Hi everyone, we are back at Salana Breakpoint here in Abu Dhabi, and I'm super excited to be joined by Teddy Prea, who's the co-founder of Plume.
Welcome to the show, Teddy.
Thank you for having me.
How's it going?
Yeah, very well, thanks.
So I'd love to talk a bit more about what you're doing at Plume, and then we can go further into kind of where you see the evolution, but tell me a bit more about.
Yeah, of course.
So at Plume we're building an open blockchain.
Focused on tokenizing real-world assets.
You know, we're really focused on three things.
One is infrastructure, 2 is distribution, and 3 is really creating this defi layer to weave everything together.
So on the infrastructure side, we've built all different types of products to bring anything on chain.
Whether it's esoteric data sets, physical assets.
But the biggest question we typically get is, you know, when the assets are on chain, how do you find the real buyers and real users?
So what we've done differently is You know, we have a strategic partnerships team that works with different distribution chains, so we integrate our products into custodians, wallets, exchanges, different communities, and that way we can really drive true demand to these different assets that we're bringing on chain.
And the third, you know, pillar of what we're focusing on is building this Defi layer on top of all of our products.
So that we can have these RWA products basically co-live with uh different Defi primitives on chain, and we found that the biggest issue before was that there's a lot of great RWA products, but the on-chain artist is very web 3.
So there was a mismatch in how they really consumed it on their civil was going on.
So we found a way through our Nest products.
Which we just talked to Salon and just announced two days ago.
Um, basically a way to communicate this in the right way so that users can, you know, buy an RAA asset, use it within Dei, collateralize in a lending protocol, borrow more against it, and do basic DFI strategies that hasn't really been exposed in the RAA well before.
And so, you know, that's kind of what we're tackling, you know, we've raised money from Different Tratfi and crypto investors like Bravin Howard, Galaxy Digital, Binance Labs, um, you know, Han, Han Ventures, and a lot of these folks.
And so we've been able to curate an ecosystem where we can create actual retail demand for Artabase with a lot of our institutional partners coming on chain as well.
So, you know, right now we're the largest chain by Rtabase retail users.
We have around 300,000 users.
Um, the Entire vertical has around like 5000, so we have most of our users on our chain right now.
But um moving forward, we want to grow on our distribution fees.
So you know, taking Nest to Salon is only the first step, and we want to grow the RDA Pie by, you know, really bringing RDA assets that are quality assets that can be used within Dei to the rest of the ecosystem.
I'd love.
To pick up on so many of the points that you just mentioned, so on the, on the distribution side, particularly, um, retail institutions, where are you seeing the most growth coming from at the moment?
Yeah, yeah, so we work with a lot of institutional partners like the Follow team, uh, the Wisdom Tree team, you know, we just announced something with Securitize, the DigitFT team, so we've brought onto Plume a lot of different.
You know, private credit assets, you know, treasury assets, these are like opportunities that are very hard to reach, honestly, in the normal world, unless you're like a high net worth individual working with like a private wealth arm in the US.
And what we've done is actually put these assets into our nest vaults, which we can And permissionlessly deploy into, um, you know, other ecosystems, other partners.
And so what we're seeing a lot of the growth right now is basically integrating this product into different wallets, different exchanges.
So to give you an example, we just integrated our product into the Group of 3 wallet.
So their users can go to the earn section.
Deposit stablecoins straight into our assets and we pass the yield back.
On the OX side, we did an integration with them, you know, a few months ago where their users can get access to our yields just by going to the centralized exchange and dropping, you know, uh, stablecoins into our vaults.
And so we want to basically recreate this, but with a lot of different partners in the ecosystem.
So we'll be pushing pretty hard on this, you know, for the rest of the year in Q1, Q2 of next year.
But we're basically lining up all of these, I guess you could call it.
B2B or B2C partnerships to really bring flow into RWAs because before, uh, it was just really hard to really understand like where you would actually go to buy these assets, how do you actually use them within D5.
And so we want to basically simplify the user experience and really bring, you know, velocity to the vertical.
Totally.
I think that so many people were focused on the technology aspect of it, like the how shall we do it, that, that big piece of distribution that was missing.
Wasn't it?
You also made a really interesting point which I want to go more into on the kind of utility aspect and that collateralization piece because I think that opens up a whole new market.
Can you talk more?
Yeah, yeah, about that of course.
So we're seeing something interesting right now in the US, at least with some of our issues where I think the old, like the phase one of tokenization was more so to like save money, you know, save on overhead costs, increase transparency, increase accessibility, which is still a thing.
But I think the phase two of what we're seeing now is a lot of issuers looking to make money.
So they're looking at how to take, for example, this, this flow is happening onre where you can like buy into like a wisdom tree, uh, Nephalt or an Apollo asphalt, take that LP token, collateralize it on moreho on.
Boom, borrow more stable coins against it and then deposit it into another RWA vault.
And then you can repeat this loop, looping cycle to basically farm and increase your yield on, on your assets.
But the underlying assets are just RWA, so it's not as volatile and as dangerous as if you're doing it within DeFi.
And so I think this kind of a use case that we've created was something, you know, our team has been building for, for a very long time and it's great to see it finally proliferate on chain, you know, we have, I think a little bit over like 50 million borrowed demand right now for, for these types of assets.
Um, you know, I mentioned earlier about the R2A wallet users.
All the RAA retail flow is for this use case.
I mean, with, without this one.
You know, you would just probably just buy an asset.
It would just sit in your wallet.
You wouldn't do much with it, right?
And that's more of like an LP institutional perspective versus now we can give these cases to on-chain folks so that, you know, they would actually understand.
And they can, you know, make more money from it.
And right now, I think ROBs are really taking the center stage, especially with everything that's going on in DeFi.
The market's not doing as well.
ROBs are always consistent on correlated yields, paid back in stable coins.
So right now it's definitely the time to shine.
I think the regulatory windows opened up, you know, we just did a bunch um of announcements in the region as well, and you.
Congratulations.
Saw that in Abu Dhabi.
Yeah, yeah, we just got our commercial license in the ADGM area.
We, uh, you know, just finished our program with Hub 71 as well.
So we really want to grow more globally.
I think we are the only art of a product right now that's really taking this from a global perspective.
You know, we're headquartered in the states.
Uh, we do a bunch in Asia.
Um, but now, you know, being here and being through this program, it helps everyone, we really do see the true growth potential in the UAE region as well, which is why we're here today.
Yeah, no, it's excellent decision by the way, to, to come to Abujabi.
Just one last quick question, where are you seeing on the actual asset part of that discussion, so the real world assets.
Where are you seeing the most demand and supply for the, the assets?
Yeah, yeah, I think um right now we're seeing a lot of flows into the more blue chip type products, um, from like, you know, the more institutional names that people understand.
There's another product on Arch on Nest actually that's kind of a good blend of Defi and Artabase, um, it's a vault that consists of a basis trade.
Uh, strategy that we tokenized from the superstate team.
Um, and then 20% of that vault is also like a, a T-bi, uh, strategy as well.
So the yields are high enough where the math makes sense, where if you, you know, if you buy into this vault, you can collateralize it and borrowed because the math doesn't make sense.
For example, if it costs like 10% to borrow, but you're only making 6%, then you'll be losing money, right?
So a lot of the times we need to kind of curate these different strategies.
Um, and thank, uh, you know, thankfully, we've been around for a while where like, we have almost every, you know, asset in the market that you can think of on the supply side.
So it's more so now just getting our, you know, ears to the ground and understanding what these investors and buyers would actually want to do with these assets.
And then we can kind of, you know, put the ingredients together and just, you know, whip up something that, you know, they would actually like to invest in and, and use within our ecosystem.
Amazing, well, it's really great to hear that you're considering all parts of that chain and that ecosystem, so it's been absolutely fantastic, and thanks so much for coming on for me as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
