In this episode of the WuBlockchain Podcast, we speak with Chris Yin, co-founder and CEO of Plume, about the real-world asset (RWA) market, the sources of onchain yield, liquidity risks, regulatory challenges, and growing competition from traditional financial institutions.
Chris argues that stablecoins are among the most successful examples of RWAs because they make dollar-denominated assets accessible to users worldwide. For the broader RWA market, the biggest challenge is no longer simply tokenizing assets, but distributing them to users and building sustainable liquidity.
He also discusses RWA products offering 12%–15% annualized yields, emphasizing that higher returns come with risks beyond smart contracts, including underlying credit exposure, custody, asset maturity, and redemption restrictions.
Looking ahead, Chris expects banks, asset managers, and crypto exchanges to become increasingly active in RWAs. As tokenization becomes more accessible, distribution and product design will become key competitive advantages. Over the next two to three years, he sees opportunities for RWAs to evolve beyond tokenized traditional assets into onchain derivatives, structured products, and portfolios combining crypto and traditional financial assets.
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What Is Plume Building, and Why Focus on RWAs?
Alison: Can you introduce Plume and explain why you decided to focus on real-world assets?
Chris: Plume is building an Open Finance ecosystem that brings real-world assets onchain and distributes them to users globally. We currently have more than $250 million in assets across our vault products and have established partnerships with platforms including Bybit, Binance Wallet, and ether.fi.
Before founding Plume, I worked in venture capital, while my co-founder Teddy was involved in RWA development at BNB Chain. We noticed a recurring problem: tokenizing assets wasn’t particularly difficult, but building liquidity, use cases, and a sustainable user base around those assets was much harder.
Stablecoins have already demonstrated that the RWA model can work at scale. We want to apply similar distribution principles to a broader range of financial assets.
Our team combines traditional finance and crypto expertise, with backgrounds at JPMorgan, Citi, Coinbase, BNB Chain, and other institutions. That helps us bridge the gap between asset issuers and onchain users.
Why Are Stablecoins the Most Successful RWA Use Case?
Alison: If investors can already buy stocks and Treasuries through traditional brokerages, why do they need RWAs onchain?
Chris: For someone in the United States, buying stocks or U.S. Treasuries is relatively straightforward. But that isn’t true for investors everywhere.
Take SK Hynix, for example. It’s a major Korean semiconductor company with global investor interest, yet buying its shares isn’t equally easy in every jurisdiction. The same applies to U.S. Treasuries, which can be difficult for ordinary investors in certain countries to access.
That’s exactly why stablecoins have been successful. They make it easier for people around the world to hold and transfer dollar-denominated value.
RWAs follow the same logic. The first priority is expanding access to assets that people otherwise couldn’t easily obtain.
There’s a lot of discussion about composability, lending, and DeFi integrations, but those benefits only matter once people actually hold the underlying assets. Tokenization alone doesn’t create demand.
Distribution, Not Tokenization, Is the Biggest Bottleneck
Alison: Why do so many tokenized assets struggle to attract users?
Chris: Because you can’t simply take a traditional financial product, put it onchain, and expect crypto users to buy it. You need to understand the target audience and design the product accordingly.
For example, a tokenized Treasury product might offer a 3%–4% annualized yield. That may be reasonable for traditional investors, but it’s not necessarily compelling for crypto users accustomed to higher yields. If the product also requires extensive documentation, complicated onboarding, and a six-month lockup, adoption becomes even harder.
Crypto users aren’t a single homogeneous group. Meme coin traders, yield farmers, market makers, and institutional funds have very different expectations around returns, liquidity, and risk.
There’s no realistic asset that simultaneously offers 20% APY, instant liquidity, permissionless access, and minimal risk. But onchain infrastructure allows us to structure products differently through tranching, liquidity pools, and DeFi integrations.
One example is Plume’s Opal product, which provides exposure to Brazilian credit card receivables. Its relatively high yields and shorter maturities make it attractive to certain onchain investors.
Our job isn’t just to help issuers tokenize assets. It’s to turn those assets into products that crypto users actually want, then distribute them through exchanges, wallets, and DeFi protocols.
Issuers also want stable, long-term capital rather than $100 million flowing into a product one month and disappearing the next.
Where Do 12%–15% RWA Yields Come From?
Alison: Some RWA products offer annualized yields of 12%–15%, significantly higher than U.S. Treasuries. Where do those returns come from, and what risks are investors taking?
Chris: It depends entirely on the underlying asset.
Credit card receivables generate returns from consumer lending. Private credit yields come from interest paid by borrowers. Reinsurance products may generate returns from insurance premiums. We also work with institutions such as Figure on products involving home equity lines of credit, or HELOCs.
Each asset has a different risk profile.
Crypto investors are familiar with smart contract and protocol risks, but RWAs introduce additional considerations: credit risk, issuer risk, custody arrangements, asset maturity, and redemption restrictions.
We’ve seen investor preferences shift over time. Initially, some crypto users dismissed Treasuries because the yields were too low. Then institutions became more comfortable holding lower-risk, yield-bearing assets. More recently, investors started pursuing higher-yielding private credit without always understanding the liquidity constraints.
Some private credit products offer 9%–10% yields but require investors to hold positions for at least 90 days, with additional limits on redemptions.
You can’t evaluate these products based on APY alone. Investors need to understand where the yield comes from, when the underlying assets mature, and what could cause losses.
A major part of our work is helping exchanges, asset managers, and end users understand those trade-offs.
What Happens When RWA Investors Want to Exit?
Alison: If markets turn bearish and investors rush to redeem, where does RWA liquidity come from?
Chris: It depends on the underlying assets. U.S. Treasuries are relatively liquid, while private credit generally isn’t.
Putting an asset onchain doesn’t automatically change its liquidity characteristics.
The industry is experimenting with secondary markets, including liquidity pools and arrangements where specialized credit investors purchase positions at a discount from holders who want to exit early.
But I think the market significantly overestimates how mature RWA secondary liquidity is today. Even tokenized Treasuries don’t yet have particularly deep secondary markets.
We also shouldn’t assume every financial product needs instant redemption. Many successful traditional financial products have redemption windows and settlement periods.
What’s important is creating reasonable exit mechanisms that connect investors seeking liquidity with buyers willing to hold assets to maturity.
I expect secondary liquidity to develop first around standardized assets such as U.S. Treasuries, before expanding into more complex instruments like collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and private credit.
For now, investors shouldn’t assume that tokenized assets can always be sold immediately at par.
How Does Plume Address Regulatory Restrictions?
Alison: RWAs promise broader global access, but many products still have geographic, investor eligibility, and transfer restrictions. How do you approach compliance?
Chris: Tokenization doesn’t eliminate regulatory requirements. Different assets have different rules governing who can hold them, how they can be traded, and when they can be transferred.
That’s why we’ve invested heavily in compliance infrastructure from the beginning.
Our team includes professionals with experience at the SEC, CFTC, FINRA, and related legal institutions. We’ve also worked on regulatory structures involving transfer agency services, Bermuda, and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM).
Our approach isn’t to circumvent regulation. It’s to integrate KYC, AML, and investor protection requirements into the infrastructure so that more assets can move onchain within appropriate legal frameworks.
Stablecoins provide a useful example. Despite regulatory complexity, they’ve developed significant global distribution.
We believe RWAs can follow a similar path through cooperation with regulators rather than short-term regulatory arbitrage.
Can Plume Compete With Banks, Asset Managers, and Exchanges?
Alison: With banks, traditional asset managers, and major crypto exchanges entering RWAs, how does Plume maintain its competitive position?
Chris: The market is still so early that collaboration is often more important than direct competition.
Bringing a traditional asset onchain involves legal structuring, regulatory approvals, custody, product design, operations, and liquidity. Building that infrastructure takes time.
Traditional financial institutions have assets and established client relationships, but they don’t necessarily understand crypto-native users. Many are focused on tokenizing existing products without fully considering how those products will be used in DeFi.
Plume’s advantage is that we understand both sides of the market. We work with asset issuers while reaching users through exchanges, wallets, and DeFi protocols.
More importantly, the amount of financial value currently represented onchain remains tiny compared with global capital markets.
The bigger opportunity isn’t taking market share from another RWA project. It’s bringing more traditional assets and capital onchain.
If other platforms help expand the overall market, that benefits us as well.
The Next Two to Three Years: From Tokenization to Onchain Finance
Alison: What are the biggest RWA trends you’re watching over the next two to three years?
Chris: First, we’ll see more traditional assets move onchain, including equities, fixed-income products, and other financial instruments.
Stablecoins have already grown into a market worth approximately $300 billion, demonstrating to traditional institutions that onchain finance is becoming too significant to ignore.
The next stage is moving beyond simply wrapping existing assets into tokens.
In the future, some assets may be issued and managed natively onchain rather than being created in traditional systems first and tokenized afterward.
Once there’s enough underlying asset supply and a sufficiently large holder base, we’ll start seeing more meaningful secondary markets and financial applications.
That includes collateralized lending, derivatives, tranching, yield splitting, and maturity transformation.
Many projects are already discussing these possibilities, but without real assets and real users, it’s difficult to build sustainable markets.
Beyond Tokenized Stocks: New Onchain Financial Products
Alison: If RWAs evolve beyond tokenizing traditional assets, what new products could emerge?
Chris: One example is a new generation of investment portfolios and index products.
Today, investors might buy the S&P 500 to gain exposure to U.S. equities. But younger investors may want portfolios that combine Bitcoin, AI-related assets, GPU compute, mining assets, and technology stocks such as Nvidia and Google.
If all those assets can be traded and combined onchain, we could create entirely new index products spanning crypto, equities, and real-world assets.
That goes beyond simply tokenizing an ETF. It uses onchain composability to create financial products that are difficult to build within traditional market infrastructure.
Adding derivatives, yield splitting, and other structured strategies could unlock even more possibilities.
I think that’s where the long-term value of RWAs lies.
Eventually, users won’t need to think about whether an asset is onchain or offchain. They’ll simply see financial assets they can hold, trade, and combine.
The ultimate goal is a more unified financial market connecting users, assets, and liquidity around the world.
Plume’s Push for a U.S. Broker-Dealer License
Alison: What’s next for Plume’s regulatory infrastructure?
Chris: One of our biggest priorities is obtaining a U.S. broker-dealer license. We’ve spent years building our regulatory infrastructure, starting with our transfer agent registration and Bermuda licensing framework.
A broker-dealer license would allow us to work with a broader range of traditional financial institutions and bring more high-quality assets onchain in a compliant way.
We’ve already worked with institutions including Apollo and WisdomTree, and more recently Fidelity. Expanding our licensing capabilities would help us deepen those relationships and onboard additional issuers.
The challenge today isn’t just tokenization technology. It’s gaining access to high-quality underlying assets. By investing in regulatory infrastructure, we can connect more traditional issuers with crypto-native users and create a stronger feedback loop between asset supply and market demand.
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