Jan. 26, 2025

Why Real World Needs Blockchain 💥 - Interview with CEO of Plume Network

Why Real World Needs Blockchain 💥 - Interview with CEO of Plume Network
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We caught up with Chris Yin, the mastermind behind Plume Network, to talk about making tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) actually easy. From turning Pokémon cards and real estate into tradable assets to creating new ways to speculate and build on-chain, Plume is breaking all the rules.

Chris spills on why being in New York is clutch for crypto founders, how Plume Arc and Nexus are helping builders plug into their ecosystem, and what’s next with their token launch and mainnet. Plus, his advice for founders raising money and going all-in.

🎙️ THE ChainStories Podcast – powered by Dropout Capital and Blockchain Education Network!

👉 Follow us on Twitter/X: https://x.com/BlockchainEdu
👤 Connect with Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisyin/
🎧 Connect with our Host on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/cryptoniooo
👉 Follow Plume on Twitter/X: https://x.com/plumenetwork

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WEBVTT

00:00:00.530 --> 00:00:07.040
Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention.

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Here, we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

00:00:18.086 --> 00:00:18.687
Hey everyone.

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Welcome to the ChainStories Podcast.

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Here with your host, Tony Cryptonio.

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Today, we have someone very special, Chris from Plume Network.

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Chris is working in something very interesting that we're seeing and I've never seen before in my 10 years of crypto history.

00:00:34.786 --> 00:00:38.671
He's bringing the real world to chain on-chain.

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And I think this can really disrupt the way that we've seen value occurring in blockchain.

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Chris, I would love to have a little intro of what you've been up to and what inspired you to start Plume.

00:00:49.957 --> 00:00:50.466
Yeah, totally.

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Thanks for having me today and excited to get into all this.

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We started this project with a very simple idea.

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We wanted to make it easier to access the real world on-chain.

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Basically me and my co founders are all cryptonatives.

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We interact with mostly cryptonative assets.

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And doing things on-chain, whether it's swapping, buying things, lending, borrowing, earning yield, whatever it is.

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We think that's just a better way of doing things.

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You're connected to the whole world at once.

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It's 24/7.

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There's no gates, there's no barrier.

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You do whatever you want, right?

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And there's a lot of permissionless innovation.

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People creating new things all the time that are really fun and interesting and exciting new stuff.

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That just keeps it all going.

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Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that.

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And it seems to be a partition between these two things.

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There's the on-chain world today, which is folks like us, right?

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And there's the real.

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And they seem to be two separate things.

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And we always want to say, look, I'd love to interact with the real world.

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Just the way we do with the crypto native assets.

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If I want to have something, I should just buy and swap and hold it.

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And earn some yield against it.

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I want to be able to trade and speculate on this thing.

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I want to take a loan out against this thing.

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I should be able to, right?

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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.

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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?

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In the way that we like them.

00:01:51.757 --> 00:01:59.197
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.

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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?

00:02:05.397 --> 00:02:10.137
You have the election, Gensler resigning, all these things came together to really give us a lot of tailwinds behind what we're doing.

00:02:10.137 --> 00:02:10.977
But that's the original idea.

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And were you in blockchain before or you had a career in traditional finance?

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How was it going into this new world?

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I grew up in enterprise software in classic software.

00:02:21.728 --> 00:02:27.127
I caught up with a bad group of people and I started doing mostly Web2 kind of classic enterprise software.

00:02:27.288 --> 00:02:32.520
I was mostly doing software as a founder before I did a bunch of different companies, some worked, some didn't.

00:02:32.520 --> 00:02:35.990
But at some point, we had enough that I'm transitioning over to a venture investor.

00:02:36.259 --> 00:02:39.000
And when I was doing that, I got caught up in a lot of the crypto stuff.

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My most recent company has a place called Rainforest QA, and Rainforest was a distributed community of QA testers around the world.

00:02:45.250 --> 00:02:47.639
So you push a button or hit an API call, right?

00:02:47.759 --> 00:02:49.590
And these people would come test your software for you.

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So you'd have an on demand QA team, basically, if you're building software.

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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.

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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.

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Cause all of these people are in Latin America and Eastern Europe or Africa or wherever it might be.

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And they would rather hold USDC or just BTC and ETH.

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And so that's how I got sucked into all this and DeFi summer was rare on that time.

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And I got lost in the sauce.

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As I was doing a bunch of like classic venture at the same time into Web2 startups.

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I found that I just spent all my time doing crypto stuff.

00:03:20.935 --> 00:03:22.585
I was still doing a lot of retail crypto stuff.

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I was helping founders of mine who are friends building crypto starts and new projects.

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And just spend all my time here, going to conferences, meeting people and just helping out on stuff.

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And ended up meeting my co founders through a bunch of mutual friends.

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We've all we've been friends for a while and that let us down to Plume.

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I can see that sort of that DeFi Summer planted a seed in your brain.

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Maybe I should launch a project, we should launch a token.

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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.

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I have this idea.

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Maybe it's going to work, maybe not.

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And then starting the race process.

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Yeah, it was a shit show, honestly.

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And in hindsight, it's always easier and it becomes more clear, and it's it seemed like there was a plan.

00:04:04.882 --> 00:04:06.391
At the time, it was always simple, right?

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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?

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And see what they would do.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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So we just went to talk to a bunch of them, right?

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We talked to a dozen of them or so in the beginning and they're all like, Oh, good.

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This is great.

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I would love to use it.

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Are we going to build this or what?

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And we're like, okay, cool, that's great.

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But you always know the first 10 are bullshit.

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Everyone tells you yes.

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And so we're like okay let's go, let's do another 10.

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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?

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We're ready to go.

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I'm like, oh shit.

00:04:44.545 --> 00:04:44.774
Okay.

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Maybe it's a thing.

00:04:45.584 --> 00:04:47.615
So we started to build it and put it together.

00:04:47.615 --> 00:04:52.735
And then from there, always lived ahead of reality in the sense of we never had the money to support what we were doing.

00:04:52.735 --> 00:04:54.810
We just didn't take salary we didn't make any money.

00:04:54.810 --> 00:04:55.600
We brought on friends.

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We didn't pay them, and so we'd always just lived ahead, to try and support it.

00:04:59.230 --> 00:05:07.660
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.

00:05:07.660 --> 00:05:08.360
We need to go do that.

00:05:08.370 --> 00:05:10.720
And then also bring on some partners who can really help us.

00:05:10.980 --> 00:05:13.529
Then that's when we went out and found some money, but it was never a good time either.

00:05:13.560 --> 00:05:19.389
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?

00:05:19.579 --> 00:05:21.180
But like BTC is at a hundred ish, right?

00:05:21.180 --> 00:05:22.850
It's all good time, everyone's up only right.

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I think it wasn't even that long ago, but it was like, not a good time.

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It was definitely down only, there's no cycles anymore.

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Everything's fucked.

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It's all bad.

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And so that we've always raised in that moment.

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And then even when things did start to come up, I think the liquid market's always ahead of the venture markets.

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And so just because tokens start to rip doesn't mean the venture markets change, and so it's still bad.

00:05:39.680 --> 00:05:43.194
And then when we finally did go out to raise, even the liquid markets started to go down again.

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So people are like, oh, it's no good.

00:05:44.384 --> 00:05:45.944
So it's always been a grind, honestly.

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And it's because RWAs have so much, it's not only the market timing, like we do RWAs obviously, right?

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And it's such baggage to it.

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I don't even want to hear about RWAs.

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I think most of the times, RWA is an acronym or something we don't care about.

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It's just a grouping of things that you don't do, we just don't touch, like it don't matter.

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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.

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And I get why people feel that way.

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Now I think we're doing it very differently.

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And I think the market's changed.

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And also technology has changed and there's ways to do it that are better now.

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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.

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And so those are all just hurdles.

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But I think that the benefit is, the more the better.

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It makes us stronger and it makes us tougher.

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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.

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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.

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I think it's good, it's not supposed to be easy.

00:06:34.588 --> 00:06:42.728
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.

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Was there a catalyst that you said, okay, I need to go into RWA.

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I must do something in this space.

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Was it the problem you had there was so much friction for these payments when you were doing the Web2 side of things?

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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?

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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.

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It took 6, 12, 18, 24, 36 months to get this asset on-chain.

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And that just seemed crazy to me, and it seemed like such an obvious problem at least.

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I don't know if it was the real problem, but at least it wasn't a problem.

00:07:21.865 --> 00:07:24.795
It shouldn't take you that much time and money to bring something on-chain, right?

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Who's going to do that?

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Like it's ridiculous.

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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?

00:07:42.435 --> 00:07:43.786
And that's the analogy that we drew from.

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It felt like that in tokenization, you have to do all this infrastructure work that everybody is doing all the time, right?

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It's not even a different product.

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Everyone's doing the same nonsense and stumbling through it because there's no clarity.

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And so it takes a long time.

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It's expensive and you make a lot of mistakes.

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And so that just seems ridiculous.

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Let's just start there and make that easier.

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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.

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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.

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And then that comes back to okay, what more technology you need.

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So that's how we got into was just like, we went one step at a time.

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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.

00:08:25.593 --> 00:08:33.673
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?

00:08:33.974 --> 00:08:36.903
Was there a lot of friction to do this bridge into the real world?

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Because it seems so obvious.

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Let's build what's real on-chain and bridge this over.

00:08:42.051 --> 00:08:43.230
It's a good question.

00:08:43.360 --> 00:08:44.961
I think, it's two things.

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One is definitely that.

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But I don't think that's the only part.

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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.

00:08:53.413 --> 00:08:57.083
But I think the second part of it is, there's both market dynamics, right?

00:08:57.323 --> 00:08:58.984
Which is there are two parts of it.

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I think there's always a bottoms up dynamic and a top down one.

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The bottoms up one is simple.

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You need user demand.

00:09:03.744 --> 00:09:06.374
You can bring anything on-chain if no one wants it it's still cooked, right?

00:09:06.594 --> 00:09:08.183
And so you have to start there.

00:09:08.254 --> 00:09:12.124
And I think two years ago, there's a unique moment in time where the off-chain yields are better than on-chain yields.

00:09:12.354 --> 00:09:17.048
You get 2% on pay on Compound, but really that's not as good as 5% treasury off-chain.

00:09:17.168 --> 00:09:19.698
And that led to a bunch of people sucking treasures on-chain.

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And that taught people about real yield about RWAs and showed demand and desire for these assets.

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That's number one.

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That's the more bottoms up area.

00:09:26.399 --> 00:09:30.129
And then the top down stuff is then all the stuff we talked about.

00:09:30.178 --> 00:09:36.219
Came out the new year, BTC ETF, BlackRock expanded with tokenization, putting a lot of energy into the market around this stuff, right?

00:09:36.369 --> 00:09:38.989
And the election, all these things have help propel it forward.

00:09:39.129 --> 00:09:40.879
So it's those market dynamics.

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I think because if the market dynamics are strong enough, the tooling doesn't matter, people will figure it out.

00:09:45.639 --> 00:09:51.359
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.

00:09:51.359 --> 00:09:53.719
But really I think the market dynamics are a big part of it.

00:09:54.019 --> 00:09:54.349
Awesome.

00:09:54.349 --> 00:09:55.099
That's fascinating.

00:09:55.099 --> 00:09:56.308
And you mentioned the tooling.

00:09:56.379 --> 00:09:59.499
I know Plume Network is a full stack L1 blockchain.

00:09:59.778 --> 00:10:06.639
For founders out there listening, how is this process of, okay I'm doing an L1, I'm picking this tech stack.

00:10:07.119 --> 00:10:12.038
I myself as a VC I get asked a lot of times the question, what chain should I build on?

00:10:12.038 --> 00:10:13.198
Should I go for Base?

00:10:13.198 --> 00:10:14.879
Should I go for Arbitrum?

00:10:14.899 --> 00:10:15.519
Should I do it in Solana?

00:10:15.818 --> 00:10:21.778
What sort of you are devising to navigate in these waters, which probably so much later on.

00:10:22.078 --> 00:10:30.958
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.

00:10:31.028 --> 00:10:33.828
But this is just my view at least, having been on the other side.

00:10:33.989 --> 00:10:35.578
Technology is one, right?

00:10:35.619 --> 00:10:37.749
You have to think about the technology, depends on the use case.

00:10:37.778 --> 00:10:40.318
If you're doing high frequency trading you need a high throughput chain.

00:10:40.469 --> 00:10:42.089
So that's why TPS is a thing, right?

00:10:42.349 --> 00:10:43.418
And so that's number one.

00:10:43.688 --> 00:10:44.658
I think that's one piece.

00:10:44.869 --> 00:10:47.849
Number two is you have to think about liquidity ultimately.

00:10:48.208 --> 00:10:49.759
And how much of it is there?

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Is it really supported?

00:10:50.599 --> 00:10:51.259
Is it growing?

00:10:51.269 --> 00:10:52.629
All those types of things, right?

00:10:52.839 --> 00:10:56.229
And then number three, I think you really have to understand the dynamics of the chain.

00:10:56.703 --> 00:10:59.573
Which is, what's the community, what's the ecosystem like?

00:10:59.833 --> 00:11:02.663
And you want to make sure that all three of those things are aligned.

00:11:02.964 --> 00:11:04.043
And they're in the same thing.

00:11:04.313 --> 00:11:09.423
Because when you look at things like Solana today, it's a very different community, a different field, a different ecosystem than Base.

00:11:09.714 --> 00:11:11.624
Even though sometimes they get compared.

00:11:11.953 --> 00:11:19.533
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.

00:11:19.553 --> 00:11:21.004
And not to be overly reductive, right?

00:11:21.283 --> 00:11:27.163
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.

00:11:27.313 --> 00:11:28.894
But I do think that there's truth in it.

00:11:29.089 --> 00:11:31.078
That community ends up having that feel.

00:11:31.139 --> 00:11:32.448
And you see a lot of degen activity.

00:11:32.469 --> 00:11:34.058
That's why pump works so well there.

00:11:34.288 --> 00:11:41.099
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.

00:11:41.318 --> 00:11:43.759
So you get great volume and adoption usage there for that type of thing.

00:11:43.859 --> 00:11:44.879
Versus you go to Base today.

00:11:45.048 --> 00:11:47.119
Very different feel, even though it's a similar thing, right?

00:11:47.208 --> 00:11:48.129
It's a very normie feel.

00:11:48.239 --> 00:11:50.208
Because it's normal, you've got like a bit of a social thing there.

00:11:50.208 --> 00:11:51.519
You've got like Friend.tech came out of there, right?

00:11:51.568 --> 00:11:53.119
You had Warpcast, it was still there, right?

00:11:53.288 --> 00:11:55.109
And you have those, even the memes are normal, right?

00:11:55.109 --> 00:11:57.152
And so that community, that audience is also different.

00:11:57.481 --> 00:12:01.621
And so depending on what you're trying to build and what you want to do for your protocol.

00:12:01.756 --> 00:12:04.876
That's how you should choose these things was where's they're going to be the fit for you?

00:12:04.876 --> 00:12:07.537
Because at the end of the day, all these things are infrastructure, right?

00:12:07.647 --> 00:12:10.307
They should help you achieve your goals as a founder.

00:12:10.437 --> 00:12:13.836
And for us at Plume, we've designed our ecosystem for this exact reason.

00:12:13.836 --> 00:12:14.937
Why it's technology perspective.

00:12:14.986 --> 00:12:25.356
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.

00:12:25.576 --> 00:12:31.037
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.

00:12:31.246 --> 00:12:34.736
And that's how you should choose between these ecosystems depending on what you want, right?

00:12:34.736 --> 00:12:36.927
And what's best for your protocol and the goals that you have.

00:12:37.226 --> 00:12:38.057
And they're not all the same.

00:12:38.067 --> 00:12:41.356
Liquidity is not like, all liquidity is not created equal, right?

00:12:41.496 --> 00:12:44.157
Liquidity differs depending on what you want.

00:12:44.206 --> 00:12:46.767
SOL liquidity is much smaller than ETH, as an example.

00:12:46.846 --> 00:12:48.226
SOL is what, 5 or 6 billion, right?

00:12:48.466 --> 00:12:50.836
ETH is, I forget what it is, 20, 30 billion?

00:12:50.836 --> 00:12:51.826
I don't even know the numbers.

00:12:51.826 --> 00:12:57.386
But ETH has way more liquidity, but it's just not the same feel at all, and you turn the SOL liquidity much faster.

00:12:57.397 --> 00:13:00.517
And in many places, it's going to be a better place for people to build than ETH L1.

00:13:00.667 --> 00:13:01.177
What do you think?

00:13:01.187 --> 00:13:01.677
Does that make sense?

00:13:01.976 --> 00:13:02.726
Yeah, I think it makes sense.

00:13:02.866 --> 00:13:05.017
And I was wondering regarding Plume, how do you plan it?

00:13:05.017 --> 00:13:06.486
How do you plan to access liquidity?

00:13:06.506 --> 00:13:08.966
Is making this L1 EVM compatible?

00:13:09.376 --> 00:13:12.726
Is it bringing through bridge with Solana ecosystem?

00:13:13.206 --> 00:13:14.427
We're an EVM chain.

00:13:14.496 --> 00:13:15.626
That's a starting point, right?

00:13:15.797 --> 00:13:19.756
Like at the end of the day, we start EVM first because that's where a lot of the liquidity is.

00:13:20.006 --> 00:13:21.267
And that's what I think is important.

00:13:21.326 --> 00:13:24.876
Now, but also I would say, look, it's not about where things are going as well.

00:13:25.121 --> 00:13:29.011
And a lot of attention on the SVM, a lot of attention on other ecosystems, other VMs, right?

00:13:29.022 --> 00:13:29.652
And things like that.

00:13:29.652 --> 00:13:33.741
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.

00:13:33.981 --> 00:13:35.011
So we're open.

00:13:35.081 --> 00:13:36.162
I'm not religious about any of these things.

00:13:36.511 --> 00:13:38.662
But I do think it's important to keep an open mind on all of it.

00:13:39.162 --> 00:13:39.772
Yeah, for sure.

00:13:39.772 --> 00:13:44.532
Like over the years, I have seen some founders going with other chains with much less liquidity.

00:13:44.591 --> 00:13:52.741
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.

00:13:52.741 --> 00:13:54.591
And then who's going to come and build on it?

00:13:54.611 --> 00:13:57.471
Who's going to come here and yeah, and develop?

00:13:57.876 --> 00:14:02.976
Then they get into a grand sort of program and it just basically paying for people to come in and build.

00:14:02.976 --> 00:14:04.726
There's not that organic growth.

00:14:04.726 --> 00:14:07.976
So I think that's a really good point about EVM.

00:14:08.307 --> 00:14:11.317
And I was looking into Plume and there's two core products.

00:14:11.576 --> 00:14:15.596
If you want to expand more on those, I think super interesting what you're doing.

00:14:15.897 --> 00:14:18.726
Yeah, so it goes back to this idea about this full stack ecosystem, right?

00:14:18.726 --> 00:14:23.557
Which is, we focus a lot on making it easy to interact with.

00:14:23.576 --> 00:14:27.466
So our core product is the blockchain itself, we maintain an EVM chain.

00:14:27.517 --> 00:14:29.567
Now, we have two products that are surrounding that.

00:14:29.567 --> 00:14:32.157
We want Plume to be the easiest place to bring things on-chain.

00:14:32.227 --> 00:14:32.927
That's the first piece.

00:14:33.118 --> 00:14:36.467
And then the second thing is to make it an easy place to execute and transact on those things on-chain.

00:14:36.658 --> 00:14:38.967
So the blockchain itself, is the second piece.

00:14:39.187 --> 00:14:41.467
The first thing, how do you make it easy to bring things on-chain?

00:14:41.677 --> 00:14:42.817
We have two products here.

00:14:42.868 --> 00:14:46.607
And a lot of people say, maybe even zooming out, a lot of people think RWAs equals tokenization.

00:14:46.957 --> 00:14:49.177
It's part of the story, it's just not enough though.

00:14:49.288 --> 00:14:54.332
Like at the end of the day, I think tokenization is a subset of what it is, but it can be much more.

00:14:54.413 --> 00:14:57.852
Like you can buy the underlying, but you also just own a digital representation of it.

00:14:57.932 --> 00:14:58.923
And you can just bring on the data.

00:14:58.923 --> 00:15:02.163
So I think that to me is like what is really interesting and important and what matters.

00:15:02.322 --> 00:15:07.363
If we look at those types of things today, there are two products we've built to support that.

00:15:07.582 --> 00:15:09.523
Number one is something called Plume Arc.

00:15:09.592 --> 00:15:11.793
Plume Arc is our tokenization engine.

00:15:11.812 --> 00:15:20.462
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.

00:15:20.783 --> 00:15:22.523
And we make it very easy, fast and simple to do it.

00:15:22.572 --> 00:15:25.403
And we use all the best and the latest stuff out there to make that happen.

00:15:25.692 --> 00:15:26.572
Instead of building something else.

00:15:26.572 --> 00:15:27.182
That's number one.

00:15:27.192 --> 00:15:29.873
We want to make it easy for anyone because there's more stuff off-chain than on-chain.

00:15:30.283 --> 00:15:34.503
So you want to make sure the gate and the bridge to bringing these things on is as easy as possible, right?

00:15:34.653 --> 00:15:36.842
And today, a lot of these products don't exist.

00:15:36.883 --> 00:15:38.082
They suck or they're expensive.

00:15:38.557 --> 00:15:39.817
And so that's a big barrier.

00:15:40.028 --> 00:15:43.707
Number two, this is where I think our view is different than most people in RWAs.

00:15:43.908 --> 00:15:47.768
Is that, to me real world assets is not just like a tokenized treasury bill.

00:15:48.107 --> 00:15:49.518
If that was it'd be incredibly boring.

00:15:49.738 --> 00:15:54.087
To me what's interesting about doing things on-chain is you can do new things that couldn't be done before.

00:15:54.087 --> 00:15:56.018
It's not about mirroring the real world on-chain.

00:15:56.253 --> 00:15:59.753
It's about using that as a foundational piece to create new things that can be done more.

00:15:59.923 --> 00:16:03.663
And one of those things is by bringing real world data on-chain that's often ignored.

00:16:04.052 --> 00:16:05.982
We have a product called Plume Nexus, that's what this is.

00:16:06.143 --> 00:16:09.523
Today, if you look at the Oracles today, they give you crypto prices, right?

00:16:09.773 --> 00:16:12.413
So I can get the price of Ether, BTC or different assets.

00:16:12.643 --> 00:16:16.038
Now, if I wanted to say, CPI data, inflation data in the US.

00:16:16.038 --> 00:16:20.798
If I wanted GDP data, if I wanted crime rates, if I wanted anything else, it's not easy to get.

00:16:20.998 --> 00:16:24.467
So we want to also make that easy to bring those things on-chain so you can begin to use them.

00:16:24.467 --> 00:16:28.418
So as a simple example, one of our protocols makes it easy for you to take out like a levered long.

00:16:28.418 --> 00:16:31.057
So you can take like a 50x lev long on Pokemon cards.

00:16:31.357 --> 00:16:34.357
And you don't have to tokenize every card in the world to do that, right?

00:16:34.638 --> 00:16:39.422
What you can do is just bring on a price feed of these cards and then build a market around it.

00:16:39.662 --> 00:16:41.562
And then put it into perp stacks, and now I can trade that thing.

00:16:41.902 --> 00:16:43.932
That to me is where it starts to get interesting and exciting.

00:16:44.022 --> 00:16:45.981
Is you can start to create new things you couldn't do before.

00:16:46.001 --> 00:16:47.951
Because you can take that same analogy and go even further.

00:16:48.211 --> 00:16:51.241
So if we're bringing on a digital representation of a Pokemon card, I can go even further.

00:16:51.351 --> 00:16:53.392
I can bring on a digital representation of something that doesn't exist in the real world.

00:16:53.562 --> 00:16:57.741
I can start to do things with one of our protocols that makes it easier for you to trade cultures and countries.

00:16:58.081 --> 00:17:00.381
You can level long America and short China.

00:17:00.591 --> 00:17:01.322
And what is that?

00:17:01.422 --> 00:17:05.781
Behind that, America is a collection of like 50 data feeds, 50 data points, right?

00:17:05.781 --> 00:17:10.412
Again, it's GDP, it's population growth, it's sentiment, it's crime rate, it's all these things, right?

00:17:10.682 --> 00:17:13.221
And you weight each one differently, you put it into an index, and you have a chart.

00:17:13.521 --> 00:17:14.501
And now I can trade that.

00:17:14.501 --> 00:17:17.541
And that's the simplest way to go from idea to position.

00:17:17.592 --> 00:17:19.241
Or be able to take a stance on something.

00:17:19.311 --> 00:17:20.511
And that's something you couldn't do before.

00:17:20.922 --> 00:17:22.761
Everything today in the real world is done by proxy.

00:17:23.061 --> 00:17:24.852
If I wanted to bet on AI today, what do you do?

00:17:24.862 --> 00:17:25.781
You buy Nvidia stock.

00:17:25.786 --> 00:17:27.336
But it's a really poor way to bet on AI.

00:17:27.395 --> 00:17:28.986
Because one, Nvidia stock is very expensive.

00:17:29.135 --> 00:17:31.546
Two, you have to think about a million things when you're betting on an equity.

00:17:31.715 --> 00:17:33.195
What do you want to bet on the actual thing?

00:17:33.195 --> 00:17:35.395
So like today, if I want to bet on Sam Altman, then what do I do?

00:17:35.405 --> 00:17:36.286
I'll probably buy WorldCoin.

00:17:36.586 --> 00:17:38.435
And that's exactly a WorldCoin trades.

00:17:38.465 --> 00:17:39.935
When Sam gets fired, WorldCoin dumps.

00:17:39.935 --> 00:17:40.996
When Sam gets rehired, it pumps.

00:17:40.996 --> 00:17:44.425
When Sword V2 comes out, WorldCoin pumps, like that all of these things are done by proxies.

00:17:44.435 --> 00:17:45.816
If you want a BlackRock proxy, what do you do?

00:17:45.816 --> 00:17:46.405
You buy Ondo.

00:17:46.455 --> 00:17:50.566
I think that to me is where you can get a closer representation of what's going on and like how to mirror that.

00:17:50.566 --> 00:17:52.246
And that's another way to interact with the real world.

00:17:52.415 --> 00:17:54.576
That you couldn't do with just pure tokenization, right?

00:17:54.796 --> 00:17:56.855
Even if you flip open DEXScreener any day of the week.

00:17:57.036 --> 00:17:58.076
It's all real things.

00:17:58.205 --> 00:17:59.776
These are all representations of the real.

00:17:59.776 --> 00:18:01.395
Because people want to speculate on the real.

00:18:01.395 --> 00:18:03.296
People want to interact with the real world on-chain.

00:18:03.316 --> 00:18:04.425
But it's done in a really poor way.

00:18:04.435 --> 00:18:07.465
You either have to just buy a proxy token at a 60 billion FDV.

00:18:07.766 --> 00:18:11.736
Or you go into a 10K liquidity checkpoint and hope that works.

00:18:11.826 --> 00:18:16.365
And so to me, that's like what we're trying to do in addition to core tokenization, right?

00:18:16.375 --> 00:18:19.486
You bring a lot of things on so you can access the underlying asset.

00:18:19.786 --> 00:18:20.935
You can also do a speculative thing.

00:18:20.935 --> 00:18:23.455
You combine these things and that's what creates liquidity in markets.

00:18:23.635 --> 00:18:26.056
You combine speculation with owning the underlying.

00:18:26.056 --> 00:18:27.726
That's what the commodities markets of the Forex works.

00:18:27.726 --> 00:18:28.526
That's how these things happen.

00:18:28.526 --> 00:18:29.715
So it's about combining these together.

00:18:29.715 --> 00:18:36.276
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.

00:18:36.576 --> 00:18:36.875
Yeah.

00:18:36.935 --> 00:18:37.826
Very interesting.

00:18:37.885 --> 00:18:53.385
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.

00:18:53.746 --> 00:18:54.125
That's right.

00:18:54.175 --> 00:18:56.135
One, let's say you're doing tokenized invoice.

00:18:56.296 --> 00:18:57.096
You can bring that on-chain.

00:18:57.115 --> 00:19:01.465
One, it's distribution, finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding users, people to hold that stuff.

00:19:01.516 --> 00:19:03.476
Number two, it's also an access liquidity.

00:19:03.615 --> 00:19:05.355
Third, it's composability into an ecosystem.

00:19:05.516 --> 00:19:09.455
Which is making sure that if someone's holding an invoice token, you can then go take a loan out against it.

00:19:09.455 --> 00:19:10.615
We can help see that and set that up, right?

00:19:10.615 --> 00:19:11.296
And make that a thing.

00:19:11.445 --> 00:19:17.056
And the last thing is to be able to give that asset more context and more color, meaning put this into an index.

00:19:17.215 --> 00:19:21.115
Maybe somebody wants to create a new index of all the different tokenized assets out here, right?

00:19:21.165 --> 00:19:22.336
Or let's say it's a Medicaid.

00:19:22.355 --> 00:19:23.066
We have this today.

00:19:23.205 --> 00:19:24.296
It's Medicaid invoices.

00:19:24.298 --> 00:19:31.038
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?

00:19:31.077 --> 00:19:32.278
And it basically never gets rejected.

00:19:32.428 --> 00:19:36.178
But you have to take a long time, so people can sell them and do invoice financing against them at very low risk.

00:19:36.298 --> 00:19:37.448
And so that's a very clean asset.

00:19:37.488 --> 00:19:40.198
And so maybe you want an index of all healthcare stuff, right?

00:19:40.337 --> 00:19:46.157
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.

00:19:46.157 --> 00:19:48.157
And now people can allocate into that index.

00:19:48.397 --> 00:19:49.907
And so to me, that's like how it goes.

00:19:49.928 --> 00:19:52.667
As someone who wants to tokenize an individual asset, you can come do that.

00:19:52.807 --> 00:20:01.917
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.

00:20:02.018 --> 00:20:06.387
If you want to do stuff in like real estate on-chain, you shouldn't have to own an apartment building, right?

00:20:06.518 --> 00:20:09.807
If you want to do stuff in like collectibles, you shouldn't have to own a collectible store.

00:20:10.018 --> 00:20:11.567
You should just be able to come in and experiment with this stuff.

00:20:11.627 --> 00:20:23.407
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?

00:20:23.407 --> 00:20:24.518
And create things that I want.

00:20:24.688 --> 00:20:26.597
So you can just expand the market of builders here.

00:20:26.887 --> 00:20:28.077
I think that's important too.

00:20:28.498 --> 00:20:39.867
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.

00:20:39.938 --> 00:20:40.958
Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:20:41.008 --> 00:20:45.038
And that's been our belief from the start, which is many things in RWAs are one thing only.

00:20:45.488 --> 00:20:48.278
Just treasuries, just private credits, right?

00:20:48.367 --> 00:20:49.958
I think the value is in diversity.

00:20:50.272 --> 00:20:51.282
It's an esoteric items.

00:20:51.282 --> 00:20:53.833
And we're crypto people, which is I don't control any of this.

00:20:53.952 --> 00:20:54.663
And I shouldn't.

00:20:55.063 --> 00:20:56.383
This is an open ecosystem.

00:20:56.462 --> 00:20:57.623
Anyone can build whatever they want.

00:20:57.653 --> 00:20:58.992
The market will choose and decide.

00:20:59.143 --> 00:21:02.542
And the only way to build that market dynamic is to have everything.

00:21:02.863 --> 00:21:04.722
And we're also just like aggressive people.

00:21:04.722 --> 00:21:05.772
I do want everything on Plume.

00:21:05.833 --> 00:21:06.522
I want every road out.

00:21:06.522 --> 00:21:10.252
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?

00:21:10.252 --> 00:21:14.972
You can come to Plume Trade, you can trade, you can trade sports cards, there's expensive art, there's classic wine.

00:21:14.972 --> 00:21:15.863
There's high end liquor.

00:21:15.893 --> 00:21:17.202
There's like low end with liquor, right?

00:21:17.333 --> 00:21:19.113
You can do things like loyalty points.

00:21:19.113 --> 00:21:20.823
You have tickets, all kinds of stuff.

00:21:20.823 --> 00:21:22.343
You can rent tables at clubs or whatever.

00:21:22.343 --> 00:21:23.442
You can do all these things together.

00:21:23.762 --> 00:21:26.643
But also you could do treasuries, you can do sovereign debt.

00:21:26.752 --> 00:21:28.313
You can finance a large company.

00:21:28.323 --> 00:21:29.792
You can own a piece of hotel or whatever it is, right?

00:21:29.792 --> 00:21:31.093
It's all about all those things at the same time.

00:21:31.393 --> 00:21:31.583
Yeah.

00:21:31.613 --> 00:21:32.282
Fascinating.

00:21:32.633 --> 00:21:37.192
And regarding, do you have any plans in launching a token and how would the token interact?

00:21:37.458 --> 00:21:41.548
Is that the, I don't even know how to pronounce it, but is it the lounge part?

00:21:41.548 --> 00:21:44.428
Because I've never seen something like this.

00:21:44.428 --> 00:21:45.387
It's very fascinating.

00:21:45.688 --> 00:21:47.938
So mainnet will come out soon, in the new year.

00:21:47.948 --> 00:21:54.952
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.

00:21:55.252 --> 00:21:57.633
How is the token going to interact with this ecosystem?

00:21:57.633 --> 00:22:00.442
Is it necessary to do transactions?

00:22:00.448 --> 00:22:01.597
There's a bunch of ways to do it.

00:22:01.647 --> 00:22:12.847
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.

00:22:13.282 --> 00:22:15.022
Because that's how they think about real world assets.

00:22:15.022 --> 00:22:16.103
That's how you get exposure to it.

00:22:16.103 --> 00:22:18.292
And then of course, over time to me it's part of the onboarding.

00:22:18.303 --> 00:22:21.202
So it's part of the path to becoming more and more involved in RWAs, right?

00:22:21.442 --> 00:22:30.803
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.

00:22:30.803 --> 00:22:31.073
Great.

00:22:31.202 --> 00:22:35.432
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.

00:22:35.432 --> 00:22:37.083
And then maybe you start to build your own baskets.

00:22:37.232 --> 00:22:41.423
And so to me, that's like the progression of a lot of usage when it comes to this kind of stuff.

00:22:41.423 --> 00:22:54.403
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?

00:22:54.403 --> 00:22:57.303
When you hold this token, you should get a light feel of what the whole thing is.

00:22:57.353 --> 00:22:57.923
And what is that?

00:22:57.932 --> 00:23:01.722
It's going to be yield, it's going to be exposure to different types of assets.

00:23:01.732 --> 00:23:03.583
It's going to be usability across these things.

00:23:03.583 --> 00:23:05.313
So that's how I think about it at least.

00:23:05.343 --> 00:23:11.758
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.

00:23:11.788 --> 00:23:13.488
It's not just a token for the network.

00:23:13.657 --> 00:23:18.768
It is the first and maybe original point of RWA interaction for most people on-chain.

00:23:19.067 --> 00:23:26.887
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.

00:23:27.228 --> 00:23:33.448
And that raises the question is, I believe yesterday you finalized your first series A round with you raised 20 million dollar.

00:23:33.448 --> 00:23:34.978
Congrats on that.

00:23:35.278 --> 00:23:43.117
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.

00:23:43.417 --> 00:23:44.417
It's not very fun.

00:23:44.597 --> 00:23:47.567
I always liked telling my story, and also hearing real feedback.

00:23:47.637 --> 00:23:50.478
Like I'm not shy about that, some people believe what we're doing.

00:23:50.478 --> 00:23:51.347
Some people think it's nonsense.

00:23:51.367 --> 00:23:51.938
That's okay.

00:23:52.117 --> 00:23:55.518
So being on the streets and telling our story, I think it's great.

00:23:55.863 --> 00:23:56.363
No issues.

00:23:56.373 --> 00:24:05.613
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.

00:24:05.923 --> 00:24:08.323
Because people think we'll just, it's another centrifuge.

00:24:08.323 --> 00:24:09.182
It's do people want that?

00:24:09.182 --> 00:24:10.323
It's not clear that people do.

00:24:10.343 --> 00:24:11.207
So there's that baggage.

00:24:11.227 --> 00:24:18.317
And the number two, when people think about RWAs, they tend to think regulation, TradeFi, institutional stuff, which is part of the story again.

00:24:18.317 --> 00:24:21.067
But you can see like from the things that we're talking about, it's more than that, right?

00:24:21.086 --> 00:24:21.946
To me it's more DeFi.

00:24:21.997 --> 00:24:24.027
It's more crypto than TradeFi stuff.

00:24:24.076 --> 00:24:25.886
People tend to think that as well, which is also a barrier.

00:24:25.987 --> 00:24:30.666
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.

00:24:30.946 --> 00:24:33.277
Or we'll do some new AI token and something ecosystem.

00:24:33.277 --> 00:24:37.856
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.

00:24:37.866 --> 00:24:38.957
It's a little bit different than that.

00:24:39.176 --> 00:24:40.876
And so it ends up being tough, to get it.

00:24:41.086 --> 00:24:44.886
Fortunately, we've found some great investors and great backers who really do understand this.

00:24:44.896 --> 00:24:50.487
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.

00:24:50.487 --> 00:24:58.257
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.

00:24:58.267 --> 00:25:00.386
So it's been great, but yeah, it's not straightforward.

00:25:00.396 --> 00:25:04.487
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.

00:25:04.557 --> 00:25:07.376
We just spin up the protocol, we get some audits and we send it, and we can start.

00:25:07.376 --> 00:25:12.416
Especially let's call it a BTC Land, you can drop a billion dollars in TVL and the protocol like pretty quickly, right?

00:25:12.646 --> 00:25:15.096
Now, making it useful, that's a different question.

00:25:15.106 --> 00:25:19.227
But at least like getting the initial bits going, it's like fairly straightforward to make some of these bets.

00:25:19.227 --> 00:25:21.916
And so first of all, we're doing just has a lot of extra dimensions.

00:25:22.207 --> 00:25:23.586
And extra dimensions means thinking.

00:25:23.886 --> 00:25:25.876
And some people don't like to think, that makes it hard.

00:25:25.876 --> 00:25:25.895
Yeah.

00:25:26.317 --> 00:25:27.446
I think it makes a lot of sense.

00:25:27.487 --> 00:25:41.856
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.

00:25:42.242 --> 00:25:43.182
It's always a tricky line.

00:25:43.452 --> 00:25:45.073
And you see this a VC obviously, right?

00:25:45.073 --> 00:25:47.173
I was invested before too, I did venture for a bit.

00:25:47.173 --> 00:25:48.762
I was mostly a founder, but I've been a VC too.

00:25:48.762 --> 00:25:53.593
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.

00:25:53.603 --> 00:25:56.282
I think VCs are wrong a lot too, for it's worth, the founders are often wrong too.

00:25:56.373 --> 00:26:03.252
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.

00:26:03.363 --> 00:26:05.462
So people can really get overly focused and attached.

00:26:05.462 --> 00:26:11.712
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.

00:26:11.853 --> 00:26:16.702
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?

00:26:17.002 --> 00:26:19.242
Generally you're chasing the deal versus picking a new thing.

00:26:19.353 --> 00:26:20.803
That was my experience with VC.

00:26:20.853 --> 00:26:22.613
It was a lot less picking than I thought.

00:26:22.893 --> 00:26:26.673
It was more, we all know the hot deal is more trying to get in, and that was my experience with it.

00:26:26.692 --> 00:26:29.288
And so if that's the case, then you shouldn't listen too much either.

00:26:29.522 --> 00:26:30.272
At least in the beginning.

00:26:30.633 --> 00:26:34.303
And so if that's the case, knowing when to call it as a big thing is a big deal.

00:26:34.353 --> 00:26:36.863
But also staying true to like what you want matters a lot.

00:26:36.952 --> 00:26:38.502
I guess I'm curious your view too.

00:26:38.833 --> 00:26:42.393
I always think there's two parts of a great startup or a great company, a great project.

00:26:42.803 --> 00:26:44.222
You have to have a great founder.

00:26:44.583 --> 00:26:45.682
That's a hard requirement.

00:26:45.913 --> 00:26:47.813
No great founder, you're fucked out the gate.

00:26:47.853 --> 00:26:53.762
There's just no way, because that's one thing you cannot change, but something you also need to is a great market.

00:26:54.002 --> 00:26:58.643
And without a great market, there's nothing either, and so you can have a great founder, crap market company still fucked.

00:26:58.692 --> 00:27:02.383
If you have a great market, bad founder, it could still work, but probably not, you need a great founder.

00:27:02.403 --> 00:27:07.553
And so for the founder, what you have to really believe is are you in a great market?

00:27:07.613 --> 00:27:08.903
And is this the right market?

00:27:08.913 --> 00:27:09.863
Is there something new here?

00:27:09.863 --> 00:27:11.242
Something interesting that's actually happening?

00:27:11.452 --> 00:27:14.792
And if it is, it's obvious, like the fundamentals will always tell you the truth.

00:27:15.167 --> 00:27:16.367
It doesn't matter what VCs say.

00:27:16.528 --> 00:27:19.167
If people are using the hell out of the thing, you're gonna be fine.

00:27:19.667 --> 00:27:21.268
If everyone's dying, it's gonna be fine.

00:27:21.317 --> 00:27:22.167
It may not be easy.

00:27:22.167 --> 00:27:24.147
It may raise a lower price than you want or whatever.

00:27:24.228 --> 00:27:25.678
But ultimately, it's always on you as a founder.

00:27:25.708 --> 00:27:28.567
You have to communicate the story, and you have to be responsible for that.

00:27:28.587 --> 00:27:30.428
You have to keep the business financed.

00:27:30.728 --> 00:27:31.407
Yeah, absolutely.

00:27:31.488 --> 00:27:34.157
And what do you think is the core component for a great founder?

00:27:34.157 --> 00:27:35.468
Is it resilience?

00:27:35.488 --> 00:27:36.708
Is it not giving up?

00:27:36.768 --> 00:27:40.897
Is it not sleeping and just putting everything into this project?

00:27:41.198 --> 00:27:42.448
I think it's a bunch of those things.

00:27:42.548 --> 00:27:45.303
At the very core it's just not giving up.

00:27:45.512 --> 00:27:50.482
It's being dumb enough to not give up, honestly, because in many ways you should.

00:27:50.623 --> 00:27:55.863
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.

00:27:56.163 --> 00:27:57.863
So I think at the core level it's that.

00:27:58.163 --> 00:28:07.292
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.

00:28:07.577 --> 00:28:10.417
And get a little bit more done and maybe that's great engineering talent.

00:28:10.708 --> 00:28:13.698
And you're just like, when it comes out, you can recruit engineers like nobody else.

00:28:13.867 --> 00:28:17.518
Or you can write the best product and build the best protocol, like super quickly or whatever that is.

00:28:17.567 --> 00:28:18.647
Or maybe it's going to market.

00:28:18.657 --> 00:28:20.653
You're incredible selling, and you can get that done.

00:28:20.863 --> 00:28:21.772
Maybe it's raising money.

00:28:21.782 --> 00:28:23.432
You can raise more money, which you can hire the rest.

00:28:23.432 --> 00:28:26.532
Like you just need the juice and you can always tell when it's there.

00:28:26.603 --> 00:28:31.512
It's hard to articulate, when you see it, you don't even know exactly what it is, there's some magic there.

00:28:31.813 --> 00:28:34.682
Doesn't mean it always works, but you have to see that at least.

00:28:34.813 --> 00:28:36.472
And if that's not there, I think you're cooked.

00:28:36.502 --> 00:28:38.192
But in my opinion, that's what a great founder is.

00:28:38.232 --> 00:28:41.313
You always know when you see it, but it's very hard to say what it is.

00:28:41.603 --> 00:28:43.192
And after it's easy, right?

00:28:43.252 --> 00:28:44.202
You can always explain it.

00:28:44.212 --> 00:28:45.782
But in the moment, it's ah, there's something weird.

00:28:46.083 --> 00:28:47.643
I know it's good, but it'll work.

00:28:47.643 --> 00:28:48.942
But usually these things are messy too.

00:28:49.053 --> 00:28:53.673
My experience was like, it's always messy, like someone who's great at something is usually very bad at something else.

00:28:53.712 --> 00:28:54.553
And that's just how it works.

00:28:54.553 --> 00:28:57.613
You have to learn to ignore that or at least understand how to compliment it to make it work.

00:28:57.913 --> 00:28:59.063
Because that's how founders are.

00:28:59.063 --> 00:29:00.292
Like the crazier, the better.

00:29:00.633 --> 00:29:04.137
But also didn't look crazy, you know, that's also an issue, so I don't know.

00:29:04.137 --> 00:29:04.647
What do you think?

00:29:04.948 --> 00:29:15.847
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.

00:29:16.137 --> 00:29:22.708
And maybe it's just better if I can manage everyone and they have those outputs resulting in, wow, this is fascinating.

00:29:22.998 --> 00:29:27.917
And sometimes I see with founders, sometimes devs that are like, no, I need to code, I need to keep coding.

00:29:28.337 --> 00:29:32.468
And you can hire someone that's better than you that's been doing this for a while.

00:29:32.708 --> 00:29:36.028
And then you should achieve velocity and then things are moving.

00:29:36.428 --> 00:29:41.397
So it's an humbling lesson and we have to look a lot of times into ourselves and think.

00:29:41.843 --> 00:29:46.343
And cross that line and find the balance where should I keep getting involved?

00:29:46.343 --> 00:29:49.942
Should I keep trying this or step back and look into the old picture?

00:29:50.163 --> 00:29:51.222
If this is right.

00:29:51.522 --> 00:29:58.742
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?

00:29:58.762 --> 00:30:14.455
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?

00:30:14.756 --> 00:30:16.066
I'm very biased to this.

00:30:16.566 --> 00:30:17.625
I think you have to be here.

00:30:17.955 --> 00:30:21.462
And I think here's actually New York for what it's worth at this point in crypto.

00:30:21.462 --> 00:30:24.833
If you're doing AI, you got to be an SF, but if you're doing crypto, you got to be in New York.

00:30:24.883 --> 00:30:26.782
And there's a pro and con to it.

00:30:26.932 --> 00:30:31.117
In the sense that the pro is, you're around a lot of like minded people.

00:30:31.167 --> 00:30:33.008
It generally is going to raise your ambition level.

00:30:33.008 --> 00:30:41.887
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.

00:30:41.938 --> 00:30:43.657
You're just going around a lot of the nonsense all the time, right?

00:30:43.827 --> 00:30:46.307
The downside is you could fall in love with that.

00:30:46.468 --> 00:30:49.387
And forget the real thing that matters, which is building the product, making it work.

00:30:49.438 --> 00:30:52.667
And so like some people go there and just get lost in the mix and it's all they do all day, right?

00:30:52.667 --> 00:30:55.417
You're just like going to events and meeting people and you know everybody, but you build nothing.

00:30:55.538 --> 00:30:59.057
And so that's the benefit of not being here, which you can focus on building something great.

00:30:59.198 --> 00:31:01.298
And the truth is, if you build something great, they'll come find you.

00:31:01.597 --> 00:31:02.127
That's the reality.

00:31:02.127 --> 00:31:03.807
If you build something great, like people will find you.

00:31:03.807 --> 00:31:04.837
You don't have to go find anybody.

00:31:04.837 --> 00:31:08.198
But the problem is sometimes it's not always easy to build something great.

00:31:08.258 --> 00:31:10.647
Not everyone can, not everyone is Jeff, not everyone can build hyper liquid.

00:31:10.647 --> 00:31:12.367
It's learning, and that's where it's good for that.

00:31:12.367 --> 00:31:15.087
And it can increase your cycle time, when it goes to those things.

00:31:15.087 --> 00:31:18.678
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.

00:31:18.978 --> 00:31:19.438
Yeah, for sure.

00:31:19.438 --> 00:31:20.657
I think that's a great advice.

00:31:20.718 --> 00:31:26.337
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.

00:31:26.738 --> 00:31:28.307
And then, I haven't been building anything.

00:31:28.317 --> 00:31:36.502
There's no product that's actually delivered over these last couple of weeks or months and you just found yourself socializing over.

00:31:36.813 --> 00:31:37.653
Yes, exactly.

00:31:37.853 --> 00:31:39.232
Made a lot of friends, but that's it.

00:31:39.526 --> 00:31:49.286
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.

00:31:49.470 --> 00:31:58.490
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?

00:31:58.953 --> 00:32:00.933
Man, probably a lot of things to be honest.

00:32:01.034 --> 00:32:02.183
There's a million things.

00:32:02.598 --> 00:32:03.949
But they're all too specific.

00:32:03.949 --> 00:32:09.368
I think the real thing I would say to myself, which is the accumulation of all these things is to just believe it more.

00:32:09.759 --> 00:32:15.979
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.

00:32:16.019 --> 00:32:17.338
Because we were very practical.

00:32:17.338 --> 00:32:20.719
We wanted to be sure that there was something going on here.

00:32:20.739 --> 00:32:23.969
We wanted to really try and test, and talk to people.

00:32:23.969 --> 00:32:25.308
And I still think it's the right thing.

00:32:25.358 --> 00:32:27.538
I would say this, we tried not to hire people to raise money.

00:32:27.923 --> 00:32:32.483
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.

00:32:32.503 --> 00:32:38.134
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.

00:32:38.134 --> 00:32:40.564
If it doesn't, sorry, tough shit, like that's not how we do things.

00:32:40.773 --> 00:32:43.653
But on the other end, there's an argument you made that they should do things.

00:32:43.703 --> 00:32:44.933
Do it all at the same time, right?

00:32:44.933 --> 00:32:45.683
Because we believe.

00:32:45.703 --> 00:32:48.824
So don't wait to raise money and hire people, hire them now and move even faster.

00:32:48.884 --> 00:32:52.653
We always had maximum belief in what we were doing, but we were very practical about how we built things.

00:32:52.733 --> 00:32:57.743
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.

00:32:58.023 --> 00:33:02.090
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.

00:33:02.280 --> 00:33:06.171
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.

00:33:06.171 --> 00:33:09.411
I think if we just rushed even faster, we could have done even more by now, which is great.

00:33:09.471 --> 00:33:10.631
I think that was great advice.

00:33:10.691 --> 00:33:16.230
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.

00:33:16.530 --> 00:33:18.780
Chris, where should people follow you?

00:33:19.050 --> 00:33:20.990
Any socials, any websites?

00:33:21.298 --> 00:33:23.108
We're classic people in crypto Twitter.

00:33:23.108 --> 00:33:23.969
Like we're all over the place.

00:33:23.969 --> 00:33:24.898
It's@plumenetwork, right?

00:33:24.919 --> 00:33:25.888
I'm@chriseyin.

00:33:26.211 --> 00:33:27.001
So you can find me anytime.

00:33:27.201 --> 00:33:27.801
We're in discord.

00:33:27.801 --> 00:33:29.612
We're in telegram, I live in telegram all day.

00:33:29.612 --> 00:33:30.442
I'm sure you do too.

00:33:30.662 --> 00:33:31.872
That's like where to find us anytime.

00:33:31.872 --> 00:33:33.162
And then we're always at different events.

00:33:33.332 --> 00:33:42.501
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.

00:33:42.511 --> 00:33:43.172
And we do workshops.

00:33:43.172 --> 00:33:44.311
It's not even about these conferences.

00:33:44.311 --> 00:33:46.682
So I would say online we're always around.

00:33:46.946 --> 00:33:51.326
Anytime, come ping us anytime and then secondarily, if you want to do something in real life, like we're always around too.

00:33:51.326 --> 00:33:54.257
I'm always around ping anytime and we'd love to chat with anybody and everybody.

00:33:54.267 --> 00:33:57.836
If you have anything around Plume or even not just to talk about crypto and shoot the shit.

00:33:57.846 --> 00:33:59.126
Like we're always, we love that too.

00:33:59.126 --> 00:34:03.616
And one thing I'm curious, if I'm building a project and I want to get involved with Arc.

00:34:03.787 --> 00:34:07.817
Is there a formal process that I should submit or get early access platform?

00:34:08.117 --> 00:34:08.387
Totally.

00:34:08.507 --> 00:34:08.686
Yeah.

00:34:08.806 --> 00:34:12.083
Just hit the website and just click on Arc and there should be a button to take you there.

00:34:12.083 --> 00:34:15.293
And I would say there's forms to get like early access because look, it's a real thing.

00:34:15.324 --> 00:34:18.434
Tokenizing and we're tokenizing, in some cases, hundreds of millions of billions of dollars.

00:34:18.603 --> 00:34:21.713
And that's not something you just click a few buttons and do without some guidance.

00:34:21.764 --> 00:34:25.583
I always hated when the first experience we have with someone is through a form, I think it's terrible.

00:34:25.603 --> 00:34:28.914
I hate filling out forms and I just usually just fill it out in blank and just move on.

00:34:29.184 --> 00:34:30.534
So if you don't want to fill it out, don't fill it out.

00:34:30.594 --> 00:34:32.684
Just ping us, don't let the form be the gating factor.

00:34:32.684 --> 00:34:42.434
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.

00:34:42.434 --> 00:34:43.653
Chris, it was a pleasure to have you.

00:34:43.954 --> 00:34:44.603
Thanks so much for having me.

00:34:44.603 --> 00:34:45.054
I appreciate it.

00:34:45.552 --> 00:34:50.702
Thanks for tuning in to the Chain Stories podcast, where disruptors become trailblazers.

00:34:50.981 --> 00:34:57.101
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