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Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention. Here, we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

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Hey everyone. Welcome to the ChainStories Podcast. Here with your host, Tony Cryptonio. Today, we have someone very special, Chris from Plume Network. Chris is working in something very interesting that we're seeing and I've never seen before in my 10 years of crypto history. He's bringing the real world to chain on-chain. And I think this can really disrupt the way that we've seen value occurring in blockchain. Chris, I would love to have a little intro of what you've been up to and what inspired you to start Plume. Yeah, totally. Thanks for having me today and excited to get into all this. We started this project with a very simple idea. We wanted to make it easier to access the real world on-chain. Basically me and my co founders are all cryptonatives. We interact with mostly cryptonative assets. And doing things on-chain, whether it's swapping, buying things, lending, borrowing, earning yield, whatever it is. We think that's just a better way of doing things. You're connected to the whole world at once. It's 24/7. There's no gates, there's no barrier. You do whatever you want, right? And there's a lot of permissionless innovation. People creating new things all the time that are really fun and interesting and exciting new stuff. That just keeps it all going. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that. And it seems to be a partition between these two things. There's the on-chain world today, which is folks like us, right? And there's the real. And they seem to be two separate things. And we always want to say, look, I'd love to interact with the real world. Just the way we do with the crypto native assets. If I want to have something, I should just buy and swap and hold it. And earn some yield against it. I want to be able to trade and speculate on this thing. I want to take a loan out against this thing. I should be able to, right? And as we looked more, what we found that so many things in the real world had the same dynamics, but were just not set up in the way to do this. So we said look, if we could put this together in the same way, just at a personal and selfish level, make it easier to do things, right? In the way that we like them. Now, I think the thing that we are a beneficiary of and fortunate is like a ton of macro stuff happened around the same time that really helped us push in this direction. We had things like the BTC ETF, you have the ETH ETF, you've got all the BlackRock stuff that I think you have treasures at 5%, right? You have the election, Gensler resigning, all these things came together to really give us a lot of tailwinds behind what we're doing. But that's the original idea. And were you in blockchain before or you had a career in traditional finance? How was it going into this new world? I grew up in enterprise software in classic software. I caught up with a bad group of people and I started doing mostly Web2 kind of classic enterprise software. I was mostly doing software as a founder before I did a bunch of different companies, some worked, some didn't. But at some point, we had enough that I'm transitioning over to a venture investor. And when I was doing that, I got caught up in a lot of the crypto stuff. My most recent company has a place called Rainforest QA, and Rainforest was a distributed community of QA testers around the world. So you push a button or hit an API call, right? And these people would come test your software for you. So you'd have an on demand QA team, basically, if you're building software. And so 60,000 people on there all around the world testing software for you, and using Rainforest as a coordination platform and payment platform. The problem is, you keep making me off ramp in my native currency, we had to build something as far and they would rather hold BTC and ETH. Cause all of these people are in Latin America and Eastern Europe or Africa or wherever it might be. And they would rather hold USDC or just BTC and ETH. And so that's how I got sucked into all this and DeFi summer was rare on that time. And I got lost in the sauce. As I was doing a bunch of like classic venture at the same time into Web2 startups. I found that I just spent all my time doing crypto stuff. I was still doing a lot of retail crypto stuff. I was helping founders of mine who are friends building crypto starts and new projects. And just spend all my time here, going to conferences, meeting people and just helping out on stuff. And ended up meeting my co founders through a bunch of mutual friends. We've all we've been friends for a while and that let us down to Plume. I can see that sort of that DeFi Summer planted a seed in your brain. Maybe I should launch a project, we should launch a token. How was that process of going from SaaS, Web2 probably more secure career path everything is much more resourced out there to, I need to find a co founder. I have this idea. Maybe it's going to work, maybe not. And then starting the race process. Yeah, it was a shit show, honestly. And in hindsight, it's always easier and it becomes more clear, and it's it seemed like there was a plan. At the time, it was always simple, right? I think my co founders have always been more like fundamental people, which is like, let's go talk to some users or customers or people, right? And see what they would do. And so we went out, once we had this kind of like kernel of an idea, we went to talk to a bunch of people. And fortunately, I'd seen a bunch of RWA projects as an angel investor, so I knew a bunch of them, so I could go to ask them, right? And Teddy, my other co founder he was at BNB before, and he had seen a bunch of projects in RWA trying to deploy on the BNB chain. So we just went to talk to a bunch of them, right? We talked to a dozen of them or so in the beginning and they're all like, Oh, good. This is great. I would love to use it. Are we going to build this or what? And we're like, okay, cool, that's great. But you always know the first 10 are bullshit. Everyone tells you yes. And so we're like okay let's go, let's do another 10. And as we did the second set of calls, the first ones came back and called us and they're like, so you're going to build this or what? We're ready to go. I'm like, oh shit. Okay. Maybe it's a thing. So we started to build it and put it together. And then from there, always lived ahead of reality in the sense of we never had the money to support what we were doing. We just didn't take salary we didn't make any money. We brought on friends. We didn't pay them, and so we'd always just lived ahead, to try and support it. And then as we hit breaking points, which is okay, like at some point we have to pay people, we went to go raise a lot of money to build this or like at some point when the ecosystem needs more help, like we just can't do it. We need to go do that. And then also bring on some partners who can really help us. Then that's when we went out and found some money, but it was never a good time either. When we raised money it was last year, not around earlier than this time, but I feel today, BTC at a hundred, I guess we're under a hundred now, right? But like BTC is at a hundred ish, right? It's all good time, everyone's up only right. I think it wasn't even that long ago, but it was like, not a good time. It was definitely down only, there's no cycles anymore. Everything's fucked. It's all bad. And so that we've always raised in that moment. And then even when things did start to come up, I think the liquid market's always ahead of the venture markets. And so just because tokens start to rip doesn't mean the venture markets change, and so it's still bad. And then when we finally did go out to raise, even the liquid markets started to go down again. So people are like, oh, it's no good. So it's always been a grind, honestly. And it's because RWAs have so much, it's not only the market timing, like we do RWAs obviously, right? And it's such baggage to it. I don't even want to hear about RWAs. I think most of the times, RWA is an acronym or something we don't care about. It's just a grouping of things that you don't do, we just don't touch, like it don't matter. And that's why it was hard, because I think people hold a lot of that with them and for good reason, because a lot of historic RWA stuff is a problem, it isn't very good. And I get why people feel that way. Now I think we're doing it very differently. And I think the market's changed. And also technology has changed and there's ways to do it that are better now. And we're seeing the adoption now as a result, but there's a lot of baggage around the phrase that you have to escape. And so those are all just hurdles. But I think that the benefit is, the more the better. It makes us stronger and it makes us tougher. And I think it also is humbling, cause you see a lot of founders go out and they can raise a billion dollars off nothing. And gets them out like it's never been that way for us, it's always been a grind, but I think it keeps us sharp and it keeps us humble. I think it's good, it's not supposed to be easy. And you mentioned at the time you're a VC, you're looking at a lot of RWA deals and this was an inspiration or planting the seed in your mind. Was there a catalyst that you said, okay, I need to go into RWA. I must do something in this space. Was it the problem you had there was so much friction for these payments when you were doing the Web2 side of things? It was mostly, the more we saw people trying to bring things on-chain, we realized it was just ridiculous in the real world, right? The thing that I remember hearing the most of was everyone we talked to said, no matter what it was, if you were bringing sneakers on-chain or Pokemon cards or real estate or financial instruments or whatever you want to do, every single one of them told me the same thing. It took 6, 12, 18, 24, 36 months to get this asset on-chain. And that just seemed crazy to me, and it seemed like such an obvious problem at least. I don't know if it was the real problem, but at least it wasn't a problem. It shouldn't take you that much time and money to bring something on-chain, right? Who's going to do that? Like it's ridiculous. And so God bless we have a few people who have been like brave enough to go do it to show us the way, but that's a very challenging thing to do and I wasn't really around in like the 90s building startups, but I was at least told that back then, you had to raise 10 million bucks to rack servers for two years before you even built a product, right? And that's the analogy that we drew from. It felt like that in tokenization, you have to do all this infrastructure work that everybody is doing all the time, right? It's not even a different product. Everyone's doing the same nonsense and stumbling through it because there's no clarity. And so it takes a long time. It's expensive and you make a lot of mistakes. And so that just seems ridiculous. Let's just start there and make that easier. And then from there, you discover problem two, which is like it turns out when you bring things on-chain, there's nothing to do with it still sucks, and so you have to build an ecosystem around it, and you can make composable, you need liquidity. And you go from tokenization, and bringing things on-chain to then community and ecosystem and liquidity and having a network together and all these sorts of things. And then that comes back to okay, what more technology you need. So that's how we got into was just like, we went one step at a time. Just talking to users and talking to people who are trying to build in this market and then just trying to help them step by step. And do you think the reason why we haven't seen RWA narrative coming in previous cycles is because there's not enough infrastructure, there is not enough resources? Was there a lot of friction to do this bridge into the real world? Because it seems so obvious. Let's build what's real on-chain and bridge this over. It's a good question. I think, it's two things. One is definitely that. But I don't think that's the only part. I think it's a huge barrier and a huge issue that even doing anything on-chain is such a pain in the ass when it comes to real world assets. But I think the second part of it is, there's both market dynamics, right? Which is there are two parts of it. I think there's always a bottoms up dynamic and a top down one. The bottoms up one is simple. You need user demand. You can bring anything on-chain if no one wants it it's still cooked, right? And so you have to start there. And I think two years ago, there's a unique moment in time where the off-chain yields are better than on-chain yields. You get 2% on pay on Compound, but really that's not as good as 5% treasury off-chain. And that led to a bunch of people sucking treasures on-chain. And that taught people about real yield about RWAs and showed demand and desire for these assets. That's number one. That's the more bottoms up area. And then the top down stuff is then all the stuff we talked about. Came out the new year, BTC ETF, BlackRock expanded with tokenization, putting a lot of energy into the market around this stuff, right? And the election, all these things have help propel it forward. So it's those market dynamics. I think because if the market dynamics are strong enough, the tooling doesn't matter, people will figure it out. So I think the tooling that we've built and the token is like, it helps accelerate it and hopefully expands the funnel, opens the market. But really I think the market dynamics are a big part of it. Awesome. That's fascinating. And you mentioned the tooling. I know Plume Network is a full stack L1 blockchain. For founders out there listening, how is this process of, okay I'm doing an L1, I'm picking this tech stack. I myself as a VC I get asked a lot of times the question, what chain should I build on? Should I go for Base? Should I go for Arbitrum? Should I do it in Solana? What sort of you are devising to navigate in these waters, which probably so much later on. Yes, and I would say I'm always surprised how people make these decisions to be honest, because I would say it's often misinformed or at least incomplete, which is not to say we're right. But this is just my view at least, having been on the other side. Technology is one, right? You have to think about the technology, depends on the use case. If you're doing high frequency trading you need a high throughput chain. So that's why TPS is a thing, right? And so that's number one. I think that's one piece. Number two is you have to think about liquidity ultimately. And how much of it is there? Is it really supported? Is it growing? All those types of things, right? And then number three, I think you really have to understand the dynamics of the chain. Which is, what's the community, what's the ecosystem like? And you want to make sure that all three of those things are aligned. And they're in the same thing. Because when you look at things like Solana today, it's a very different community, a different field, a different ecosystem than Base. Even though sometimes they get compared. The Solana community, in my opinion and this is a good thing, but it's a community that sort of DCA five bucks into 10K market cap shitcoins, a lot of times. And not to be overly reductive, right? Because there's a lot of great things happening, but just with the Pump.Fund, with the rise of pump and all these things, like it ends up being the caricature of that community. But I do think that there's truth in it. That community ends up having that feel. And you see a lot of degen activity. That's why pump works so well there. Whereas pumps actually a fairly simple product, but it doesn't work as well everywhere else because that's where the community and the ecosystem and the liquidity are aligned. So you get great volume and adoption usage there for that type of thing. Versus you go to Base today. Very different feel, even though it's a similar thing, right? It's a very normie feel. Because it's normal, you've got like a bit of a social thing there. You've got like Friend.tech came out of there, right? You had Warpcast, it was still there, right? And you have those, even the memes are normal, right? And so that community, that audience is also different. And so depending on what you're trying to build and what you want to do for your protocol. That's how you should choose these things was where's they're going to be the fit for you? Because at the end of the day, all these things are infrastructure, right? They should help you achieve your goals as a founder. And for us at Plume, we've designed our ecosystem for this exact reason. Why it's technology perspective. We've optimized a bunch of the stuff around the chain to make it easy to RWAs, but to build a community around our ecosystem of protocols that make it easy to make your RWA assets composable, because I think that's a huge part of the story. And then finally, we can then go find liquidity to help put this together and make it work, so I think all of this stuff is like hyper important. And that's how you should choose between these ecosystems depending on what you want, right? And what's best for your protocol and the goals that you have. And they're not all the same. Liquidity is not like, all liquidity is not created equal, right? Liquidity differs depending on what you want. SOL liquidity is much smaller than ETH, as an example. SOL is what, 5 or 6 billion, right? ETH is, I forget what it is, 20, 30 billion? I don't even know the numbers. But ETH has way more liquidity, but it's just not the same feel at all, and you turn the SOL liquidity much faster. And in many places, it's going to be a better place for people to build than ETH L1. What do you think? Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it makes sense. And I was wondering regarding Plume, how do you plan it? How do you plan to access liquidity? Is making this L1 EVM compatible? Is it bringing through bridge with Solana ecosystem? We're an EVM chain. That's a starting point, right? Like at the end of the day, we start EVM first because that's where a lot of the liquidity is. And that's what I think is important. Now, but also I would say, look, it's not about where things are going as well. And a lot of attention on the SVM, a lot of attention on other ecosystems, other VMs, right? And things like that. And so I think it's really important that we maintain an open mind on it and be able to support multiple types of things. So we're open. I'm not religious about any of these things. But I do think it's important to keep an open mind on all of it. Yeah, for sure. Like over the years, I have seen some founders going with other chains with much less liquidity. And then that sort of put them in a isolated Ireland situation where, oh man, we're here, but we can't access there, or we can't do this. And then who's going to come and build on it? Who's going to come here and yeah, and develop? Then they get into a grand sort of program and it just basically paying for people to come in and build. There's not that organic growth. So I think that's a really good point about EVM. And I was looking into Plume and there's two core products. If you want to expand more on those, I think super interesting what you're doing. Yeah, so it goes back to this idea about this full stack ecosystem, right? Which is, we focus a lot on making it easy to interact with. So our core product is the blockchain itself, we maintain an EVM chain. Now, we have two products that are surrounding that. We want Plume to be the easiest place to bring things on-chain. That's the first piece. And then the second thing is to make it an easy place to execute and transact on those things on-chain. So the blockchain itself, is the second piece. The first thing, how do you make it easy to bring things on-chain? We have two products here. And a lot of people say, maybe even zooming out, a lot of people think RWAs equals tokenization. It's part of the story, it's just not enough though. Like at the end of the day, I think tokenization is a subset of what it is, but it can be much more. Like you can buy the underlying, but you also just own a digital representation of it. And you can just bring on the data. So I think that to me is like what is really interesting and important and what matters. If we look at those types of things today, there are two products we've built to support that. Number one is something called Plume Arc. Plume Arc is our tokenization engine. It's a modular tokenization, so it makes it easy to bring anything on-chain, you can do watches, you can do cards, you can do gold, you can do real estate, you can do equities, whatever you want. And we make it very easy, fast and simple to do it. And we use all the best and the latest stuff out there to make that happen. Instead of building something else. That's number one. We want to make it easy for anyone because there's more stuff off-chain than on-chain. So you want to make sure the gate and the bridge to bringing these things on is as easy as possible, right? And today, a lot of these products don't exist. They suck or they're expensive. And so that's a big barrier. Number two, this is where I think our view is different than most people in RWAs. Is that, to me real world assets is not just like a tokenized treasury bill. If that was it'd be incredibly boring. To me what's interesting about doing things on-chain is you can do new things that couldn't be done before. It's not about mirroring the real world on-chain. It's about using that as a foundational piece to create new things that can be done more. And one of those things is by bringing real world data on-chain that's often ignored. We have a product called Plume Nexus, that's what this is. Today, if you look at the Oracles today, they give you crypto prices, right? So I can get the price of Ether, BTC or different assets. Now, if I wanted to say, CPI data, inflation data in the US. If I wanted GDP data, if I wanted crime rates, if I wanted anything else, it's not easy to get. So we want to also make that easy to bring those things on-chain so you can begin to use them. So as a simple example, one of our protocols makes it easy for you to take out like a levered long. So you can take like a 50x lev long on Pokemon cards. And you don't have to tokenize every card in the world to do that, right? What you can do is just bring on a price feed of these cards and then build a market around it. And then put it into perp stacks, and now I can trade that thing. That to me is where it starts to get interesting and exciting. Is you can start to create new things you couldn't do before. Because you can take that same analogy and go even further. So if we're bringing on a digital representation of a Pokemon card, I can go even further. I can bring on a digital representation of something that doesn't exist in the real world. I can start to do things with one of our protocols that makes it easier for you to trade cultures and countries. You can level long America and short China. And what is that? Behind that, America is a collection of like 50 data feeds, 50 data points, right? Again, it's GDP, it's population growth, it's sentiment, it's crime rate, it's all these things, right? And you weight each one differently, you put it into an index, and you have a chart. And now I can trade that. And that's the simplest way to go from idea to position. Or be able to take a stance on something. And that's something you couldn't do before. Everything today in the real world is done by proxy. If I wanted to bet on AI today, what do you do? You buy Nvidia stock. But it's a really poor way to bet on AI. Because one, Nvidia stock is very expensive. Two, you have to think about a million things when you're betting on an equity. What do you want to bet on the actual thing? So like today, if I want to bet on Sam Altman, then what do I do? I'll probably buy WorldCoin. And that's exactly a WorldCoin trades. When Sam gets fired, WorldCoin dumps. When Sam gets rehired, it pumps. When Sword V2 comes out, WorldCoin pumps, like that all of these things are done by proxies. If you want a BlackRock proxy, what do you do? You buy Ondo. I think that to me is where you can get a closer representation of what's going on and like how to mirror that. And that's another way to interact with the real world. That you couldn't do with just pure tokenization, right? Even if you flip open DEXScreener any day of the week. It's all real things. These are all representations of the real. Because people want to speculate on the real. People want to interact with the real world on-chain. But it's done in a really poor way. You either have to just buy a proxy token at a 60 billion FDV. Or you go into a 10K liquidity checkpoint and hope that works. And so to me, that's like what we're trying to do in addition to core tokenization, right? You bring a lot of things on so you can access the underlying asset. You can also do a speculative thing. You combine these things and that's what creates liquidity in markets. You combine speculation with owning the underlying. That's what the commodities markets of the Forex works. That's how these things happen. So it's about combining these together. It creates like robust liquid markets and creates a real value for the asset and as well as the people that are bringing this stuff on-chain. Yeah. Very interesting. So you think it's fair to say that Plume is a way that an ecosystem that I can come in as a founder and plug in, let's say I'm doing tokenizing invoice bills and plugging my product into the Plume ecosystem and have access to all these APIs on-chain verifiable data. That's right. One, let's say you're doing tokenized invoice. You can bring that on-chain. One, it's distribution, finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding users, people to hold that stuff. Number two, it's also an access liquidity. Third, it's composability into an ecosystem. Which is making sure that if someone's holding an invoice token, you can then go take a loan out against it. We can help see that and set that up, right? And make that a thing. And the last thing is to be able to give that asset more context and more color, meaning put this into an index. Maybe somebody wants to create a new index of all the different tokenized assets out here, right? Or let's say it's a Medicaid. We have this today. It's Medicaid invoices. In America, Medicaid, like we do things through a very strange system in America with Medicaid, but big picture, you can bill the government for all your healthcare, right? And it basically never gets rejected. But you have to take a long time, so people can sell them and do invoice financing against them at very low risk. And so that's a very clean asset. And so maybe you want an index of all healthcare stuff, right? And so someone can just open market, just buy a bunch of these tokens, related to invoice health care, put them into an ETF now or some kind of index. And now people can allocate into that index. And so to me, that's like how it goes. As someone who wants to tokenize an individual asset, you can come do that. If you have something there on the other side, if you're a builder, what we want to do with Plume Arc and Nexus is to get people away from having to own the asset to build an RWAs. If you want to do stuff in like real estate on-chain, you shouldn't have to own an apartment building, right? If you want to do stuff in like collectibles, you shouldn't have to own a collectible store. You should just be able to come in and experiment with this stuff. So by building these tools, whether they're both digital representations or through physical representations, you can pull these things on-chain now and then now just as a straight up developer, I can combine and make some matches tokens together, right? And create things that I want. So you can just expand the market of builders here. I think that's important too. Do you think that's that flexibility that you've built into the core of Plume that enabled right now I'm looking up and you have over 180 apps and I believe over 4 billion in value in this ecosystem. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's been our belief from the start, which is many things in RWAs are one thing only. Just treasuries, just private credits, right? I think the value is in diversity. It's an esoteric items. And we're crypto people, which is I don't control any of this. And I shouldn't. This is an open ecosystem. Anyone can build whatever they want. The market will choose and decide. And the only way to build that market dynamic is to have everything. And we're also just like aggressive people. I do want everything on Plume. I want every road out. So we like, we want it all, but I think that's part of it, which is why we have such a diversity of assets, right? You can come to Plume Trade, you can trade, you can trade sports cards, there's expensive art, there's classic wine. There's high end liquor. There's like low end with liquor, right? You can do things like loyalty points. You have tickets, all kinds of stuff. You can rent tables at clubs or whatever. You can do all these things together. But also you could do treasuries, you can do sovereign debt. You can finance a large company. You can own a piece of hotel or whatever it is, right? It's all about all those things at the same time. Yeah. Fascinating. And regarding, do you have any plans in launching a token and how would the token interact? Is that the, I don't even know how to pronounce it, but is it the lounge part? Because I've never seen something like this. It's very fascinating. So mainnet will come out soon, in the new year. And as a result of mainnet we were going to progressively decentralize things over time as well, and that's going to involve the classic methods of doing that. How is the token going to interact with this ecosystem? Is it necessary to do transactions? There's a bunch of ways to do it. And we'll share more as it comes, but big picture, the way to think about the token at least in my opinion is in many ways, the first real world asset that people will get exposure to is the Plume token. Because that's how they think about real world assets. That's how you get exposure to it. And then of course, over time to me it's part of the onboarding. So it's part of the path to becoming more and more involved in RWAs, right? First the token, if you like it, then you can come in and bridge over to the ecosystem, begin to get involved in maybe a bunch of indices, maybe small risk, high risk, low risk, or whatever, and you just pick one and allocate there. Great. Then you can go even deeper, assemble your own basket, if you want, I have a bunch of different things then get into synthetics or whatever. And then maybe you start to build your own baskets. And so to me, that's like the progression of a lot of usage when it comes to this kind of stuff. So the token is the first sort of interaction point, which means you want to train people or at least educate people or give them a flavor of how the token will work and what the value of the ecosystem, it's almost a microcosm of the whole ecosystem, right? When you hold this token, you should get a light feel of what the whole thing is. And what is that? It's going to be yield, it's going to be exposure to different types of assets. It's going to be usability across these things. So that's how I think about it at least. There's a bunch of stuff coming up as it relates to the token, but that's the user experience I think that matters for this token. It's not just a token for the network. It is the first and maybe original point of RWA interaction for most people on-chain. Honestly, myself as a VC, and I've got access to a lot of deal flow the past couple months, I have not seen anything similar to what you're doing. And that raises the question is, I believe yesterday you finalized your first series A round with you raised 20 million dollar. Congrats on that. How is this process of pitching to VCs something that's so on the forefront and the vanguard, like this is not something very common in the market. It's not very fun. I always liked telling my story, and also hearing real feedback. Like I'm not shy about that, some people believe what we're doing. Some people think it's nonsense. That's okay. So being on the streets and telling our story, I think it's great. No issues. Now, let's say, comparatively speaking, like you said, compared to other friends of mine who are building XYZ or people doing ABC, it is harder, because you have baggage from the word RWA. Because people think we'll just, it's another centrifuge. It's do people want that? It's not clear that people do. So there's that baggage. And the number two, when people think about RWAs, they tend to think regulation, TradeFi, institutional stuff, which is part of the story again. But you can see like from the things that we're talking about, it's more than that, right? To me it's more DeFi. It's more crypto than TradeFi stuff. People tend to think that as well, which is also a barrier. And then lastly like you said, it's just a new area, it's not as easy as, Oh, let's do LSTs on a new chain. Or we'll do some new AI token and something ecosystem. Or we'll do like a, it's a new lending market here on new DEX here, and you can just bet on the ecosystem and bet on the products. It's a little bit different than that. And so it ends up being tough, to get it. Fortunately, we've found some great investors and great backers who really do understand this. Often they sit at the intersection of both these worlds and we've been just grateful to have their support and their help and their understanding. Fortunately for us, the sort of market is changing at a pace that really leans into our perspective and our view with all the macro stuff happening. So it's been great, but yeah, it's not straightforward. Because when you deal with the real world, it just sucks is the honest answer, it's slow, it's hard to do the real world. We just spin up the protocol, we get some audits and we send it, and we can start. Especially let's call it a BTC Land, you can drop a billion dollars in TVL and the protocol like pretty quickly, right? Now, making it useful, that's a different question. But at least like getting the initial bits going, it's like fairly straightforward to make some of these bets. And so first of all, we're doing just has a lot of extra dimensions. And extra dimensions means thinking. And some people don't like to think, that makes it hard. Yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense. Is there any advice you'd give for the founders listening that are out there trying to raise and the door closes and they go back home and they draft a new pitch or maybe they really believe that what they're doing is the thing, but they just feel that they don't understand. It's always a tricky line. And you see this a VC obviously, right? I was invested before too, I did venture for a bit. I was mostly a founder, but I've been a VC too. And I think I learned a ton from being a VC, to be honest, about how to think about things and where founders are wrong. I think VCs are wrong a lot too, for it's worth, the founders are often wrong too. And founders can get way too attached to their own nonsense, because it's your baby, you came up with it, you have a lot of pride around it, blah, blah, blah. So people can really get overly focused and attached. And you have to know when to call it and when not to, but because on the other side a lot of times VC is just straight up wrong, and they just don't see it. And so if you were to only listen to them, you would never do anything but consensus bets, because generally speaking, VC is like follow, right? Generally you're chasing the deal versus picking a new thing. That was my experience with VC. It was a lot less picking than I thought. It was more, we all know the hot deal is more trying to get in, and that was my experience with it. And so if that's the case, then you shouldn't listen too much either. At least in the beginning. And so if that's the case, knowing when to call it as a big thing is a big deal. But also staying true to like what you want matters a lot. I guess I'm curious your view too. I always think there's two parts of a great startup or a great company, a great project. You have to have a great founder. That's a hard requirement. No great founder, you're fucked out the gate. There's just no way, because that's one thing you cannot change, but something you also need to is a great market. And without a great market, there's nothing either, and so you can have a great founder, crap market company still fucked. If you have a great market, bad founder, it could still work, but probably not, you need a great founder. And so for the founder, what you have to really believe is are you in a great market? And is this the right market? Is there something new here? Something interesting that's actually happening? And if it is, it's obvious, like the fundamentals will always tell you the truth. It doesn't matter what VCs say. If people are using the hell out of the thing, you're gonna be fine. If everyone's dying, it's gonna be fine. It may not be easy. It may raise a lower price than you want or whatever. But ultimately, it's always on you as a founder. You have to communicate the story, and you have to be responsible for that. You have to keep the business financed. Yeah, absolutely. And what do you think is the core component for a great founder? Is it resilience? Is it not giving up? Is it not sleeping and just putting everything into this project? I think it's a bunch of those things. At the very core it's just not giving up. It's being dumb enough to not give up, honestly, because in many ways you should. Like it is very stupid like the spreadsheet says you should give up and just get a job, if you were to like map out your life. So I think at the core level it's that. Paul Graham writes as like being a relentless resource for something there's a post, it's called like having the juice, which means that like you have an edge in some area that others don't, so you can just move a little bit faster. And get a little bit more done and maybe that's great engineering talent. And you're just like, when it comes out, you can recruit engineers like nobody else. Or you can write the best product and build the best protocol, like super quickly or whatever that is. Or maybe it's going to market. You're incredible selling, and you can get that done. Maybe it's raising money. You can raise more money, which you can hire the rest. Like you just need the juice and you can always tell when it's there. It's hard to articulate, when you see it, you don't even know exactly what it is, there's some magic there. Doesn't mean it always works, but you have to see that at least. And if that's not there, I think you're cooked. But in my opinion, that's what a great founder is. You always know when you see it, but it's very hard to say what it is. And after it's easy, right? You can always explain it. But in the moment, it's ah, there's something weird. I know it's good, but it'll work. But usually these things are messy too. My experience was like, it's always messy, like someone who's great at something is usually very bad at something else. And that's just how it works. You have to learn to ignore that or at least understand how to compliment it to make it work. Because that's how founders are. Like the crazier, the better. But also didn't look crazy, you know, that's also an issue, so I don't know. What do you think? I think that we should know ourselves really well and know where our skills stand out and I even have seen, even with myself, I start hiring people and I can hire people that are so much better than I. And maybe it's just better if I can manage everyone and they have those outputs resulting in, wow, this is fascinating. And sometimes I see with founders, sometimes devs that are like, no, I need to code, I need to keep coding. And you can hire someone that's better than you that's been doing this for a while. And then you should achieve velocity and then things are moving. So it's an humbling lesson and we have to look a lot of times into ourselves and think. And cross that line and find the balance where should I keep getting involved? Should I keep trying this or step back and look into the old picture? If this is right. And so a question that I get asked a lot by founders, but I can't answer and you can answer these better than I for sure is should I move to Silicon Valley? Is there a competitive advantage in being there from VC standpoints, from peers that are working in the same industry or project, or can I just be in Lisbon, Portugal or any other city in the world that is not as super competitive technology wise or most of the VC firms in the world? I'm very biased to this. I think you have to be here. And I think here's actually New York for what it's worth at this point in crypto. If you're doing AI, you got to be an SF, but if you're doing crypto, you got to be in New York. And there's a pro and con to it. In the sense that the pro is, you're around a lot of like minded people. It generally is going to raise your ambition level. It's going to increase your speed because you're going to be embarrassed that everyone's being faster than you, and you're going to increase your network and just like your sort of rate of learning increases a lot, because of just pure exposure. You're just going around a lot of the nonsense all the time, right? The downside is you could fall in love with that. And forget the real thing that matters, which is building the product, making it work. And so like some people go there and just get lost in the mix and it's all they do all day, right? You're just like going to events and meeting people and you know everybody, but you build nothing. And so that's the benefit of not being here, which you can focus on building something great. And the truth is, if you build something great, they'll come find you. That's the reality. If you build something great, like people will find you. You don't have to go find anybody. But the problem is sometimes it's not always easy to build something great. Not everyone can, not everyone is Jeff, not everyone can build hyper liquid. It's learning, and that's where it's good for that. And it can increase your cycle time, when it goes to those things. But if you can land in one shot, stay wherever the hell you want to, it's going to be totally fine, they will find you. Yeah, for sure. I think that's a great advice. And a lot of times we get caught up in all the events or conference, especially in crypto, there's all these conferences around the world. And then, I haven't been building anything. There's no product that's actually delivered over these last couple of weeks or months and you just found yourself socializing over. Yes, exactly. Made a lot of friends, but that's it. Yeah, it comes with that drawback, but for sure, I do see a lot more activity in terms of venture capital in SF, or I think being placed there, definitely there is a competitive advantage. One last question before we close is if we had a time machine and you could go back to when you started building Plume, is there anything you tell to that version of yourself? Man, probably a lot of things to be honest. There's a million things. But they're all too specific. I think the real thing I would say to myself, which is the accumulation of all these things is to just believe it more. And then not to say we didn't believe it, but I think we could have gone even faster if we had really pushed on it. Because we were very practical. We wanted to be sure that there was something going on here. We wanted to really try and test, and talk to people. And I still think it's the right thing. I would say this, we tried not to hire people to raise money. As a simple example, because we wanted to be sure that we took care of people and if I hire you I take it seriously. I want to make sure that we treat your life seriously and respectful of that person as well, not just hire them on a whim, and hope it works. If it doesn't, sorry, tough shit, like that's not how we do things. But on the other end, there's an argument you made that they should do things. Do it all at the same time, right? Because we believe. So don't wait to raise money and hire people, hire them now and move even faster. We always had maximum belief in what we were doing, but we were very practical about how we built things. And I think it actually led to a bunch of good habits around how we do things today, because we're more rooted in the fundamentals. But I think every founder says this and when I used to work for them, I used to think it was so annoying when they would say this. And now I say it all the time, but it's we got to go faster, like we can do more, and that's exactly what I feel like. I think if we just rushed even faster, we could have done even more by now, which is great. I think that was great advice. And definitely that's something that's in the mind of a lot of founders that are right now building, deploying and trying their best to go to markets. Chris, where should people follow you? Any socials, any websites? We're classic people in crypto Twitter. Like we're all over the place. It's@plumenetwork, right? I'm@chriseyin. So you can find me anytime. We're in discord. We're in telegram, I live in telegram all day. I'm sure you do too. That's like where to find us anytime. And then we're always at different events. And so, if you ever want to come and hang out and meet the team, just like you said, we're all at the nonsense conferences, where us hosting events and like meeting people for our developers, for people who want to build and interact all over the place. And we do workshops. It's not even about these conferences. So I would say online we're always around. Anytime, come ping us anytime and then secondarily, if you want to do something in real life, like we're always around too. I'm always around ping anytime and we'd love to chat with anybody and everybody. If you have anything around Plume or even not just to talk about crypto and shoot the shit. Like we're always, we love that too. And one thing I'm curious, if I'm building a project and I want to get involved with Arc. Is there a formal process that I should submit or get early access platform? Totally. Yeah. Just hit the website and just click on Arc and there should be a button to take you there. And I would say there's forms to get like early access because look, it's a real thing. Tokenizing and we're tokenizing, in some cases, hundreds of millions of billions of dollars. And that's not something you just click a few buttons and do without some guidance. I always hated when the first experience we have with someone is through a form, I think it's terrible. I hate filling out forms and I just usually just fill it out in blank and just move on. So if you don't want to fill it out, don't fill it out. Just ping us, don't let the form be the gating factor. The forms are just there to be there, but we're happy to just talk to you anytime you want to use Arc, get in touch with us, DM us, we'll reply guy and we can talk to them, just DM us on Twitter, hit us in TG and we can just talk about it and get it going. Chris, it was a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

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