >> Exactly. Exactly. you know, like, you know, you want the yield, you want that good yield. Here it is. There it is. >> Exactly. At the end of the day, you know, they might be dealing, but like we're biased still, you know, and that's the reality, you know. Um, and so, you know, I I think it'll all get sorted out. Look, in the real world, we have curators. They're called they're called financial advisors and asset managers, you know, like and like, you know, they're the same thing, you know, and so I think there's just there's precedent that it works today and it's required and we need it, right? Now, whether those cures are humans or AI, that's a

different question. Yeah. And I do think yeah, I think it's very I we're working on a bunch of stuff around there too, right? Where you can just have a machine, right, be your curator, quote unquote, right? Um and and be your ass. I think there's a lot to that as well. So, um you know, I think we're pretty far off today, you know, from from that in reality. But I think it's like almost certainly going to happen very soon. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I think like Yeah. Yeah. I think you're you're you're right that you know, people are going to do what they want to do. I guess what did 1010 you reveal about curators that moving forward you know sensible curators may you know the industry is all about sort of you know there's a lot of sort of self-regulation and standards that build

over time and we always like learn from mistakes and then you know >> and then repeat them mo most yeah we repeat them but we make different mistakes but I think I think there is possibly like some lessons But were there any sort of tangible lessons you think that at least from from the perspective of like new curators coming in who sort of integrated now and are upping the bar, you know, raising the standards for for how they you how they how they do their work. >> You know, my the honest answer >> or or is it just nothing's changed? And >> the honest answer I will tell you is no right now. I'm still hopeful. Look, I think you'll find that I'm like hyper cynical about everything, but I'm also like very hopeful and optimistic for

everything. I think the reality on the ground is no, I have not seen any material change, right? Um, and uh, you know, I think you'd be surprised. I mean, we talked to everybody out there we built at all. I'm like, you know, some of the quote unquote biggest like best curators out there have like, you know, are curating assets they really don't know anything about and and doing very dangerous things with them, you know. Um, and and that's that's a thing today. And like I've we've gone and explained it to them and they they come back, wow, you're right. Like how do we get out of this? What do we do? I'm going to do this. I don't know. I told you not to, right? Um and so like and that was before all the 1010 stuff. I mean I tweeted about this months ago

like before all like look the primary thing right now is everyone is calling things a stable coin when it's not right. Um and people are creating these like levered vaults that they they they are claiming riskree when they're not you know and just by packaging everything into a stable coin. People begin to think that oh you can just like do anything it's all stable it's safe and it's not and it's fine. It's that it's not. You just can't sell it as a stable asset. You can't sell it as as a risk-free thing you know. Um and so that that that has happened now. It's it's cooled off a little bit mostly because liquidity is just dried up and the ecosystem sucks and everyone's mad right now and everything just is awful, right? So, it's more of a reflection of that versus what I think of like versus like

fundamental change, right? And like an improvement, right? So, I see less of the nonsense now, but I don't think it's um a reflection of learnings. It's a reflection of everyone's everyone's like down bad, there's nothing to do, so we're not doing anything. Um so, we'll see when the mark comes back is does it does it change or not? >> Yeah. Um, let's talk about like Plume a little bit. You know, why did you build an L1 to do RWAS when there's like lots of perfectly good L1's out there? What was the the thesis around building uh essentially like an app chain to do RWA?

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> But also from a product perspective. Yeah, >> totally. Totally. And and this has been evolving thing and I don't think we did the best job of explaining it. Um, like we had never set out to build a chain. Maybe I'll start with that, right? the the job was always to grow crypto. Um, and that's what we wanted to do. Um, and originally we had started off building just a classic tokenization engine, right? Let's just do tokenization. We'll take assets, we'll bring them on chain, and we'll we'll we'll send them anywhere. Don't I don't care, right? Base, it's soul, ethane, doesn't matter, right? We'll send them to wherever they got to be and like we'll just be a modern new version of these. It's easy to use, right? Because we've gone through the tokenization browser ourselves and we're like doing research and realized, wow, it can take like two

years to do this to do it right. Right. And it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. So immediately 90% of the market is priced out of doing any tokenization. So we got to first fix that thing, right? What we realized very quickly though was that you know basically if you um tokenizing things wasn't an actual problem meaning it sucked but it wasn't the bottleneck. The problem was once you tokenized an asset on the other side there was no one to buy it, no one to use it, there's nothing to do with it, right? Um and so you know as we began pulling that third realized there's a two things. You had to not only figure out how to tokenize the asset, you had to deliver it in a in a mechanism in which someone could take it and use it. And the only way to do

that is you had to then build a community around this thing. So there were people on the other side. And then number two is you had to build an ecosystem where then once the asset came on chain, it improved from what it was offchain. Because the truth is almost every asset that you tokenize today becomes worse onchain than offchain, right? Um and it's not because the rails are different. It's because you're now like you if you go to Fidelity today and buy T bills, right? Um and like that's a very safe straightforward thing. Like it doesn't really get better than that, right? And when you bring that onchain now, you're taking counterparty risk.

You're taking smart contract risk, right? You're you're having multiple middlemen to kind of figure out what's going on. You're taking you're you're also almost certainly um getting less yield because there's fees are going to all these people in the middle, right? So it's just it's functioning worse in almost every dimension when you bring this asset on chain if it does nothing like it does in the offchain world which is what all these assets were at the time right and so how do you actually improve it? You have to lean into what makes it great to be on chain which it has to be able to move. It has to be able to get plugged into an ecosystem and actually do things with it. And so that's why we got pulled over from okay let's just do a tokenization engine to then okay god we have to like it has to

it has to we have to demand on the other side. So how to do that? Let's build this community, right? And and that's why we have the plume goons today. We have this sort of like rapid group of folks that are that interact with plume. And then at the end it's like well now you have to build a bunch of applications that want to actually take these things and do use it with it. We have to build liquidity pools against you have to have a secondary market. You need to be able to lend against these things, right? You need to do all this stuff. And so that's what ended up becoming this like you know chain story where I said okay everyone here we have to bring together we could do it all in another chamber. We have to solve a bunch of the same problems right AML to

sequencer level doing privacy stuff you know having even like you know focused integrations. It turns out like you know uh taking classic DeFi applications and like making them RW ready is not really a thing. you know, we our vault product Nest, right? We use we've used every off-the-shelf thing you could find, right? And we've used all the sort of like just, you know, classic E5 products to do these things. They they don't really work that well. So, you have to customize every single thing. So, that's what came out of this. You had to just constantly customize the chain, some of the dynamics around these things, the applications, the products in here to make this whole thing work together. And that's how like sort of, you know, many steps later from starting off with just pure tokenization engine, we ended up with here's our own chain, here's our

own ecosystem, here's our application. Now on the other side of that where I think a lot of people get sort of caught up with us in this is like people say well you know most chains are just optimized to like grow in their own chain right and and they're very like only working with themselves we are just not like that right like you know going back to it the whole point of startup plume was to grow crypto and we thought that bringing real world assets and new use cases and tying the word together would be how we broke crypto and be a net positive for everybody if we can grow arts we all win right versus just growing flume right and so for us it was like meant to be a place it was born out of necessity to bootstrap this ecosystem, bootstrap this use case and

do and that's why we were the first ones to do all this stuff, you know. Um that's what we have you know we had um you know one of the largest holder bases in all of RDA in crypto you know um you know more than uh the next 10 chains combined you know um uh and hundreds of millions you know like you know it's why we have these things because we had to build all this stuff together now that it's like kind of in place you know across other places and there's more adoption elsewhere we can begin to take the things that we've sort of like perfected here and bring them elsewhere right and that's why you know we we took Nest and we put on and we put her on to slaughteries in here right um and like you know people sort of like don't

understand why what that is but you know again our whole focus is to grow grow RWAS and grow crypto and that's by going to where the user is. >> Does that make sense? >> And yeah. Yeah, totally. So, so there's, you know, there's two products. There's Plume, which is the RWA issuance platform. Um, and then Nest is a a vault protocol uh or like a vault product that uh allows users to kind of generate yield on on some of the I guess perhaps like flagship assets that you guys have on on Plume. Is that like a right way to look at it?

>> Like I would say this Plume is a chain like just straight up a chain. You know, we have an Ash product on top that's basically the other half of Nest, right? Um so Nest is two sides. There's an asset issuer side where you can issue the assets and tokenized things. We have a transfer agent uh that from the SEC right that we're granted uh in the fall and we have uh you know many other licenses that are there pending right now. So it allows you to work with like regulated funds and bring these assets on chain and then NES on the other side is the end userfacing side of things and it's the sort of distribution part and that lives on as one of the applications on our chain. We have you know dozens and dozens of applications on our chain and that's one of them but we highlight

that just because it ends up being the the sort of central point that a lot of the activity stems from. So what how how um uh how significant is this transfer agent license that you received from the SEC? Can you explain what that is? And >> yeah, totally totally. >> Yeah. >> So um it's it's a it's one piece of a bigger story for us, right? Meaning we have many other things with broken and ATS license, you know, all these things as well. Um the the transfer agent basically it is a simple um license from the SEC that allows you to update the cap table, right? And so, you know, if uh if there's a fund as an example, take the Black Rock money market fund or any fund, right? Or the private Apollo private credit fund, right? Like what

that is is, you know, say here's the $10 million slug of this asset, right? And here's a list of people that own it, right? And like how much they own basically, right? Um and the transfer agent allows us to update that list, right? That file sits in a desk somewhere, right? Or sits it sits sits in a file box somewhere like in DC or whatever, right? And that allows us to go and update this thing. So this way now it allows us to then take the asset as we bring it on chain and as we move it around right we can update that record right um and update things and this way you can actually have a closer tie and ownership of the asset on chain right um and allows us to uh to have the asset issuer also get more comfortable because they need to they need this

information right in order to actually feel conflation with these assets and so it's both sides uh it allows movement but also opens the funnel for more assets to come in >> okay no that makes sense um yeah so I'm actually like pretty curious about these nest vaults. Uh so can you talk about some of these faults and I mean because like the yields are like on paper pretty attractive some of the top vaults here as as I'm recording this today are around 12% and then there's of course like some boost but um you know redemption period up to seven days um you know why like I guess like where are these yields coming from primarily?

Totally. Totally. >> Um what's the kind of like risk profile for some of these vaults? Is like >> totally >> uh principal capital at risk? Um is it just smart contract risk? Like Yeah. >> Yep. Yep. For sure. Um there's no such thing as risk-f free yield, right? So that's probably the starting point. Um uh but like the um like Nest today, right, is it's it's classic vaults, right? That's like the way things are. There's a lot of stuff under the hood that's customized for RBOs, but basically like for the for the user, it's vaults, which means you come and you put stable coins, you get a receipt token against it, and then it's a value accuring receipt token, right? So, we call them N tokens. And so, if you were to take $10, right, a 10 USDC, right?

Um, and put it into N alpha, excuse me, our Nest Alpha vault, you get an N alpha token. That N alpha token is an LP token you can then go around doing things with and primarily like, you know, lube on Morpho or whatever or or swap in and out on on our decks or whatever, right? Um and so that um that's what Nest is today. Right now what is underlying Nest? Nest really is right like I said the other half of Nest is the asset issuance platform right which means um there's there's a redesign like there's a bunch of new UI stuff and a bunch of new like vaults that are not exposed to data to the public um that we're also want to expose because we have a permission side of Nest too. So for example, we have the um you know a a

credit X um so Apollo's Ared private credit fund right um that everyone talks about well the largest deployment of that on any in any chain is on plume today right um and it's there just not showing up right now because it's a it's a permission thing it's uh it's done in a more classic KYB way and you have the assets sitting there it's a whole thing right so there's a lot of that but what is underneath of under the hood of Nest is just a list of assets we've tokenized a bunch of stuff from some of the best asset issues in the world right um and it's sitting there and these We we've like plugged and integrated all these things and so you have the legal setup, the entity setup, the tie-in, the pricing setups, right? So then you could do bind, redemption, pricing updates,

withdrawals, rebalancing, all of that, right? And so when you go into a Nest Alpha vault as a simple example, right? What we have is a set of curators that assemble these vaults today, right? Um that that basically say for Nest Alpha, it's a collection of these things that sort of give you this target risk profile, this target duration, this target APY, right? But you also have single asset vaults that are just one thing, right? Um you know we have N basis today right um which is our basis trade vault which is like primarily just USC. There's some other stuff in it too, but it's like primarily just USC, right? Um basis trade stuff, right? And that's like almost a single asset vault, right? Uh we al we have I think with NOPEL, right? Nope is our Brazilian credit card rece vault, right? That's just one

asset. It's just Brazilian credit card receipt pools. And then we have these collective vaults like NA alpha where you take many of these vaults and assemble them into one thing, right? So that's what this is today, right? Nest today has um some of the biggest asset in the world. We have things like Apollo on there. We have wisdom tree. We have uh you know some of the Janice Henderson funds. We've got um you know Hamilton lin scope that's coming in there as well, right? Um we have uh you know um there's also you get some are exposing AC stuffs in there. We have um Taikon which is one of the big uh insurance companies in China. We have CMI, China Merchant National Bank in there, right? And so that's what this is right now for for most people today. We deal a lot with like more institutional folks as

well. the the uh the platform is a simple way to say I can plug into Nest and just through a menu get every major asset in the world that's that's in that's in crypto today and either deploy directly to that one thing right or I can assemble a basket of my own that gives me the proper exposure that I want right and we have some out of the box ones that have been assembled kind of small medium large that's what you see in the interface right and then behind the scenes you have you know things that have been customuilt right for individual users does that make sense >> yeah that makes sense and so you you you know I'm looking at for instance like the you know Nest Alpha vault. You know we hit like credit card receivables and here you can click and you can go and

see like the data the data room for that um for that vault. So there's there's some curator like some asset manager that is managing that position um and uh and delivering the the yield. >> That's right. Uh and so the vaults are sort of like um uh um essentially sort of allocations in different in different weights of of these uh >> that's exactly correct position. >> That's exactly right. Right. and just the function like you know it it sounds easier because the vaults actually sound like a very simple thing and that's why I thought they were too to be honest and it turns out there's a lot of there's a lot under the hood of the vault which is you have to like you know especially for RWAs which these things are not fully liquid right these things are not fully uh you know a lot of these things are

just Monday through Friday you can't do on the weekends right so you know you have to and then also getting the yield back at the right time and getting pricing updates so like you know nest alpha when you deposit into that as a simple example there maybe like four or five assets in there it's then breaking up your your um your your USDC or whatever into multiple into like multiple tranches and sending that to like 10 different places, right? Um and then keeping track of that position and balancing managing and bringing the yield back at the right time. So when you withdraw, it's the exact same thing. You have to go ping five people, withdraw and then collect it, bring it back and offer it and put it into Bit. So it's a lot of coordination, a lot of ops, a lot of work under the hood to do

this in a way that like normal uh crypto native vaults don't have to do because all the smart contracts you just do it instantly, right? But for us to do with real world assets, it's a lot of integration work, it's a lot of like pricing work, it's a lot of like you know ops work to make it to make it all a thing. But that's what it is. Um, today. >> Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Um, I want to take a step back here a little bit and and come back to the institutional conversation we were having a little bit >> and um, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately and it's been on my mind is yeah, I've been in the space for well over well over a decade and it really feels right now like there's a big inflection point

where all this stuff that we all wanted, right? we wanted like Trifi to get in crypto and that was the whole kind of part partly the whole point. Um, but it does feel to me and a lot of people I talk to that have been in the space for a while that um, folks that have been in crypto and have been on more like the DGEN side um, are not so excited about what's happening, right? There's not a lot of there's like innovation is kind of drying up. You know, we tried DeFi, we tried like NFTTS and like memecoins like there's been all these waves of like really interesting times in crypto where stuff is happening, things are frothy, people are making money, there's

innovative new things and I'm not talking even about, you know, all the kind of innovative u consensus mechanism and governance mechanisms and Dows and all that kind of stuff, right? Like all the stuff that we all kind of got in the space for seems to be drying up. >> Yeah. as things become more institutional and I think there's going to be somewhat of an exodus of a lot of folks that have been in the space for a while like you know Hib talks about this uh recently he was on some podcast and it's like you just have to stay in the space long enough and like a lot of the people that were in the be where they're in the beginning are going to leave and you're going to be sort of like in a good position and and I I agree I I think that's kind of happening and um

and so I guess the question is like where where do you think the space goes from here when decentralization, decentralized governance, you know, not the consensus mechanisms, all these things cease to be that important, >> right? >> Um where self-custody ceases to be that important, right? Where you you buy some asset, it's using some crypto rail, it's in your Revolute account, but you never hold your own keys. you know, all of these ideas that have been pushed by the crypto industry and sort of proponents of the space for the last, you know, decade and a half >> kind of go away, right? So, what's left basically like what's left? Is it just rails?

>> Um, >> yep. It's only I think it's a pivotal moment in that it could go one way or the other. Um, and one way to me is more bleak um and more uh a little bit more depressing and the other one is like uh temporary pain will make it type of situation, right? Um, and I think that uh, you know, at the end of the day, like what people were here for was very simple. They're sort of it's split between the original people came into crypto who were really focused on decentralization and uh, this new this new architecture and all these types of things, right? Then sort of a second wave of people that came in that really was here for nothing more than just making money, right? And I don't say that pajoratively like I would I would

like you know I would count myself in that in that group as well you know like you know that it's not it's like I it's it's like not possible to pretend that's not like a huge part of crypto culture as well right um and um and so both those things I think are are real um now where does that take us now right I think the reason it's kind of gone sideways a little bit sentiment-wise is because both of those things have dried up right like the idea that this sort of like new this new architecture that would upgrade the financial ecosystem and all this stuff and you have self-custody and privacy and self- sovereignty and all these things, right? And and trustlessness, like it's kind of not really led us anywhere so far, right? Um from an adoption standpoint.

And number two is the the other side of things, which is the hyper gambling and the yield and the and and the you know, the 100x type of nonsense is also not really panned out. You know, it's mostly been down only and it's just massive extraction from from uh from a bunch of stuff. Right? So, both those things have gone the wrong way. Right? Now, if we go back to it, right? crypto the the problem with crypto has always been that the benefits of these principles don't really show up until step two or step three, right? Meaning in the beginning it actually looks and feels worse, right? That's why it's that's why we always talk about the onboarding stunt. It's like actually pretty hard for people to understand why it's valuable until much later. Once you're deep in it, it's actually awesome. You totally get it, right? Like you know having be

able to hold your own stables, right? Have all your money be able to move around do whatever you want. I'm like it's like incredibly useful, right? And it's impossible to like it's possible to go it's impossible to go backwards once you really see that, right? Um but the problem is it take you have to get to step two or three for that to happen, right? And so that's what's going on right now. It's like, you know, we've been unable to kind of bring that thing forward. All the new stuff coming in is very it feels like the same thing as before, right? It it feels like, you know, it's vinty. It's very like trad. It's very, you know, again, we're throwing away a lot of these principles, but I think if we do it right, it's the same thing. By onboarding a lot of these things, if we

set the frame correctly that phase two, phase three when all these assets and people and use cases are here will then manifest in different ways, right? And we all the things that matter which self- sovereignty, right? Being able to take care take, you know, being having self custody and all those things will apply, but instead of just to a very no to everything and then that will massively change everything again, right? Uh and and so so that to me is like to be the upside case here and where it gets really exciting. uh and where I think it's it's a little bit of like a temporary a moment in time where it just feels bad. Um, but if we set this thing correctly, this massive event will bring all these like, you know, people have been scared of regulation, but like, you know, we're deep in it as

an example, right? Like we we we spend a lot of time in Hong Kong, a lot of time in UAE, a lot of time in DC to like talk to regulators, right, and get our licensing, work with them. And the reason is because unlocking a massive amount of dollars, assets, and use cases and people, right, into all this stuff, right, is going to there's no way it's bad for crypto, right? But we have to maintain our stance and make sure that it's done in a way that if once it's here, we still ball control, right? And in two or three years when when when when you have the opportunity to now, you know, treat these assets and and uh as your own and still have hold the keys and do all like that, it's still possible to do all that, you know, um and it hasn't been co-opted by someone

else. And so that to me is like where we at. It is is a pivotal m it's like a it's a it's a pivotal moment at which you can go the wrong way. Um, and I think we're I think we're still tracking tracking, but it's it's like, you know, it's pretty it's up in the air, honestly right? >> Um, >> and you have two sides of like, you know, maybe like take the, you know, the new channel like maybe take ZRO, right? Uh, or Zero, right? That's sort of like very, you know, in my opinion, they're talking about privacy, talking about decentralization, they're talking about, you know, open information, which I think are all the right words and then you look at something more like I take Canon as an example, right? Uh, and like, you know, I think both are doing great things for what it's worth, right?

But there's clearly two different viewpoints, right? you know, we are crypto was meant to sort of get rid of the middleman, right? And you know, now you have one one that's like very that's literally the middleman, right? Um trying to do their thing, right? Um and uh and and the assets don't live on change, right? You can't move them around. You can't take hold of them. You know, there is no custody. So, it's just two different two different worlds. Um and I think they both can win for its worth, but I do think we need to preserve at least the original one that we were here for. >> Yes, I agree. Um Chris, thank you so much for joining me on Epicenter today.

Hey, it's been great chatting, learning about Plume and um yeah, excited to see where things go next with regards to RWAS. I mean, I think you know there there is sort of a inflection point right now in the space and you whether or not enough people with sort of crypto values and principles and ethos stick around I think is an open question, but I'm definitely hoping they do. >> Yes, definitely. Definitely. I mean, I think to go back to it, right? been you know money is made and not even that but like you know I think the job of anyone is to find change right in my opinion and and there clearly is change happening right now in crypto and and finance and and technology and so the question is you know what direction it goes in but at the minimum it's an

exciting time to kind of be involved and and you know there are few moments where things actually um get shaped and this is one of them so uh you know glad to to be part of it and hope everyone else is like also you know you know pitching in so we can hopefully make it work the right way. >> Thanks Chris. Cheers. Cool. Thanks, man.