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CoinDesk 2024-12-18 13:05:00

RWA-Focused Network Plume Raises $20M from Brevan Howard and Others Ahead of Mainnet Launch

Plume, a blockchain network focused on real-world assets, raked in $20 million in fresh funds in a Series A fundraising round, the platform told CoinDesk on Wednesday. Investors participating in the round included Brevan Howard Digital, Haun Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Superscrypt, Hashkey, Nomura's crypto arm Laser Digital, A Capital, 280 Capital, SV Angel, Reciprocal Ventures and others. The fresh investment round followed a $10 million seed fundraising in May led by Haun. With the investment, the team plans to speed up the development of its own layer 1 blockchain. Plume's mainnet launch is slated for early next year, the press release said. Plume aims to streamline bringing and investing in traditional financial instruments, or tokenized real-world assets (RWA), on blockchain rails with its tokenization engine, and is also developing an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain where users can trade assets. RWAs are a rapidly growing class of digital assets, with analysts forecasting to mushroom into a market worth several trillions of dollars over this decade as crypto firms and big financial institutions place assets like bonds, commodities and real estate on blockchains. Plume said it has onboarded over $4 billion worth of assets to its ecosystem including private credit funds , renewable energy financing and mineral rights. The platform also brought niche products on-chain that often are not widely available to average investors such as graphics processing units (GPU) and carbon credits, noted Will Nuelle, general partner of Galaxy Ventures, one of Plume's investors. "RWAs have always had tremendous demand, but historically the infrastructure to bring these assets on-chain just hasn’t existed,” said Chris Yin, co-founder and CEO of Plume. "Through our technology and ecosystem, we plug them directly into our community, ecosystem, and liquidity and all in an open, permissionless and composable way."