#518: Chris Yin, CEO of Plume Network, on Optimizing Looping, RWAs, Onchain Asset Management, and Nest vaults on Solana

Speaker A: Foreign. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the crypto news podcast. Your host, your Matt say how we are buzzing as always guys. Market is tough right now. We're gonna keep grinding, we're gonna keep building. Don't look at the price, don't look at your net worth. Get absolutely obliterated. If you guys have been in this for a couple cycles, you know what happens at uh, it always goes back up and it will go back up. So keep battling. Don't look at the red on the board. Go touch some grass or snow if you're like me in Toronto and you know, keep on saying happy, healthy and wealthy. Time for the intro today. We have Chris Ian on the show today. CEO and co founder of Plume Network. The first permissionless full stack blockchain built for real world asset finance RWA Fi. He spearheads the team shaping the infra and policy standards to accelerate the development development of on chain capital markets. Accomplished track record for. Chris is a founder and investor in enterprise software space with tenders at Scale Venture Partners, Rainforest Q A and Expenser which was acquired by Koopa IPO 2016. Chris? Absolutely. Pumped to have you on my friend. How you doing this lovely evening?

Speaker B: Good, good, good. You know despite the fact that every time I look at my phone you know it's all red and, and things couldn't feel worse at the same time, you know the, the world couldn't be better for crypto. You know like it's, it's one of those strange feelings where things are going incredibly well. Everything we thought was going to happen is happening except the thing that matters which is the price going up, you know. But you know, policy wise, you know, adoption wise, technology wise, all these things are going crazy. I mean even ZCASH been ripping. I mean like the, the sort of uh, you know, unthinkable's been happening. So it's all positive except for our uh, financial status but it's all good. You know I think again if you zoom out a little bit, which is not that long, zoom out even the tiniest bit. I mean this is an insane sort of up only time for crypto and so yeah, very excited to be here, excited to chat about all this stuff and, and get into it. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: I love it. Pumped to have you again. We don't do this too often but because of the current you know, sort of price shit show that we're in right now, just overall market I we never get into price predictions on the show. We have US equities, worldwide equities getting Absolutely tanked. We had up only A.I. uh, energy metals for literally the last couple months, if not years. And a couple of my big holdings like the COR weaves which have literally just printed money are getting decimated as we speak. Do you think this is a full on correction for both crypto and tradfi assets? Is this just a couple month bare market, long term bear market? Again, no price action, just overall sentiment. As a builder who's been in the space for a while, how do you feel right now about everything?

Speaker B: You know, I think, look, I, I'll. Maybe the big asterisk is as a builder, I'm a relentless optimist for everything and I like that, you know, much m to, much to the negative to my bags but you know, like I, I'm, I'm hopeful for anything and I'm very positive about where we' going in totality. I think if you look a little bit under the hood, price is incredibly short term, is incredibly short term stuff. If you look at anything happening right now, it just couldn't be more positive, you know. And so I, I'm incredibly bullish on what's going on. I think, you know, for the world it's a bit of a tenuous time. Right. And that's why, you know, you mentioned, you know, AI and metals and, and things outside of crypto. Right. Nose diving, right. And just kind of going to. And, and, and that's a reflection of where things are around the world right now. We've got all kinds of nonsense happening, right, with you know, sort of stuff with the financial markets. Uh, geopolitically it's a little bit tricky. There's a lot of things happening right now, but no doubt that at the end of the day all these things are coming in the right direction. And so I think that we are right around the corner from getting out of this. Right. It's, you know, admittedly it's been longer than I would have expected, you know, and you know I sort of was, was, you know, I thought you kind of Q3 post rate cut and not quite immediately but you know, near the end of the year we'd get a nice low off top. Um, did not happen. Right. But you uh, know, of course, you know, as, as with everything in crypto, you know, you plan for one thing and then you have something like 10, 10 come into play and just absolutely decimate everything and completely change the course of where we're going. But that's, you know, candidly, you know, you can't have good ups without good Downs, you know, and so that's just the game that we're playing, and that's what keeps it fun and interesting. Right? You know, if we all just wanted something more unstable, we would just, you know, the T bill is perfect. Perfectly fine for that. You know, just, you know, kind of inch up at 3, 4, 5% a year and be fine. But, you know, again, like, you know, we're here for the, for. For not only, um, the financial gains, but for a good time and all these things. And this is just the nature of the game. And so I, I'm still. I. I cannot see a world in which we're not going up, you know, in the midterm. But, you know, again, I've been. I've been surprised before, and hopefully we'll be surprised again, but this time to the opposite side.

Speaker A: Well said. It's part of the process, guys. Joel Embiid, Philadelphia 76ers. He's always said it. It's part of the process. And, uh, we are still in the process, gents, and, and ladies, okay, speaking of fun stuff in 2026, before we get into PL popping off, I'm a big, hyper liquid guy. I love hyper liquid. I think that's one of the sort of greatest sort of, you know, boom booms into RWAs over the last month with just, okay, let's find product, market fit in. Crypto, metals, go parabolic. What's the best place to trade metals in crypto? It's hyper liquid. Hyper liquid had insane volume. Still still has insane volume. This is literally just the tip of the iceberg. We have incredible teams like Chris's and Plume, where we are just guys for everyone who trades in crypto and goes back to tradfi, it's pulling teeth every single time for all the tradfi listeners, the brokers listening. I love you guys. I'm sorry, but it is absolutely absurd. I'm Canadian. I still get hosed on, you know, five $10 trades when I trade with TD, the second biggest bank in Canada. Like, what are we doing? It should all be on chain. It's way more efficient. It's just better. Let's jump right into RWAs before we get into Pluton. Chris, why are you so bullish on RWAs in 2026?

Speaker B: Totally. I think it's a bunch of things coming together, but to keep it very, very simple. Look, at the end of the day, what we need from crypto to grow, right? Everybody wants to do one very simple thing. We want our bags to grow. It's not even like, let's not pretend it's anything more than that, right?

Speaker A: Same as, Same as tradfi. Same as tradfi.

Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. I don't think it's a negative thing. I think we should wear that badge proudly because we're just humans at the end. Everyone is. That's not a crypto combination, it's a human being question, right? And so, like, this is the path that we've chosen for that. But that's the game, right? Like, you know, it's very clear the one thing that helps any market grow is adoption. It's really no more. It's not a question that that goes any deeper than that. And the institutional adoption, the additional bags that are coming in and the additional users and holders and real money coming in, that's what changes markets, right? If you look at the trad markets or look at any market throughout the history of time, right, Retail users sort of lead the way and bring in adoption in the beginning, right? Things get regulated, which is a pain in the ass and sucks. I deal with it all day. It's one of the worst things that I've ever had to deal with. I got a crypto to get away from that nonsense and I'm right back in it, right? But here we are, you know, someone's got to do it. And the point, the point is though, when we make it to the other side, right, the these things unlock tremendous inflows right into the market. The reason why equities are incredible, right, is because of things like in the 401k and all these things that happen that sort of aggregate tremendous amounts of money into these flows and that creates an incredible positive momentum for the whole world, right? Because on both sides then, you know, the builders and people that need capital are able to access it much, much more efficiently, right? And in much more higher qualities. And then people all around the world, right, can get access to these things, right? And have exposure, right? So it's just an incredibly positive force that creates value for everybody like that, right? And this is one of those things that unlocks it for the crypto user, right? It brings the money into crypto, takes the technology that we have here, blockchains, permissionless by Internet capital, all the capital markets, all these things, uh, unlock in incredible ways and will expand and exponentially. We are not even in the first inning for this thing. You know, if we look at the user base for crypto, it's like, look, we can talk about fake numbers all day, which I do too, right? So I'm not, I'm not above it, right? But like the reality is it's still very, very small, right? We are sub any, any meaningful skill from a user perspective and a TVO perspective and a real adoption perspective. And we're already seeing incredible value from that. So we just get to not even the same size as Trad 5. Forget that, you know, I think we go much bigger than that. But forgetting that even if we go to 10, 15, 20, it's a blow off top of where we are today, right? And so, you know, that's why I'm incredibly positive where we're going. I think we need it, right? Because we need more usage, more people, more dollars, right? And more assets with deeper pools of liquidity, right? So I just think there's a lot that's happening on this thing. It's going to be positive for all of us. And I think more importantly, if we don't take that, don't take a part of this, this is happening whether we like it or not. It's a runaway train, right? Larry Fink's been talking about it for all, all year, right? Every major country, financial institution and company is doing stuff in tokenization, in Artemis, in stablecoins and it's all happening in front of us. If we are not part of that process, we risk replicating the same bullshit that is here today on Chain, right? We, I think we have to be part of it. We have to take control. We, we have ball control right now because we know how to play this game, we know what's going on here. And, and by engaging in a more honest way, right, with them and in a more like, in a more meaningful way rather than just reluctantly trying to deal with them, right? Or letting whatever fly, right? And just, well, they're going to bring money, they'll just do whatever. If we just try and actually work with them to, to help shape what this is, man, it's going to be positive with us in the driver's seat still if we don't, right? It'll be the same shit on Chain, which is like, it'll be margin better for sure just because of Chain, but we'll have missed a massive opportunity. So uh, I just think the, the upside is insane here.

Speaker A: Very well said. Let's get into Plume here. You guys are one of the leaders in the RWA space and we have so much to talk about. Just like you said, Chris, you've been dealing with the shit shows of regulatory developments and the policy and the whole nine yards. I mean, regulators and policymakers in different jurisdictions. Usa, Hong Kong, Bermuda, uh, uae, you name it. It's all over the place. I mean, there's not a whole lot going on in Canada. So again, that's why we don't have many Canadians on the show. It's just sort of, you know, it's funny, we're always, almost always the leaders for a lot of tech. Literally the first one on base and then we fumble the bag every time and don't get home. Like Ethereum. Ethereum. Vitalik. Canadian.

Speaker B: I say, like, people underestimate Canada as like, as a, a place for just insane crypto talents. And so much has actually come out of there. You know, we've, we've had, we hire a lot of Canadians, you know, because, you know, just like, like you said, Toronto, like, like Italian. So you have all these people like, like building the foundations of crypto that come from Canada. And like you said, you guys just like let them leave and go, like they do whatever else. I'm from the us right? We fuck it up too. So don't, don't get me wrong.

Speaker A: Well said. Yeah, well said. So Plume, Give me, give me the elevator pitch on Plume and then we'll get into the nitty gritty.

Speaker B: Yep, Very, very quickly. The TLDR is very simple. We build a, a network and ecosystem, uh, and a block on making it easy to access robot assets. Right? Our, our, the point of our story is, you know, we think that, uh, the crypto native is the user of the future, right? And is the primary user that the world should care about, right? It's a 247 global market, right? It's a user base all over the world, right? We've seen this already, the velocity of capital, the velocity of, um, users, the laws of innovation. When it comes, this type of user base, when it's open and permissionless to 27 is unparalleled, right? We've done in four to five years in DeFi what the traditional markets took over a hundred years to do, right now we're not in the same place. There's still a lot to go, right. We've not caught up. But just to say, when things are open and things have happened just sort of organically from the streets, right? The way the Internet took off, right? It's an open, permissionless protocol. Things go nuclear, right? And in 10, 20 years, the Internet's take, like the Internet's completely warped how we do everything, right? And this exact thing is happening to value and money around the world right? Now with crypto, right? And so, you know, what we do is we believe that this user base and this, this philosophy right, around how to build capital markets and how to build in, in finance is uh, is a core idea here. And we're building around that. So we build tools and products and services that sort of make it easy for the crypto native to interact with RWAs and robot assets, right? And it's, you know, our perspective, it's not RWAs versus crypto, right? To me, they're all the same thing at the end of the day. These are assets people want to get hold of, right? And when the things are going nuclear, right? Which, uh, I don't remember what that's like anymore, but at some point they did, right? When things go nuclear, right, you want to hold shitters, you want to be trenching, you want to like. I don't think we should project. I think that's part of the whole game and that's, that's part of the beauty of it, right? You know, and we look, the, the traditional markets have shitters too. They're called P sheets, right? And even in the majors, right, we have plenty of shitters, you know, in the, in the sort of class like, you know, I think SPACs and many things, like a lot of them are trash, you know, let's just be super clear about it, right? And so like, that's just the game that we're playing. And so you have both sides and just increasing access for both sides for the crypto native get access to other things that are sort of a counterweight to pure BTC beta, right? Which is kind of what it all is right now. And also for the way for the tradfolk to get access to crypto markets, right? Both these things are incredibly important ideas. And so we believe that. I think leading with the crypto native user allows these things to take shape in a much, much more coherent way. And I think this is honestly, it's more who we are at the end of the day, right? So that, that's part of it. But I do think if you look at history, new technologies are adopted by the fringe, right? You know, the Chris Dixon post, which is what people, you know, it's sort of like the toys, you know, tomorrow's like sort of infrastructure are just toys today, right? And they seem weird. And they seem, they seem weird, right? And sort of like the poses, like what, what, what the nerds are, what, like what people are doing on the weekends are going to be what you do for work in the future, right? And, and that's sort of the history of. So if you look at the Internet, if you look at mobile, right? Every single one of those things upended the historical thing. You have an analogy to it, but the new thing takes advantage of the technology in a native way and transforms it so it rhymes. It's never the exact same thing. If you look at mobile as an example, uh, the thing that made mobile great was not porting over the New York Times or Bank of America or TV or whatever and putting on the phone, right? That is part of it. The thing that made mobile great was things that took advantage of the phone, right? You had a 247 network of people doing things all day, right? You had an accelerometer you could use location natively in this application system like Uber, right? Took hold because now instead of having to build a fleet, you have people coordinate on this thing and you had location, real time, right? So that wasn't. It couldn't be done before, right? So we had a taxi service, Great. I could call taxi on the web before anyway. I had Google Maps support. It was used in a. In a completely different way on the phone, right? And that transformed the markets and transformed the world and just put things forward in an insane way. And that same thing is happening for crypto, where we are taking the core primitives of crypto and the core principles of crypto, which is permissionless, right? It's liquid, it's composable, and 24,7 global, that is embedded and transforming these assets. And so instead of having to engage in assets, right, where you're bound to a, uh, eight to five, right? You know, and, you know, like you said, ridiculous fees, tons of middlemen, right? Clothes on the weekends, all kinds of nonsense, right? Now, transforming that into what it is today, which is the minute something happens in the world, someone throws up 50 shitters, right? And you can spec it and utilize. And not to say that's the only way to express that idea, but that idea that allows you to just engage in the markets instantly for what's happening and move money at the pace of the world, at the pace the world is moving. That is an incredibly powerful idea. And by doing this in the way crypto has already adopted, that is going to transform the entire world, right? And so that's why I was so bullish on RWAs and what we're doing here and why our perspective is, you know, there's a lot of assets today in RWAs. Like, I think if you look at RWs today, everyone's bullish on. Talk about it. Great, great. Like the truth is, who the fuck actually holds and use rwas? Very few people, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Before this metals boom, right. And even then we're talking about perps, right? I think people holding spot is very, very, very small. Right? But like if you look at that, you look at Biddle, the biggest fund out there, right, In RW today, which is the money market fund. It's got what, 3 to 3 billion in TBO, right? It's. It's good, but that's nothing.

Speaker A: But that's, that's absolutely. That's peanuts.

Speaker B: Yeah. It doesn't mean anything. Right? And if you look at the holder base today, right? That holder base has about 100 wallets is my understanding, right. If you look at RW XYZ, right? And we all know in crypto 100 wallets is like six users, right?

Speaker A: Wow. I thought it'd be. I thought it'd be more than that.

Speaker B: It's not. Because the thing is, the question is how would you get access to Biddle today, right? Like, do you hold Biddle? It's almost certainly. No, I don't either. I don't even tried, right. Because the way to do this is just like any trad asset, you know, you have to do a bunch of fucking paperwork, you know, you're probably hitting a fax machine, you know, God forbid at some point, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And doing all kinds of nonsense. And kyc, the minimums are 100k, right? Your withdrawal windows for a T bill

Speaker A: product are accredited investment, the whole nine yards. It's a shit show.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's like the experience just sucks, you know, Like I'm not doing that shit, you know? There's no way you're gonna get me to sign up for this now. Even if it's better. Like I'm just don't have the intention to do it, you know, like crypto's fried my brain. I cannot do anything more than 10 seconds in time, you know? And so like that, that alone is a huge barrier to anyone doing anything, you know. And so when you look at that, our perspective is when you make things crypto, which is liquid permissions composable, the difference is astounding, right? Look at uh, the stablecoin, which is liquid, permissionless and composable, you know, look at Tether, right? Look at usdc, look at Athena even, right? These things are just. I hold all three of those things, you know, uh, and it's very easy for me to get access anytime in and out, to use them in different ways, right? And the utility grows every day for them. So there's no reason not to hold them. Right. And we look at those, the TV across those is, is not even remotely close. Like they, like Athena went to what Athena two years, it went to 15B. Right. You know, uh, in a very short period of time they correct it back down to 6, 7. It's still better than anything else out there, right. You know, the stablecoin grows at insane rates. And so that to me is the view here when it's not only philosophically better for crypto because it puts us in the driver's seat and it gives us ball control over where the future is going. Right. But number two, it actually works better like just provably by these numbers and the stats, right. You know, 2 billion in TVL with, with a hundred wallets or really 10 users is nowhere near the adoption Athena has, which is 15B. You know, at peak TVL today is what, 6, 7ish, right? With. With hundreds of thousands of holders, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That one is clearly better than the other. And so if we just look at the historical examples, it's very clear that the crypto native path is the way forward. Now the problem in RWOS is all people dealing in rws are trad people for the most part. Right. Because we're crypto native like man dealing with these regulators and like dealing with compliance, it just sucks, you know, so might as well spin up some uh, some LST or do something else that's like. It feels more crypto you can get moving. It feels like things that we do and not suffer through all this nonsense. But if we do it right and make these assets feel like crypto, like it's provably true that the experience and doing the UX right will bring a tremendous amount of flows into that. Right. And people want it. I mean like you said, when you look at hyperliquid, right. They've done an amazing job with hip3, right. And bringing trade XYZ and all these things, uh, uh, up there. So now you can trade purpose on these assets and people clearly want it. Right. At the end of the day, you know, the thing that people want here is people are looking for alpha. Going back to the same statement, we're here to make money, right. And having a good time while we're

Speaker A: doing it and, and on, uh. That was a great rep, Chris. And on top of that people want the most efficient way to make money as well.

Speaker B: Yes, right.

Speaker A: You know, and that's a present day. Why do stocks still dominate off chain? Well, no, as a Canadian, I can go into any of the big five banking accounts. Boom right away. Or wealthsimple, our version of Robinhood. If you're in the States, there's probably no better way to buy stocks than on Robinhood. If you're anywhere else in the world, it's probably interactive brokers. Right? There's always the easiest way to do. Going back to your Uber statement. I'm, um, going to call an Uber or Lyft. A hundred times out of 100. I don't remember the last time I've gotten a cab unless there was one literally just magically out front of me in the perfect time. And even then he's probably going to scam me or freaking swipe my credit card. If you provide a better solution at a better price, barring some crazy long term relationship, no one's going to use that old shitty solution. They're going to use the new thing. And it's better on crypto. Quick, we got to take quick break. Give a huge shout out to our sponsor the show when we get back. We're going to keep buzzing. Huge shout out. Primexpt, longtime friend, long time sponsors of the Crypto News podcast. We love the team at PrimeXPT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. Doesn't matter if you're a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. Prime XGT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Crypto News podcast. Use the promo code crypto news50. That's crypto news5 0 all one word to receive 50. 50 of your deposit credited to your trading account in the description is 50 all one word to receive 50 of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to show with Chris. Okay, one of the things you guys do that I absolutely love is looping. Looping. Uh, I'll let you explain this because you're definitely better at explaining this than I am, but it's really just taking assets that are already in, whether it's a vault, whether it's a chain, you name it, and utilizing all of the yield opportunities possible in a very, very safe way to maximize earning potential. It's sort of like giving it to a money manager except on chain, minus, you know, the 2 and 20 and them bending you over and rinsing you on fees. That's sort of my explanation of it. I'll, I'll give it to you. Explain what looping is and how exactly

Speaker B: you guys do it sentiment wise. You're exactly right. That's what this is, right? What we're trying to do with looping, and what looping is, is it's been popularized, right, when we talked about defi hist. Historically, it's been a million things, you know, but it's really centered around this one use case. Because what people want, it fixates us on this idea. What we are doing here is chasing yield, right? And looping allows us to maximize the utility of the capital to achieve the best apy and achieve the best yield, right? And it, it creates an ecosystem on both sides where the user, right. Can now take an asset, borrow against it, right? And then buy more of that same asset, right? And continually do that loop over and over and over. So you end up doing what? One loop, you do two or three or four or five. And now you can really take your apy up a tremendous amount.

Speaker A: I gotta jump in. When, whenever someone talks about looping, I literally think of the banks guys. When you give the banks money, they literally loop your and then keep all the money and then they give you 1% back. But so think about what the, what the banks do, where they lend it to capital markets, they lend it to, uh, whatever the case may be, t bills, you name it, fees, the whole nine yards. They literally loop your money and keep all of it. Whereas in crypto, it's the opposite. Maybe Chris and the team are taking a very small percentage, as they should and as they deserve, but it's literally the bank's bending you over. Except the exact opposite. You are now bending the other person over. That's pretty much it.

Speaker B: Uh, exactly. That's right. And just like you said, right? Where historically, you know, the banks, again, the, the margin on this is ridiculous. You know, you give them money and they'll be making 10, 20% on this thing, you know, after everything is said and done and you're getting, you know, what, two, three, max, if you're lucky. More like max, right? I mean, you're talking, like you said, I think 50 dips 1%. So it's ridiculous. So you're losing 20, you know, 10, 20% of the spread right there, right? Whereas in crypto, you know, like, just because the middleman is entirely gone, it's efficient, it's on chain and people compete away. The, the nonsense, you know, you're looking at, you know, the average fees are mostly zero today, right? But if you have to do it 10, 30, 40, 51%, you know, but you're keeping the money for use. And that's why when we talk about looping, it's beneficial for both sides. Uh, it's mostly talk about from a user perspective. Meaning I can juice my APIs, right? Because I'm looping, I'm engaging in leverage in order to scale up, right. My dollar. So I, instead of buying the asset for a dollar, I can effectively buy $10 with that asset for the same dollar, right? That's like sort of quote, basically what this is on the other side, the thing that also helps us as fast as the people that are supplying the capital, right? I'm, um, just saying, you said, whereas you give the money like they're also able to maximize their utility for the money. So instead of just sitting there doing nothing, you're lending it out to multiple who want different things. You're making fees on that and you're able to sort of profit that in some ways. And so that's the ecosystem we're building around looping, right? And uh, the reason it's incredibly important is it's more efficiency for all sides of the equation, right? The, the again, the people that want the capital, right, to build or do whatever they need to do or to take out loans, whatever, are able to do it, right? The people that are achieved, that want yield, right, can also contribute, right? And the people that want to supply these liquidity in these markets to then loop against can also make money, right? And so it's just the best way to do things right now. Now, that being said, it's also incredibly inefficient, you know, to do this right? Yeah. And, uh, you know, there are, there are a lot of new novel ways that people are looping, but this core idea around efficiency in capital formation, right, an efficiency in API, efficiency in using capital is. It's clearly an idea that's going to stay right and really is one of the few places of product market for crypto.

Speaker A: 100% Solana. You guys launched Nest vault on Solana again? Vaults. I love vaults. Vaults are sort of like just looping vaults, if you will. It's sort of like if you imagined a crypto vault. It's this imaginary vault that just, you know, you put your shit in it and you let people like Chris and their teams make more money for you sort of, you know, that's really what it is. But why Solana launched the test nut on, or excuse me, the Nest Vault on Solana. I'm a big Solana guy, I get it. I'd love to hear your two cents though. Chris. Why Salon of all the chains you could have chose.

Speaker B: Totally. Look, vaults, like you said, are very simple. Vaults are a way to encapsulate a bunch of features and a bunch of ideas into a single interface where I'm just taking some stable coins or whatever and depositing into this thing and then all the things happen on the scenes, right? So very much like a stablecoin, right? You deposit money into stablecoin and they do something with it, right? In the stable coin, they only do one thing. They buy treasures. They should be, right? But it could be many other things. But Athena is the base tripler. Uh, but you're taking complex set of actions, reducing it into a simple interaction and going back to, I think, the user experience, right? Like you said, the reason Robin is dominant is because you swipe to trade. Very, very easy, right? And I think the user experience stuff matters a tremendous amount more than people realize. And so vaults are a way to encapsulate hard ideas into simple things, right? Now, why Solana, for these things is. Look at, uh, the. Look, you know, Plume people often. People often ask this because we are a blockchain ourselves. We have our own chain, an EVM chain, right? We built our own ecosystem. We've got a network, we've got hundreds of applications building on plume, and we work with them today. Why go to another chain at the same time, right? And it goes back to the core idea behind Plume. We started Plume with a very simple idea. We want to grow crypto, right? It was not about RWAs, it's not about. It's not about Plume. It's about growing all of crypto. We're crypto natives and we're sort of like, you know, my, um, life. And everything we do is on chain, right? And so growing that ecosystem purely from a selfish perspective was part of it, right? More things to do, more ways to make money, and just bringing the world on chain, right? Now, if that's the case, then growing all of crypto is more important than growing plume, right? And if we grow all of crypto, then growing the plume will grow as a result, right? And so I think it's always a push and pull, right? I think the thing with other blockchains and with blockchains in general is you're very beholden to your own world, right? And it's again, thinking about it from your perspective versus the user's perspective. I've. We started playing with the same thing, right? We've talked about user experience a hundred times on this podcast already, right? Because user experience to me is Everything, right? At the end of the day, the thing that matters is do people want to use these products, right? And so if you think about it from that view, they don't give a fuck about a blockchain, right? I don't give a fuck about where this thing is. They want to know how can I get the best access to this thing, right? And so we have a build our own great community. We have, uh, you know, one of the largest chains out there from RWA's perspective, right? And so God bless, it's all good. Doesn't mean everyone's going to come to Plume, right? And if our goal is to grow crypto, not grow plume, most people are just trying to grow their own thing, not crypto, right? We're trying to grow all crypto. You got to go to where the users are. And a lot of users happen to be on Solana and they're going to stay there. And there's no reason I should try and bring them to Plume. You know, like, I would love for them to come here and I hope that we can get them over, right? But like, I think it's perfectly fine for them to be on Solana too. And I think it's great. In a world, I think there's a. I think Salon's done a lot of stuff incredibly well, right? And I think they've also been focused on user experience, right? I mean, we all remember the last cycle, $100 gas fees, trading NFTs on OpenSea and like that, right? And Solana being able to do things fast and easy, even simple things. Phantom is better, right? It feels better, right? Camino looks and feels better. Jupiter feels better, right? Even like these little. Chris, I look and feel the Internet, so it's super important.

Speaker A: I gotta jump in this. This is an analogy that, that I use so often and I love it. You brought this up. Think of companies in crypto as countries, okay? You have, if you are a huge. If you are, Chris, and you built Plume and you have a lot of people coming to your country and uh, and your business is in that country, but you can go to Solana, maybe United States, maybe Britain, maybe Spain, maybe China, maybe wherever. A huge economy. Are you not going to open up an office in that country? You stupid. You know what? Why the hell wouldn't you do that? You have to grow. You have to. It makes no sense why so many teams are like, they have to come to our country. No, you keep your own country. You keep your HQ in your own country and you go to their freaking country too. Why would you open up shop in their country? I do not get it. I love that you said that.

Speaker B: I love that you said that. It's a great analogy. I think it's a great. It's the right way to think about it, right. Like at the end of the day, you know, if I want people to. To migrate our countries as well. Right. But like it again, you got to go to when people are I uh. In so many words I think if you agree greedy long term, which is what we are, right? You want it all, right. Versus being greedy short term, which I think most people are, right. They just focus on their own little thing. Let's grow Micronesia or whatever the hell it is versus saying let's take our and put it everywhere, right? And get everyone to experience what we have. And if they want to come here and get an even better version, God bless, you know. Yeah. Then. Then we're all. But if not, that's awesome.

Speaker A: Yeah, well said. Last question here. Plume 2026. I mean you guys have some absolutely absurd partnerships. Apollo Global, Wisdom Tree, Digi ft, Securitize. I'm sure you got were on the back burner on the pipeline 2026. Any plume related news, Chris, any RWA hot takes, you name it. Just anything to leave us with before we let you go today.

Speaker B: Yep, I think look, the um. For plume itself, you know the broad arc of. Is this. In Q3 of last year we launched the chain, right? And very quickly became the largest chain in the world for RWAs by holders by asset type, by by velocity, all these things, right? And then from there, right, we parlayed that. And because of the distribution that we obtained from this, a lot of the major ass issues around the world came to work with us, right? And that's where we got Apollo Global. We had Ernst and Young, we had uh. They're building a privacy chain. On top of us we have wisdomtree like you said, secure Digi FT is bringing things like China Merchant Bank, $100 billion AUM um, asset manager in China. We have Taikong, which is a multi hundred billion dollar insurance company in China bringing their assets to plume as well. So because of those things we had them come to us. It was the same philosophy which is at the end of the day we want to be a bridge between these two worlds, right? And so by starting right with crypto, natives and distribution, then we can have the institutions come to us versus us go to them, right? And when they come to us, we have ball control, right? And we can begin to shape the world in the world that works for us versus just listening to them. So that's what we did in Q4, which means then now parlaying the into what are we going to do for the 2026 is now we take that in the other way, way. Right. It always goes back and forth. We build distribution, we find that uh, we go that, that allows us to get great assets. Then we take those assets and bring them back to distribution. Right. And Solana was the key starting point for it. But we have many more uh, integrations coming from a chain perspective. Right. We've been working with you know, a couple different centralized exchanges as well, distribute our products there. You know we announced Gate recently. We have many more coming as well. Right. As well as new applications. I think you know one of the key stories in crypto right now is the neobank, the Neo Finance, those types of things. Right. And you know plugging RWAs into that is also a big part of it. Right. As well as the bitcoin community. And so that's kind of what we're doing now. It's this interplay between both. We're constantly finding new great assets, bringing them to people and bringing them to wherever they can go within crypto and then use it to go back to find even better assets. And we're doing that cycle over. So that's what we're doing now. We've got a couple great and like some very, very big announcements coming across those dimensions distribution wise. Right. Between chains and sexes and applications and bitcoin or whatever. Like those areas are the main areas that we're going forward and so that's where we are. And I think, I think you know, for folks who are still sort of figuring out because I think a lot of people are still figuring out the RWA story because while we hear about a lot the interaction points for the user are not quite as much as maybe other crypto native assets is that it is changing in front of our eyes. Right. You know the ability to like you said, utilize vaults to one click, push a button and get access to all the best access in the world. Right. And have money spray into every pocket of the, of, of uh, of the world today and find the best yields. Right. Is an incredibly powerful idea. And to, from holding my, my, my, my net worth in fart point to you know, potentially you know, you know, maybe maybe rebalancing a little bit into the S and P and a little bit of gold here and there, whatever, right. And still holding a broad array of them that to me is the magic where we're going. It's not one or the other, it's, let's have all of them at the same time. There's no reason why we shouldn't, right? You know, in my opinion, I do think, you know, like, you know, many of these tokens, even the shitters, are blue chips, right? That should be uh, at uh, the same quality as what's going. And you can see how the world is becoming crypto, right? There's a post that everything is crypto except crypto, right? But like, you know, the world has become crypto the minute, the minute, you know, we started aping into metals. Of course it don't, right? But you know, like, even the biggest assets in the world are trading like shitters now, right? Because that's what's happening in front of our eyes. Like the crypto markets have set the tune and tone for where the world is going, right? And so that's what is happening in front of us. And so it's just going to be an insane world where, you know, again, there is no line between these things. You know, you can be anyone, anywhere with any size, any size of, uh, bag, you can get access to whatever you want and build a portfolio on top. And by making this open, the people building around it, whether you're going to cure it or vault, right? And say, look, I think this combination of assets, btc, farcoin and gold is going to take you to the next, take you to the moon and just pack it up. And a lot of people interact with that. That on uh, its own is going to open up. So it's not just the assets themselves, but the ecosystem around these assets. And what you could do is going to just exponentiate. And so I would just say for anyone else out there, right, there's a lot more to RWAs than just T bills. There's a lot more to RWAs than just gold, right? Or even just assets. It's the whole thing around it that is going to explode in an incredible way. And there are a million things, we don't even know how they're going to pan out right now that are going to go nuclear. So I would just say there's, there's literally infinite opportunity in this world right now. And so if you're not involved, you should be in some form or fashion. I'm around to challenge anytime people want to talk about it, right? Just ping me or talk, whatever, or to just read stuff, build whatever it is. You know, I think there's A tremendous amount to do across every dimension for what you're doing, which is educating and talking to people and getting to, I think get. That's a massive part of this. We need to get people around this thing to be able, building people using these things to, to also people just to, to, to sort of like, you know, bring the regulatory setting. So all these things. There's a role for everybody here. So you know, if you're not involved, you know, you know you should and you know it'll pay off.

Speaker A: I love it. Before we let you go, Chris, where can our listeners find you personally and of course Plume online and on socials?

Speaker B: Yep. Look, I, I'm, I'm on Twitter all day and every day. Unfortunately my name is the rotting my brain for a while, but I still love it. And so it's like I'm always on Twitter. Ping me whenever there and second is, you know, telegram and these places. Our team is also everywhere and so you want to talk anywhere. Um, I think Twitter happens to be the homepage for Crypto, but you know, Twitter, uh, Del, that's probably a good place to find them.

Speaker A: As always guys, we will link everything in the show notes. Huge shout out to Christian, CEO and co founder of Plume. This was an absolute master class on everything RWA related and what we need in crypto. Have the ball right now, guys. Sometimes we got to chuck it back to their court. It's going to come back to ours, but, uh, let's keep moving and grooving and achieve our goals here. Huge shout out to Chris and the team for making this happen. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did. Please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speaking to the team. Love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Jaggy, keep crushing it and back to the listeners. Thanks for tuning in as always. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying happy, healthy and wealthy. Love you guys. We'll see you on the next one. Ciao.