[ interview ] Plume network, my bulllish RWA investment

Teddy the finance turn crypto bro with the RWA L2

I PUT MONEY WHERE MY MOUTH IS AND MOUTH WHERE MY MONEY IS

Met teddy randomly over some event, impressed, invested and heres a little story of him

1) Quick intro about urself & how did u fall into rabbit hole

Started my career as a finance bro doing M&A in San Francisco while trading shitcoins on the side.

Saw an opportunity to do M&A and VC at Coinbase and joined the team pre-IPO. Little did I know that accepting this role would accelerate my crypto degenness. 

After gaining more exposure and investing into several different crypto startups, I decided that the operating side was way more interesting.

I ventured deeper into the space, joining a DeFi protocol (operated by a bunch of former Alameda/FTX employees) as its Head of BD and then Binance as a BD Lead for BNB Chain. Even though it was a tumultuous journey, it equipped me with all the knowledge needed to start Plume Network

2) Why RWA, Why plume network?

RWAs have always been a hot topic, but the time for this sector was never until now.

Today, improved technology makes blockchains more scalable and easier to deploy different assets, there’s massive tailwinds from tradfi, and the UX/UI is actually usable.

Plume came to me as I was working at Binance.

RWA projects were all the craze and it was a sector we really wanted to focus on.

However, when speaking to all these projects, they asked if we had anything in particular on tokenization and compliance that was baked into our chain that could help with their infra needs.

Unfortunately, BNB Chain was too much of a general chain to cater to this new and growing sector. Therefore, when my cofounders and I discussed the idea and tested the markets, all the projects we spoke with said that they would deploy on such chain if it existed. After these conversations, Plume was born.

3) What are your thoughts on current RWA market? 

there seems to be lot of RWA projects, what are your thoughts on how to pick a good RWA project?

In my honest opinion, the pre-existing RWA market is boring and uneventful.

With BTC ripping above 70k, the traditional understanding of RWAs isn’t as exciting. Buying and holding a tokenized representation of an asset just doesn’t cut it anymore.

What people need and want is composability between RWA and DeFi.

From our conversations, people are super excited about RWAs that are tradable with or without leverage, farmable, and can be borrowed against to unlock more liquidity.

People have been wanting a more crypto native approach to RWAs and that’s the ecosystem we’re building at Plume. We’ll first drive a wedge in the more esoteric / alternative side of things and slowly move upstream as insto moves extremely slow anyways

4) What do u think the future of RWA?

Like I mentioned, the future of RWAs is being able to speculate, farm, trade, and borrow/lend against the tokenized asset you’re holding.

The end state of Plume will be a chain where RWAs and DeFi primitives live in harmony, unlocking liquidity and enabling trading of what used to be illiquid assets in the real world.

By having a chain that holds 10+ different asset classes with DeFi primitives also built in, Plume will unlock an ecosystem that has not yet been seen before.

With all RWAs on our chain, capital can easily come in and cross pollinate into different asset classes. People can participate in the crypto RWA casino and then look to park capital in our special yield bearing RWA pools that consist of a basket of stronger yielding assets.

The future of RWAs no longer consists of buying and holding an asset idle in your wallet – there’s so much potential to be unlocked.

5) What are the sub sectors within RWA

This is a tough one because we have so many cool projects in the following sectors: collectibles, alternative assets, synthetics, wine & whiskey, private credit, equities, etc. We have exciting projects in all these categories which you can find here:

https://twitter.com/plumenetwork/status/1759985254750925163

In terms of metrics, we are already at ~60 projects deploying on testnet and a bunch more in the pipeline. We have some large partnerships waiting to go out as well! On the marketing front, I wanna hit 100k twitter followers soon, currently we’re at 35k. Our discord community is growing so we’re hoping to ramp those numbers up as well.

We’re ambitious but I think we can do it. We’re going to launch incentivized testnet and gearing up for mainnet for late Q2/early Q3.

Btw, go follow me, I’m trying to become a mini KOL. (@teddyP_XYZ) 😎

9) What do you think is required to make it in crypto

Crypto is rough dude. I’ve been in it since 2018, and I’ve seen a wave of people come and go. From an individual standpoint, you gotta really find the reason why you’re in crypto in order to stay in it.

From a company perspective, it’s a mix of being a seasoned crypto expert and solving a problem that’s actually interesting to people. Which is why I believe in Plume so much because we’re a) solving a problem in the market and b) we have a top tier team. 

here is a reference