Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Tokenization of All Financial Assets on Plume Network

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

In this episode, host Sebastian Couture is joined by Chris Yin, CEO of Plume Network, to deconstruct the current state of Real World Assets (RWAs) and why the sector is at a pivotal inflection point. Chris argues that most RWA projects today are functionally "worse on-chain" because they lack liquidity, composability, and the "crypto-native" user experience that made stablecoins successful. He details how Plume is solving this through a custom L1 stack and the Nest vault protocol, which tokenizes high-yield assets like Brazilian credit card receivables and oil production for a global market.They explore the friction between traditional finance and DeFi, highlighting why private credit's long duration makes it unsuitable for the "looping" and leverage that drives crypto demand. Chris explains the significance of Plume’s SEC Transfer Agent license and its role in bridging the gap between regulated funds and permissionless rails. Finally, the conversation tackles the "bleak" vs. "optimistic" future of crypto, asking whether the industry will maintain its core principles of self-custody and decentralization as it searches for a "new daddy" in institutional capital.Topics00:00 Intro & Context04:15 The Job of a Founder: Finding Change09:30 Crypto Natives vs. TradFi Suites15:00 Stablecoins: The Only RWA That Matters (Today)21:45 The Bottleneck: It’s Not Tokenization, It’s Demand27:10 Why Build an L1 for Assets?35:20 SEC Transfer Agent License Explained42:15 Nest Alpha: Blending Oil, Credit, and T-Bills49:00 Is Leverage Sustainable for Institutions?55:30 The Exodus: Will Crypto Values Survive?LinksChris Yin on X: https://x.com/chriseyinPlume Network: https://www.plumenetwork.com/Nest: https://nest.plumenetwork.com/NEAR: https://near.ai/Sponsors:NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

coming off of like FTX 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 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 happened 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. Everyone was trying to take the blockchain, quote unquote, and like bring it to try to try to fly. 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? What we really should do is actually bring the real world to crypto.

That's one of the main things we're focused on in, is making sure that we build the pipelines and the rails that bring them in in a manner and in a way that benefits us versus just replicating the same shit we have off-chain 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 Kucho, and I'm here with Christian, who's CEO at Plum.

They're in asset management platform, focus in the R2A space, is an L1 that allows 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 overinflated the institutionalization of crypto and a whole lot of other things? But first, here's a word from our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. Rapidly, it gained over 200,000 get up stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing.

Why? Because OpenClaw makes it easy to create an... an AI agent that actually does stuff, like manager 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. Near AI cloud solves this problem by running open claw inside trusted execution environments. These are hardware-level secure-onplays,

where your agent operates in encrypted memory that even Near AI can't inspect. It's not a promise that they won't look. It's cryptographic guarantees that they can't. With OpenClaw on Near AI Cloud, you get cloud convenience without data exposure. There's no hardware to manage and no trust assumptions required. You can learn more at neer.a.i. Chris, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming on the show.

I'd love to chat a little bit of your background because you were a founder, and then we're in VC and went back to being a founder. That trajectory feels like a little bit unnatural, but I do like it. What was the impetus for going back in the founder's seat after having worked in VT? Yeah, totally, totally. Thanks for having me and looking forward to getting into it all.

So, yeah, look, like you said, you know, my background's very simple. You know, I came out of school and I was mostly just kind of bouncing around and doing technology stuff, which sort of manifested in doing like a, you know, basically doing software startups. And, you know, it's mostly doing kind of financial stuff, meaning, you know, we were doing like invoicing and, you know, like very exciting, you know, enterprise software. But it was kind of right time my place, right? And then from there, I went to venture after, right? So we were managed to, you know, sell the company, been taking it in public and it was the whole thing and learned a lot about about that.

But then we went to venture. And that's kind of like what you're supposed to do, I guess, right? You sort of like, you know, do the startup thing. You get tired and you like, hey, look like, let me let me go do and do the venture thing and, 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, like, know a lot of things and, you know, and, like, you get to meet a bunch of people, what do they think are all true to some degree. Um, but the truth is, like, look, I had been an angel investor. That's how I got into great founders. I'm not bold enough to think I'm actually, like, that's smart of things. And so I was mostly just, like, you know, writing early days 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. Like maybe I should go like learn how to do this properly, right? And turns out it's, you know, you're selling money. And it's the same thing no matter where you go, you know?

And so like that was my lesson from it all. But like the venture side of things, 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 had this like philosophical veneer around those things. But the truth of it is that like at the end of that 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? And then someone else is, right? Like my money was always less green than Sequoias. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, sort of, my think at the time was, you know, sort of, my think at the time was, you know, it is, um, it's sort of two kinds of people in venture, right? There's people that sort of chase me, when they get chased, right? Um, and, uh, and, uh, you know, I, 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 was, it's not quite the same thing. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's there's certain people I 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 ability, right? And that's how you sort of like you to flip the script and, you know, progress back down that path. And so that was really why.

I was like, like, look, let's, like come back. And, you know, one is like, you know, I felt like I had sort of like the juice and energy to run it again and to run it back in so many words. And there's plenty time, but, like, you know, write checks and just sit around and do nothing. And so let's, you know, roll the dice again. So that's where I came about to. No, that's interesting. I mean, I also was a founder and then started a VC fund. And I think there was also when I started the fund some aspect of this veneer and this kind of high status, very intellectual sort of job. But like, you know, we have fairly small fund. And I found that although it was really great, it is really great and really interesting to talk to founders, 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. And 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, tend to possibly invest in your fund. And the other thing that most people don't realize is like running a fund is a lot of compliance. And, and I find that, I know, 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 fuck out of. And, um, for sure. But, but, but for the moment, it's like, not that well automated and, and, um, and doing that like is just us, you know, soul sucking work. So, um, like you said, running running a fund and actually investing are two very different things. I mean, actually running a fund like 90% of the dollars 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, but, but, like, they feed into each other. So you have like try to invest to help you run. to like fundraise, but you're always doing that instead of investing. So it just ends up being a shit show. So yeah, I get it. Yeah. No, that's, that's, I mean, that resonates, that certainly resonates with me. And as I'm thinking now, you know, now the fund's been deployed and, you know, thinking about what to do next.

Building something is definitely, definitely feels more appealing than like starting another fund. And so at what point did you get interested in this idea of putting real world assets and I'm going to want to deconstruct that term with you later, but putting real world assets on chain. Terrible acronym. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I mean, like, it's just assets. Like, there's our sets and there's rails, you know, like, you know, we, we didn't reinvent commerce by putting on the internet. It's the same products. It's just different rails. And I sort of see real world assets in the same light where we're just putting assets on a different, you know, different infrastructure. It's a buzzword. But yeah, how did you get interested in putting, uh, treas? and private credit on chain and what was the Genesis story for Plum.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was pretty simple. I mean, we had a, 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. And it was, I remember I was sort of like, it was still nudge at the top, and I sort of thing of myself. There's two ways, there's two sort of ways this goes. Number one, it was all scam and it's all going to zero, right? And like, we should just like, and it was fun while it lasted, you know, 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 happened to the market because usually big events lead to change. And like, that's the job of the founders to find change. Right. And ideally the change is big and positive and that you capture the right way. But it was very clear to me like some change is happening. Whether it was changed to the downside of the upside is unclear.

But at that point, it's like, you know, it's sort of like the conditions are right to do something. And I had sort of been in around, like I looked at a bunch of things. in crypto at the time. I thought about, we thought about doing like BTC stuff and BFI stuff and blah, blah, blah, right? And BTC at the time was just like, you know, grand new world, right? Of all the things we could do with BTC and like run back, the sort of defy playbook on Bitcoin.

But, you know, Teddy, my co-friend 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 it had expressed itself, number one. And the number two is, you know, we'd always sort of seem that like, look, you know, I live like most of my life's on chain.

And like, you know, we were like very, like, crypto-native people. And, you know, it just felt very limiting. There was only so much you could do. It's awesome. Everything that we could do. But 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, the market was changing where those two things were coming together, right? I had angel missed into a bunch of like RWA companies at a time ahead of time. And, you know, they all, I think, most of them all, I think, most of zero, because 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 growing crypto, right? And Teddy was at B&B at the time, sort of like doing a bunch of VD work.

He was a BNB 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 all we're doing here is like hyper gambling on shitters, it's not a bad thing. But it seems like an underutilization of what it should be. And what we could do with it. 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

always told everyone told who were like very stupid at the time to do to think about this was everyone everyone that's super dismissive rwis at the time right they're sort of like this is not a real thing you know nobody who cares uh you know blah blah right um we can't tell you every every i've been everyone out there nobody cared right except uh 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 trapped focused right They were very like, you know, you got to be, you know, Goldman Bankers, 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-word assets. And crypto, these are like you said, to me, they're all the same thing. They're just assets. I just want to swap between these things. I don't see a distinction with these two worlds. Meaning I used to always say, when the world's up, right, I want to be full portfart coin. Right? Like that's just the reality of things.

And when things go down, I probably rotate to T-bills, right? But it's the same, it's the same type of thing, right? They're both, 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, I should have both exist in the same dimension, right? 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 Tradify and bring it to the real world, right?

Let's like, let's do this like J.P. Morgan chain, right? Or let's do like a Goldman Sachs chain or whatever. And I remember thinking like, this is terrible. You know, why would we do that? And what we really should do is actually bring the real world to crypto, which is that, you know, and it felt like to me there was real demand for that, for real demand for it. It just wasn't expressed very well because all the people doing hard was the time where I tried people who didn't understand crypto. So they would come to this thing with like heavy K-Y-seeing stuff for mission chains, you know, there's no interoperability. You can't use it, right?

But you could see that like the appetite for real-word assets was already there and express itself in different ways. We always looked at the stable coin, right, as the inspiration for Plum, which is like the stable coin is, it's not a real-word asset. It's just crypto, right? Even though it is the original real world asset and the only one that actually matters today, right? And it's because the stable coin, it just disappears into the fabric of crypto. You don't need to think about the fact there's anything over the hood, right? Or tether, for years, we had no idea there was anything under the hood. It 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 port tether, right? And so this idea, everyone always says, well, we just really want to know. 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 crypto natives, right?

And starting with that and building on top of that. And so that was kind of the focus for us, which is like, you know, to really focus and bring this like, you know, we call it Artemify, which is, you know, admittedly, it's not my favorite phrase either. But, you know, it's this idea that like, you know, you should be able to kind of move in and around between world assets and crypto.

You should really 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? 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?

And why we do things that what we are today. So looking at the RWA space today, what is the, what are the big categories of sort of like yield generating assets 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 falls within like several different categories. Is it like rare earth metals or, you know, other types of commodities?

what's the well the kind of you know landscape look like yes so I always did this question a lot and I think I always think 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 P and what is the mood at the time right and the reason I say this is because that's going to change over time is more people come to crypto and the sort of types of people come and change the adams will change right like you know in crypto today it's not like we already have we just have one user it's not just that

the, the, the, maybe like the, like, serial apeer who just like, you know, apes a bunch of memes. And that's, you know, we have a many different profiles of users. You've got the PTC holders, bear buy and hold. You've got DFI farmers. You've got like payments type people. You have privacy folks, right? You have a lot of different types of people. And so what asset is, is popular right now is 100% dependent on what is in 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 in Tradfifis coming. It's all nonsense, right? The market here right now. is 99.9% of crypto people still, right? And 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? And so where do they actually go into these things right now? The truth is, if you go around and ask people, what RTA ways they hold, it guaranteed like 90%, 95 is the room is none of these things, right? Because people don't actually use these things today. And so the market for these assets,

The biggest one is T bills right now, right? And T bills, you know, it's not even a user-front, a user-facing product, right? The T-bill right now is a foundation product, right? 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 30-50 or whatever into a set of money into a money market fund and they earn on 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'll ask you, do you hold any private credit, like on-chain? No. Exactly. Exactly, right? And I guess you don't hold Biddle, you don't hold all the USG, you don't hold any of these things, right? And it's not even hard to say.

If you just go to RVITFSI and look at this user stats for these things, it's, you know, all these are several hundred user accounts at products, right? 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 on-chain T-bill, right? now they want to do what you normally do in this world, right? Which chase more yield. And people sort of see, oh, where's their yield?

Oh, the private credit yields higher than T bills. So let's go on the private credit route, right? What people don't understand this private credit is risky, right? And it's a longer duration and it doesn't work in defy 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, like a sort of thin veneer of liquidity appears to be doing. No people are actually doing.

Right. And the reality is people are not doing any of this stuff. Right, people are not really doing anything. If you want to talk about, like, what's the real one asked we were actually using? I think the only two things that actually sort of have real usage right now is still USDE, right? And Athena, right? That to me is still like a very clear, a clear sort of like RWA that has real adoption, real usage. I think maple and syrup is another one, right?

You know, that's, our syrup UTCO, like, that's another one that, like, people actually can use them buy and hold. This is immigrant pendle, it's ludgous. And, like, it's actually backed by real things. There's a lot of other ones that sort of, like, claim to be RWAs that have nothing backing it right now that are sort of like, you know, that are promises for the future. Many of them may work, may they mind that, who knows. But that's kind of what, that's like what's really going on right now, right? So when people talk about T-Bills and private credit and all the kinds of something,

they point to these numbers, it's great. And I'm glad it's happening. I think it is happening. But like, where is there any action? What is the energy actually going? It's actually in none of those places. Hmm. And so beyond T-bills, like, you know, if you project out now that we have like this

full of institutional, push for crypto where crypto is going institution institutions want to come on chain what do you think is the part of sort of like the tradfi you know if we stick within this framework that it's just like assets on in like on rails and we're just switching out the rails which types of tradfi assets

um are best suited for sort of crypto rails or could benefit the most from crypto rails in terms of improbability, you know, sort of transfer, sort of swapping, times, access to markets, etc. Like, where is the biggest innovation coming from in the future? So there's two ways looking 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 trad rails to crypto rails, right? And the answer is like almost all of them, right? Like a lot of these assets are going to be materially better on shame than not, right? I talk to

the biggest institution's going on all the time, right? And I was on with one of the biggest asset managers yesterday, and there sort of explains me what they do and how they run this thing today. And just clearly 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, because somebody just automated two seconds on share, right? And with sort of the same level of like, you know, of trust around it, right? So I think a lot of these assets are going to be great on shame.

and most of them are going to benefit. Now, the reality, though, is that just because it's better on chain doesn't mean the work on chain, right? We've run this sort of STO 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, Plum, 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 asset is going to do well in chain right now? You know, you have to look at like what is the comp set on chain, right? What are people doing right now on chain? And like what is going to be better than that, right?

On chain today, right? You can guess sort of like 6 to 8% API, right, in a pretty safe way without a bunch of looping, just running some basic stuff. Right. And even when USDA was hot, you could get 2030. right and that's before looping and before a bunch of stuff before you pendle it up and blah blah blah right and so you could really get to you know really meaningful API is 30 40 50s right now were they real what they stable and all like that says it's a different question right but that's sort of the comparison set and so then you compare to that the question what trad assets actually

compete with that right and the question and the answer is not very many right um where you mean is that though because is is that though because it's harder to like to do composability 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 TradFai, you've got to, like, you go to your broker, get the asset, and then, you know, borrow against it.

It's a lot of pushing paper, probably, rather than just pushing contract code. Yes and no. That is part of the problem. It's actually not the real bottleneck. The real bottleneck is the assets in Tradfite are not suitable for looping and not suitable for compositively. So just 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. Composability, it means a lot of things, but really at this point in the market, composability means looping, right? That's like what everyone does at defy at this point, right? 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 R2LUP 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 so the borrow money, 8% to buy something that yields 5% doesn't make sense. It doesn't work, right? Eight is more than 5. Very simple. And so that's one thing, right? The second piece around looping is you need rapid pricing updates because you're always trying to figure, are you in the money, are 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 of these assets are like, we work with a bunch that are custom-made. So I have assets on plume that are down to seven-day duration, right? Very short. But your average private credit asset is three months at the minimum, right? 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? And so that's the thing around these assets. It's like the reason why there's like a lack of like, you know, real adoption is not the fact that it's inefficient from a, from like a processing standpoint. It's the fact that the asset at a fundamental level does not fit into the use case that the market today wants on chain. That makes sense. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense.

I mean, I, yeah, I think, you know, if you have an asset, I hadn't considered that reason, you have an asset where time to liquidity is super long, right? Like price credit debt, that's very hard to loop. It's not possible. It's not possible. Yeah, you can't. I mean, you can, but you're like your risk, you'd have to be like very over-collarious. you'd have to be like very over collateralized right to make sure that you don't get liquidated.

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 seven day redemption. How do you make that possible? Like, how do you pay credit card receivable financing and get that time to redemption down to seven days? Totally. Yeah. I mean, and this is why I think less about assets and more about the like the the API and like what the dimensions of the asset are, right? You have to do a composite fault. That's what Nest Alpha is.

So, right? So Nest today is one of our vault 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 come to RWAs have heavy things like minimum time, minimum like deposit amounts, right? Like there's a bunch of funds out there, T bill funds, five million dollar minimums.

So that's inaccessible to 99% of people right there. right um you have to be kyc t ybbbu right and like you know your redemption is you know even for tibyl 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 and take your stables deposit into these vaults and immediately get uh art of be yield um and from there the way we do that um and and we make those receipt tokens composable and loop 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?

And so that's why we can get higher liquidity, right? Because you have a bunch of short duration assets in there, right? But also you have a bunch of longer duration to 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 where it is today.

So Nest Alpha today is a collection of many things. We have credit card receivables, right? We have oil in there, right? So we have a fund that does oil, right? The great thing about oils is very simple, right? You dig a hole in the ground and money comes out, right? And it's as simple as that, right? And so being able to use that in common ratio credit card receivals, having some teables,

we have some yield-bearing ETFs in there, right? They're also super liquid. And so balancing all these things out, you get a nice blended APY that's above the hurdle rate, right, of 8%. 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 with with with with with Nests off to pay. Hmm.

Um, so I think what like one of the things that we're touching at here is that like, um, you know, crypto is a highly leveraged, um, it'll highly like leverage ecosystem. Like a lot of the yielding crypto comes from leverage, but also carries like a ton of risk. And, you know, in, in recent months, uh, there's been like yet another, you know, major unleveraged event in October. And 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 the query within, you know, like very large institutions that are like crypto-native institutions. Yep. It also I think has the effect of

creating a lot of bad press for the for the crypto space and sort of make People are anxious because people don't understand, right? They just think like, oh, crypto's down. Like, it must be shit, right? It's just that people were over leveraged and they got liquidated. So, you know, I think there's a couple of things here that I want to touch on. But like, one is, you know, is that sustainable?

Is it sustainable for crypto? If it wants to become, you know, sort of like an institutional, a place where institutions can come, can, you know, can crypto-native institutions continue to operate with this like high leverage mindset of generating more yield with more and more risk and attract those institutions. And the other thing, maybe we can talk about this sort of in the second part is, does the curator model work long term? Because I think the curators in the last six months have suffered huge reputational damage for having had assets in their portfolios and in their strategies that were not high-quality assets.

And there's a lot of transparency issues there that I think have not been properly sort of addressed. Correct. You know, hopefully will it get addressed over time? But yeah, just your thoughts on like over leveraging and like are we putting too much trust in curators and, you know, do they deserve our trust? Better 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. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, a lot of talk about curators because I do think that it's like it's insane. some of the stuff's going on there. But, you know, going into, maybe starting off the first point, um, leverage. 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 does it basically, you know, by engaging in too much business to scare away some of the new stuff coming in that could be beneficial to us all, right? The institutional stuff.

In so many words, kind of yes and no, right? And I don't mean to give sort of like in between answer in the sense that in the, you can't stop people from doing what they want to do, right? At the end of the day, right? And so 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.

And it's a thing. Right. And to be honest, it's great when it's done correctly. Right. And that's the nature of an open market that shit's nuts, you know. And like sometimes it's good and it's bad. But things move, the ball continues to move forward. Right.

and that's just the sort of nature of innovation change. So I'm like positive about all that. I think leverage is generally a good thing. It just like it can manifest in strange ways sometimes it do hurt us here and there. Right. So there's that. I think the second question is that like good and bad evidence to just scare them away? It certainly does to some degree, right?

Like 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 looking at net negative, you know? Like, it definitely scared people off and, like, even reputational small things. Like, it just, there's, there's still a bad taste to people's mouth on FDX, right? Today, even though it's almost nothing to do than we're talking about anymore.

But the, it doesn't really affect us. I don't think it does at all 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 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. crypto names, it has nothing to do with us, is the real answer, right? That's one of the main things

we are focused on a 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 way that benefits us, right, versus just replicating the same shit we have off chain today on chain, right? Which is exactly what's happening right 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? To very literally do the exact same thing before, right, and bring it here. What's the point, right? And permission to say, privates thing up. Like, it's the same thing.

And all the benefits of the officially accrue 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 this stuff's happening in crypto land, right? They just don't even see them, care. It doesn't matter, right? They're coming and doing anything regardless. The only thing they see around cryptos is stable coin.

That's like, that's like the main thing they think about. Everything else that we deal with is irrelevant. for the most part. And so they don't, in actuality, I don't think it has any negative effect towards us. I think the bigger negative effect is,

can we get our shit together in some many words, right? As an industry to make sure that we have, we maintain ball control, right, as we move forward, right? I do think decentralization, permissionless, open, composability are all important principles

of being in crypto. And like I think we were talking about earlier, you can see those things beginning to, beginning to fade a little bit, right, and beginning to take a back seat to some of the things that we were deriding before, centralization, right, and intermediaries and all these things, right? And it's because everyone's down bad and we're in search of a new father, a 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 into the henhouse, I guess, 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? And more importantly, it would just be a massively missed opportunity to go down this way and just blow it basically. We have an opportunity to change the entire financial 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 we have a chance to do it now. And if we just literally do the same thing as last time, we're going to have blown it, right? And so that to me is like the comment there. So I guess, you know, as it relates to maybe the curator side of things, I think the curator stuff like overall I think I'm still very positive on curators

and I think the curated 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 you know unfortunately like the nature of it being an open world is you're going to have some curators that are just terrible right I know some that are great and over time the best ones will survive

and do their thing and they'll deserve our trust the other ones won't but you know as much as you want to blame the curators And as much as I've led me cures 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 it's, it came right back to them, you know? And so while you're the drug pusher, man, you're kidding. Exactly. You know, like, you know, you want the yield. You want that good yield. Here it is. Here 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. And so, you know, I think it'll all get sort of, look, in the real world, we have curators. They're called financial advisors and asset managers, you know, 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. And I do think the AI, I think it's very, we're working on a bunch of stuff out of there too, right? Where you can just have a machine, right, be your curator, quote, unquote, right?

and be your ass manager. I think there's a lot to that as well. So, you know, I think we're pretty far off today, you know, from that in reality. But I think it's like almost certainly going to happen very soon. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think like, yeah, I think you're right that, you know, people are going to do what they want to do. I guess what did 1010 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 self-regulation and standards that build over time.

And we always like learn from mistakes and then, you know. And then repeat them. Most, there 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, sort of integrated now and are upping the bar. are, you know, raising the standards for how they, you know, how they, how they do their work. You know, the honest answer. Or is it just nothing's changed?

The honest answer, I will tell you this, 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? And, you know, I think you'd be surprised. I mean, we talk to everybody out there. We know them 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 doing very dangerous things with them, you know. And, and that's a thing today. And, like, we've gone and explained to them and they come back on, wow, you're right? Like, how do we get out of this?

Or what we do? I don't know. I told you not to talk to it. And so, like, and that was before all the 10-10 stuff. I mean, I tweeted about this months ago, like, before I was life, it's like, look, the primary thing right now is everyone is talking things a stable point when it's not, right? And people are creating these, like, levered vaults that they,

they are claiming risk-free with a not, you know? And just by packaging everything into a state, point, people begin to think that, oh, you can't do any of these things that's stable and save, and it's not. And it's fine. It's not. You just can't sell it as a stable asset. You can't sell it as a risk-free thing, you know. And so that has happened now, it's cooled off a little bit, mostly because the quitter is just dried up and the ecosystem sucks and everyone's mad right now and everything just is awful, right? So it's more 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 a reflection of learning.

It's a reflection of everyone's like down bad. There's nothing to do so we're not doing anything. So we'll see when the market comes back, does it change or not? Yeah. Let's talk about like Plum a little bit. And why did you build an L1 to do RWAs when there's like lots of perfectly good L1s out there? What was the the thesis around building essentially like an app chain to do RWA's? Yeah, yeah.

So we're quickly, but also from a product perspective. Totally, totally. And it's been evolving thing, and I don't think we did the best job of explaining it. Like, we had never set out to build a chain. You'll start with that, right? The job was always to grow crypto, and that's what we wanted to do. 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 send them anywhere. I don't care, right? You do on the base, it's sole, eth, may, that 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 things easy to use. because we've gone through the tokenization browser cells 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% 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, 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 and no one to use it, there's nothing to do with it. Right? And so, you know, as we began pulling that third, you realize there's two things. You had to not only figure out how to tokenize the asset, you had to deliver it in a mechanism

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 off chain. Because the truth is, almost every asset that you tokenize today becomes worse on chain than off chain. right um and it's not because the rails are different it's because you're now like you know 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 on chain now you're taking counterparty risk you're taking smart contract risk right you're having multiple middle men to kind of figure what's going on you're taking you're also almost certainly um getting less yield because there's fees they're going to all these people in the middle right so it's just functionally worse in almost every day dimension when you bring this asset on chain if it does nothing like it does in the off chain 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 tokenization engine to then okay god we have to like it has to we have to demand the other side so how to do that let's build this community right and that's what we have the plume doons today we have the sort of like rabid group of folks that are that are at the plume and then at the end it's like well now you're Like, well, now you have to build a bunch of applications that want to actually take these things and do it, use it with it. We have to build liquidity pools against you 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 it said, okay, everyone here we have to bring together. We could do it all another chain. We have to solve a bunch of the same problems, right? AML to sequence level, doing privacy stuff, you know, having even like, you know, focused integrations. It turns out, like, you know, taking classic defy applications and like making them RW ready is not really a thing. You know, we, our vault product nest, right? We've used every off-the-shelf thing you can find, right? And we've used all the sort of like, just, you know,

classic VEVAC products to do these things. 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, And it's like people say, well, you know, most chains are just optimized to like growing their own chain, right? 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 started Bloom was to grow crypto. And we thought that bringing real-wood assets and new use cases and tying the reward together would be how we broke crypto and be a net positive for everybody. If we can grow RTAGOs, we all would, right, versus just growing clume, right? And so for us, it was like meant to be a place as born in a necessity to bootstrap this ecosystem, and bootstrap this use case in truth. And that's why we were the first ones to do all those. stuff, you know. That's what we have, you know, we had, you know, one of the largest holder

bases in crypto, you know, more than the next ten chains combined, you know, and hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, it's why we have these things, because we had to build all the stuff together. Now, 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 took Nest and we put it on, we put it on to slaughter recently, right? And like, you know, people sort of like don't understand about what that is. But, you know, again, our. whole focus is to grow RWA's 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, this plume, which is the RWA issuance platform. And then Nest is a vault protocol, or like a vault product that allows users to kind of generate yield on, on some of the, I guess, perhaps like flagship assets that you guys have. have on Plum. Is that like a right way to look at it? I would say this plume is a chain, like just straight up a chain. You know, we have an Asher product on top. That's basically the other half of NEST, right?

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 from the SEC, right, that we were granted in the fall. We have, 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 Ness on the other side is the end user facing side of things. And it's this sort of distribution part. And that lives on, it's one of the applications on our chain.

We have, you know, dozens and dozens of outclos of our chain. And that's one of them. But we highlight that just because it ends up being the sort of central point that a lot of the activities stemmed from. So what, how significant is this transfer agent license that you receive from the SEC? Can you explain what that is? Yeah, totally, total. Yeah. So it's one piece of a bigger story for us, right?

Meaning we have many of the things with broker-deal license and ATS. license, you know, all these things as well. The transfer agent basically, it is a simple license from the SEC that allows you to update the cap table. Right. And so, you know, 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 a $10 million slug with this asset, right? And here's a list of people that own it, right? And like how much they own, basically, right? And the transfer agent allows us to update that list, right? That file, sits in a desk somewhere, right, or sits, it sits in a file box somewhere like in DC or whatever,

right? And that allows us to go then 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? And update things. This way you can actually have a closer tie in ownership of the asset on chain, right? And it allows us to have the asset issue also get more comfortable because they need to, they need this information, right, in order to actually feel confidential with these assets. And so it's both sides. It allows movement, but also opens the funnel for more to come in. Okay.

No, that makes sense. Yeah, so I'm actually like pretty curious about these nest faults. 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 faults here as I'm recording this today are around 12% and then there's of course like some boost.

But, you know, redemption period up to seven days. you know why like I guess like where are these yields coming from primarily? Totally totally. It's a bucket. What's the kind of like risk profile for some of these vaults is like principal capital at risk? Is it just smart contract risk? Like yeah. Yep, yep, for sure.

There's no such thing as risk for yield, right? So that's probably the starting point. But like the like Nest today, right, is it's classic vaults, right? That's like the way they were. There's a lot of stuff under the hood that. customized for R2Os, but basically, like, for the user, it's false, which means you come and you put stable coins, you get a receipt token against it, and then it's a value-accruing receipt token, right? So we call them N tokens. And so if you were to take $10,000, right,

and put it into N-alpha, or, excuse, our N-A-Fa-Vault, you get an N-AFL token. That N-LFA token is an LP token, you can go around and do it with, and primarily, like, loop on Morphal or whatever, or swap in and out on our decks or whatever, right? And so that, that's what NEST is today, right? Now, what is underlying NEST? is, right, like I said, the other half of this is the asset issuance platform, right? Which means there's a, there's a bunch of new UI stuff and a bunch of new like evolves that are not exposed to the public that we're also going to expose because we have a permission side of this too.

So for example, we have the, you know, Acred X. So Apollo's Acred private credit fund, right? That everyone talks about. Well, the largest deployment of that on any in any chain is on Plum today, right? And it's there. It's just not showing up right now because it's a permission thing. It's done in a more classic KYB way and you have the assets sitting there and it's a whole thing, right? So there's a lot of that.

But what is 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? And it's sitting there. And 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. And so when you go into a Nest Alpa vault as a simple example, right? What we have is a set of curators that assemble these vaults today, right?

That the basis say for Nest Alpha, it's a collection of these things and 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? You know, we have NBASIS today, right? 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 USCC, right? Basis trade stuff, right? And that's like almost a single asset vault, right? We all, I think with Enopal, right?

An Opal is our Brazilian credit card receivables, right? That's just one asset. It's just Brazilian credit card receivables. And then we have these collective vaults like An 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 some of the biggest aspirations in the world. We have things like Apollo on there.

We have wisdom tree. We have, you know, some of the Janice Henderson funds. We've got, you know, Hamilton and Scope that's coming in there as well, right? We have, you know, there's also, you get some of these things are exposed to acre and stuff. And there we have Taekong, which is one of the big insurance companies in China. We have CNBI, China Merchant National Bank in there. Right.

And so that's what this is. Right now, for most people today, we deal a lot with, like, more institutional folks as well. 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 encrypted today. And I 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. 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 custom built, right, for individual users. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. And so you, you know, I'm looking at, for instance, like the, you know, NEST Alpha Vault, you know, we have, like, credit card receivables. And here you can click and you can go and see, like, the data, the data room for that, for that vault. So there's some curator, right, like some asset manager that is managing that position,

and delivering the yield. That's right. And so the vaults were sort of like essentially sort of allocations in different in different weights of these. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And just the function, like, you know, it sounds easier because the vaults actually sound like a very simple thing. And that's what I thought were to be honest. And it turns out there's a lot under the hood of the vault, which is you have to like, you know, especially for RWAs in which these things are not fully liquid, right?

These things are not fully, you know, a lot of these things are just Monday through Friday. You can't do it in 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 that as a simple example, and maybe like four or five assets in there, it's then breaking up your, your, your, your, your USC or whatever into multiple, into multiple tranches and sending it to like 10 different places, right?

And then keeping track that position and balancing and managing it and bringing the yield back at the right time. And so when you withdraw, it's the exact same thing. You have to go paying five people, withdraw, and then collect it, bring it back an offering. and put it into all the thing. 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 crypto native vaults don't have to do because all the smart contracts, you just do it instantly, right? But for us to do it 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 the thing. But that's what it is today.

Yeah. Okay. That's cool. And I want to take a step back here a little bit and come back to the institutional conversation. We were having a little bit of here. And, 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 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 TradFi to get in crypto. And that was the whole kind of partly the whole point. But it does feel to me and a lot of people I talk to that have been in the space for a while that folks that have been in crypto and have been on the more like the DGen side have.

are not so excited about what's happening, right? There's, like, innovation is kind of drying up. You know, we tried defy. We tried, like, NFTs and like meme coins. 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 consensus mechanism and governance mechanisms and Dow is not kind of kind of. Right. Like all this 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, Hasim talks about this recently.

It was on some podcast. It was like, yeah, you just have to stay in the space long enough. And like a lot of the people that were in the beginning are going to leave and you're going to be sort of like in a good position. And I agree. I think that's kind of happening. And so I guess the question is, like, where do you think the space goes from here when decentralization, decentralized governance, you know, the consensus mechanisms, all these things cease to be that important? Right.

Where self-custody ceases to be that important, right? Where you buy some asset, it's using some crypto rail, it's in your Revolut account, but you never hold your own keys. 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 over rails?

Yep, totally. I think it's a pivotal moment in that it could go one way or the other. And one way, to me, is more bleak and more a little bit more depressing. And the other one is like temporary pain and we'll make it to type. situation, right? And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, like, what people were here for was very simple. They're sort of a split between the original people came into crypto who were really focused on decentralization and this new, this new architecture and all these types of things, right? They even 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 pejoratively. Like, 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 possible to pretend it's not like a huge part of crypto culture as well. And so both those things I think are real. Now, where does that take us now? 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 the stuff and you have self-custody and privacy and self-sovereignty and all these things, right? And trustlessness. Like it's kind of not really led us anywhere. so far, right, from an adoption standpoint. And number two is the other side of things, which is the hyper gambling and the yield in the end 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 a bunch of the stuff, right? So both those things have gone the wrong way, right?

Now, if we go back to it, right, crypto, 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 always talking with the onboarding stunt. It's like actually hard for people to understand why it's valuable until much later. Once you're deep in it, it's actually awesome. You told again, right? Like, you know, have, be able to hold your own stables, right? Have all your money to move around to do whatever you want. And it's like, it's like incredibly useful, right? And it's impossible to go, it's impossible to go, backwards once you really see that, right? But the problem is that take, you have to get a step two

for that to, 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 things before, right? It feels like, you know, it's Vintechy. 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 all the things that matter, which self-sovereignty, right, being able to take you know, be having self-custody and all those things will apply, but instead of just to a very nose to everything. And then that will massively change everything again, right? And so, so that to me is like the upside case here and where it gets really exciting and where I think it's a little bit of like a temporary, a moment in time where it just feels bad. But if we set this thing correctly, this massive event of bringing all these, like, you know, people have been scared of regulation, but like, you know, we're deep in it as an example. We spend a lot of time in

Hong Kong, a lot of time in UAE, a lot of time in D.C. to talk to regulators, right, and get our licensing and work with them. And the reason is because unlocking and massing 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 you have the opportunity to now, you know, treat these assets and as your own and still have, hold the keys into it. Like, that way it's still possible to do all. that, you know, and it has been co-opted by someone else. And so that to me is a

where we're at, it is a pivotal moment. It's like, it's a, it's a, it's a pivotal moment at which you can go the wrong way. And I think we're, I think we're still tracking, tracking, but it's like, you know, it's pretty, it's up in the air, honestly, right? And you have two sides of video, like, you know, maybe like take the, you know, the new channel, maybe take ZRO, right, or zero, right? That sort of like, very, you know, in my opinion, they're talking about privacy, talking about a socialization and talking about, you know, open information lists, which I think are all the right, and then look at something in the more lines of like, I don't know, take Canton as an example,

right. And like, you know, I think both are doing great things for 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, one esos that's like very, that's literally the middleman, right? I'm trying to do the thing, right? And, and, and the assets don't live on chain, 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. 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. Chris, thank you so much for joining me on Epit Center today. It's been great chatting, learning about Plum, and yeah, excited to see where things go next with regards to RWAs. I mean, I think, you know, there is sort of an inflection point right now in a space, and whether or not enough people with sort of crypto values and principles and ethos stick around, I think, is an open question, but it's definitely open they do. Yes, definitely, definitely. I mean, I think to go back to it, right?

I mean, 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 it clearly is change happening right now in crypto and finance 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 evolved. And, you know, there are a few moments where things actually get shaped. And this is one of them. So, you know, glad 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. Cool. Thanks, man.