Building a Crypto-Native RWA Ecosystem with Chris Yin of Plume
Chris Yin is the co-founder and CEO of Plume, a crypto-native RWA blockchain.
Real-world assets, RWAs for short, are financial assets implemented in token form. Alongside stablecoins, these assets are at the heart of the transition of financial markets onto upgraded settlement rails in the form of blockchains.
Chris brings an interesting perspective to the RWA conversation. Whereas some firms, including BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, are focused on building institutional-grade offerings that mirror traditional financial products, Plume takes a different approach.
Pointing to the success of crypto-native markets, Plume’s ecosystem bridges speculative retail users and experiences with yield from traditional financial assets, on the premise that crypto energy is the source of the demand that will pull finance on-chain.
In this conversation, Chris and Will Beeson discuss the state of the RWA market, what’s real and what’s hype, the importance of crypto-native users, why there are multiple successful approaches to bringing finance on-chain, and what it takes to build and scale a thriving RWA ecosystem.
Will:
Great to connect with you. I’m a huge fan of everything you’re doing at Plume. We've known each other for a while, and I’ve been following your work for a long time.
To start things off, I’d love to hear — in your own words — how you think about the broader space Plume is operating in, and what your long-term vision is for what you're building.
Chris:
Totally — and thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to diving into this conversation.
To give a quick primer: at Plume, we operate in the real-world assets (RWA) segment. What we’re building is a chain, an ecosystem, and a network — all focused on bringing the real world on-chain in a way that allows users to interact with it natively on-chain.
What’s unique about our approach is that we're driving this from a crypto-first perspective. As we tokenize off-chain assets, we’re not just replicating traditional systems — we’re enabling those assets to take on new properties that make them fundamentally more useful in a crypto-native context. It’s about embracing the benefits of being on-chain — composability, liquidity, transparency, programmability — and applying them to real-world assets, not just native crypto assets.
That’s the core of what we do. Today, we have the largest ecosystem of users in the RWA space, and we’re actively building the infrastructure to usher in what we see as the next phase of crypto’s evolution.
The broader motivation behind Plume is simple: we want to grow crypto. That was the genesis of everything we’re doing. We believe that living on-chain — operating fully within a crypto-native environment — is fundamentally superior. You have 24/7 global markets, real ownership, instant composability, and permissionless innovation. These are the attributes that gave us DeFi, stablecoins, and everything that’s followed.
Our core belief is that anyone, anywhere should be able to pick up these building blocks and create new things. And by anchoring those capabilities to real-world assets — with the cryptographic assurances that token A corresponds to real-world object B — we unlock a whole new layer of innovation.
Now, if you zoom out, crypto today is a $3–4 trillion asset class. But the real-world economy — across equities, debt, derivatives, private credit, collectibles — is worth thousands of trillions. The opportunity we’re chasing is bringing that capital on-chain and building a unified, global economic layer.
Imagine collapsing fragmented systems — like NASDAQ here, HKEX there, eBay over here — into one seamlessly connected, programmable market. The magic of crypto is that you can log in from anywhere, click a few buttons, and make things happen instantly. That same user experience should apply to all assets, not just crypto-native ones.
And we’re starting to see the catalysts for this transformation. The Bitcoin ETF brought institutional attention. Stablecoins are going mainstream — every country and every major financial institution is now thinking about issuing their own. Regulation is catching up too. Jurisdictions from the U.S. to Asia to Latin America and the Middle East are actively rethinking their frameworks to accommodate what’s coming.
That said, the space is noisy. There's a lot of excitement, a lot of big logos, and not all of it reflects meaningful innovation. It’s important to remember that true innovation is never top-down. It’s bottoms-up — driven by builders and users. Adoption, not announcements, is what matters.
So while RWA is a broad category — one that can mean many things — our view is that it needs clear focus and intentional design to scale meaningfully. That’s what we’re trying to bring to the table at Plume.
To me, this is one of the most exciting, transformational opportunities of our time. It’ll take 10 to 20 years to fully realize, but when it starts to click, it’s going to be wild.
Will:
One of the things that intrigues me about your perspective is how different it is from other players in the space. As a counterexample, take Figure — they’re focused on deep Wall Street and institutional use cases. I think they started with an off-chain financial product like a HELOC — a home equity line of credit — and wanted to collapse the origination and lifecycle of that product using blockchain: more transparency, automation, easier standardization, and better capital allocation.
In a sense, they’re trying to build a better traditional finance product using blockchain.
Your view seems almost the opposite. There are already tons of people in crypto, and they’re here for a reason. They have different risk tolerances and return expectations. So rather than repurpose blockchain to solve traditional finance problems, why not lean into what makes crypto exciting — and find natural bridges back to the real economy over time?
Talk about how you think about that.
Chris:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s an important distinction in how we see the world, for several reasons. Taking a look at Figure, for example—which I think is a great company that’s growing fast—one of the benefits of the RWA world is that it’s positive-sum. There’s no world in which the market grows massively and there’s only one winner. There will be many winners and many approaches. We respect everyone; it’s net-positive for all of us. I’m excited by everything that’s happening. To be more pointed, I do think our approach—historically and, I’d argue, provably in the numbers—is a different and more correct path to the future we envision.
As you said, companies like Figure are solving TradFi problems with blockchains: making home equity lines of credit—HELOCs—more efficient, approaching it from a process and bottom-line perspective. How do we make this more usable? Easier to manage? How do we reduce operational costs so there are fewer intermediaries and more provability? That view makes sense.
Our view is the inverse. We’re betting on the growth of the crypto economy rather than the transformation of TradFi products. The TradFi transformation, to us, is a consequence of our perspective, not the anchor. The crypto world—today, trillions in assets and a large, growing user base—is only expanding. As it grows, the things those users want to do evolve. So rather than taking an existing thing and re-plumbing the guts, we’re betting on building and exploring a new world. We’re settling a new land—think America in the 1700s—building something brand-new, versus walking into modern America and repurposing the pipes.
Philosophically, that leads to a different process and different products. We lean heavily into crypto principles: liquidity, composability, usability, and a focus on the top line rather than the bottom line. Nobody gets into crypto to save money; people get into crypto to make money. That’s why BTC is a thing, why memecoins are a thing—people are here to generate more income and upside. That maps to my experience.
If you take that view, you don’t start with a TradFi experience—KYC-gated, hard to use, transfer-restricted—where the end-user benefit of process fixes isn’t dramatically different. Maybe it gets cheaper, and eventually some benefits accrue to the user. Our approach asks: how do you transform that product into a native crypto experience? Buying and trading ETH or BTC—or holding any altcoin—is dramatically different from, say, buying treasuries in the real world. Before this, I wasn’t that familiar with how it works in practice. It’s a whole thing: you go somewhere, you buy in certain increments, auctions only on certain days, fixed maturities—you can’t hold flexibly. The UX isn’t great.
Compare that to buying an on-chain version of T-bills today, through what’s emerged. Take USDS or Maker’s new Sky product, which is backed by T-bills, so you get T-bill yields by holding it. Today, I can go to Uniswap or to Maker’s site, take my stablecoins, click deposit or swap, and I’m effectively holding T-bills. It’s a dramatically different experience.
That change is huge. USDS has, what, four or five billion in TVL? Usage is tremendous. It’s composable everywhere and has become a standard way to hold value alongside other yield-bearing stablecoins. That difference has driven usage, volume, and demand—and inspired new things to be built on top.
Contrast that with a HELOC or a T-bill exposure that’s simply “put on-chain” in a TradFi way: you must be a Qualified Purchaser, you need $5 million to even interact, there are only certain windows to buy and sell, you transact in $100,000 increments, you have to KYC. Look at products that resemble that—take BlackRock’s BUIDL, administered with Securitize, as an example. It’s good and has a decent TVL—two to three billion dollars—but it’s still smaller than USDS, and more importantly the number of holders is very small—on the order of dozens. Composability and usage across crypto are negligible. There’s just nothing there compared to the crypto-native alternative.
When you build crypto-native rather than a TradFi product “on a blockchain,” you end up with a different experience—and therefore a different product. Our inclination is toward the top line. I don’t care about saving money right now; saving is useful, but what we care about is enabling asset managers and crypto-curious users to make more money, sell into new markets, and expand reach. Stablecoins and on-chain U.S. Treasuries speak to exporting American financial infrastructure everywhere. That’s what we want to enable—versus merely letting existing T-bill buyers transact a bit faster. The question is: how do you create new things and let that native experience trickle back into the legacy world?
Will:
What are those new experiences? What's getting traction on plume?
Chris:
It’s a bunch of things, so it’s hard to put it into one bucket, but I’ll give you a couple of examples. On Plume, we have everything from alternative assets—private equity, real estate, that sort of thing—to collectibles like Pokémon cards, whiskey, watches, and wine, as well as financial instruments from the world’s biggest institutions—BlackRock, Blackstone, Carlyle, and others. So there’s a broad variety.
Now, what’s actually getting traction? Two things. First, T-bills. They’ve become a major focus in crypto and globally, as currencies fluctuate and rates remain high. Of course, there’s adoption there. But I think the best example is something we call Mineral Vault.
Mineral Vault is one of our protocols, and what they do is tokenize mineral rights. This company owns about 3,000 oil wells in the U.S. These wells—mainly in Texas—generate what’s called “mailbox money.” They simply produce steady cash flow. The APY ranges from 13% to 20%, depending on the collection of wells. They’re producing assets, so the risk is relatively low. You lease the wells to Exxon or others, they drill, and you collect the proceeds plus upside based on what they pull out. It’s extremely stable.
The company already has about 600,000 shareholders in the real world, collectively earning from these wells. They want to keep expanding—buying more wells, upgrading operations, and scaling. By working with us, they were one of the first to ask: How do we make this a crypto-native product? How do we make it liquid, composable, with yields paid regularly so it feels like crypto?
We put it on-chain a little under two months ago. Since then, adoption has been tremendous. Today, about 85,000 people hold that asset on Plume. They’re earning real yield in accordance with production. For a crypto user, that’s powerful. In the real world, getting exposure to oil wells is almost impossible—you wouldn’t know where to start, you’d need to pool money with friends, and minimums would be high. On-chain, through our protocol Nest, you just click a button, swap stablecoins into the token, and you’re in. You start receiving regular yield distributions.
The adoption has been incredible. In under two months, over 10% of Mineral Vault’s total 600,000-holder base is now on-chain. That’s a significant enough number, with a meaningful dollar amount behind it, that the company has to take notice. They’re now thinking about how to position their product and business to appeal to this broader, global crypto-native base. Even they’ve been stunned by the demand.
It’s a great example of how putting a product on-chain fundamentally alters its nature. It feels and looks different. The interaction is different. And because of that, the velocity of capital and the breadth of access have dramatically increased.
Will:
Yeah, okay. So bridging back to what you were saying earlier about the customer profile being fundamentally different—
is leverage a part of this product? Like borrowing to reinvest, a levered loop in crypto parlance?
Is that part of the product? Do you think that’s the driver of capital moving on-chain, with that capital then seeking yield to power some of these strategies? Hence, ultimately, the bridge back into real-world assets?
Chris:
I do think that’s a big part of it. Not because leverage is the only thing we can do, but because it happens to be one of the great use cases in crypto today.
At Plume, within this asset, we’re the only product really enabling looping. Others may have talked about it, but if you look at the numbers, actual utilization is zero. It’s very hard to do and different from classic crypto looping. With Mineral Vault, through our products, about $40 million is currently being leveraged. People are taking the asset, pricing it, borrowing against it, and looping—taking out a loan, buying more, repeating the process.
For the asset issuer, that means much more capital flowing in, which they can allocate to expand their business. For users, it means higher yields. For lending protocols, borrowers, and capital suppliers, it means more utilization of funds. It becomes a fundamentally different product. That’s just one example of what putting an asset on-chain unlocks. You simply couldn’t do this in TradFi. But here, it’s a couple of clicks.
What’s even more exciting is what comes next. Once you transform an oil well—its legal agreements, bank accounts, everything—into a token, anyone can grab that token and build on top of it. Today, it starts with leverage, looping, lending, and borrowing. But who knows what comes after?
We’ve already seen early signals. We recently announced our accelerator, and among the applications are projects experimenting with new ways to use these tokens. That’s when it gets really interesting. As we unlock these structures, entirely new products and use cases will emerge.
Will:
Yeah. It’s easy to talk about general-purpose blockchains as if they can solve all problems—end all wars, address world hunger, and everything else. But do you see a potential path for Plume as more of an asset origination and asset management–focused chain, with users in different places ultimately accessing it?
Or do you think there’s a whole range of other use cases—like payments being huge, or end-customer embedded wallet experiences being huge? How do you think about that?
Chris:
Yeah, it could be any of those, honestly. For us, like any business, over time you expand into more and more areas by following your user base and demand.
We always go back to why we started Plume: to grow crypto. That was the starting point. Building a purpose-built blockchain and ecosystem was a necessity to bring these assets on-chain, but it’s not the end goal. Ultimately, what we care about is the end-user experience. What can someone, anywhere in the world, do with the click of a button? That’s the focus.
Because of that, we’ll adapt. Payments may be a use case we lean into more in the future—we’re already exploring what that could look like. But right now, asset origination is the primary driver. It’s not just about bringing assets on-chain, though—that’s only part of the story. To make an asset successful, you need an ecosystem: buyers, liquidity providers, composability, and new ways to use the asset. That’s what we’re building now.
From there, expansion is natural. Whether it’s payments, embedded experiences, or integrating with other platforms, we’re open to it all. For example, plugging these assets into a Robinhood wallet, a real estate app, or any number of other user experiences—that’s all possible. Our mission is to grow crypto, and we’ll meet users where they are.
Historically, chains have thought in zero-sum terms—“we want everything to come onto our chain.” That’s not how we see it. We’re building for the crypto ecosystem as a whole. Plume, and the way we’ve constructed our ecosystem, is the best way to onboard and bootstrap this market. But after that, we’re open—and already actively working—to expand into other places.
There are great communities elsewhere, Solana being a prime example. There’s no reason for me to say, “Solana shouldn’t do this—we’ll do it instead.” That’s not our mindset. We’re more than happy to bootstrap something and then bring it to Solana so more people can access it. That net-positive effect helps everyone grow—including us.
So, no problem: we’ll plug into a traditional bank, a neobank, another chain. We’re not just a chain. Having our own chain is a requirement to bootstrap this market—but long term, we see success coming from being everywhere our users want us to be.
Will:
Yeah. So if you think about how you hope to 10x volumes—or users, or whatever metric you prefer to focus on—where do you expect that growth to come from?
Is it new-to-crypto “degens”? Is it partnerships with platforms like Revolut or Nubank, distributing to their customers with crypto running under the hood? Or is it about bringing unique assets that people can’t access anywhere else, which motivates them to come to Plume specifically?
How do you think about that?
Chris:
Look, I think growth comes from things you can’t get anywhere else. That’s the first point. If you can already do it somewhere else, people won’t switch. The reason people used the iPhone wasn’t because they could read the news— they could already do that. It was because the iPhone enabled entirely new experiences—Uber, Airbnb—things that were native to the phone and impossible on the desktop. The ability to read the news was additive, but the real driver was net-new experiences.
That’s how I think about Plume: what’s the net-new experience, who wants it, and how strong is their motivation? That’s why we start with crypto. When we talk about tokenizing and bringing assets on-chain, the problem we’re solving is most acute for crypto users. They’re here already, so that’s the logical starting point.
Our view is still crypto-first. And if you look at the traction RWAs have within crypto, it’s tiny. Stablecoins are a great example of a product that has worked—they’re a $200 billion asset class today. By contrast, RWAs are sub–$10 billion, with even fewer users and less volume. There’s still a long way to go just within crypto, where the highest propensity for growth exists.
So step one is growth inside crypto—across new chains and into new assets like BTC. We spend a lot of time there. You can’t talk about crypto without talking about Bitcoin, which represents 60% of the entire asset class. Starting with crypto also means introducing things people can’t get anywhere else. Historically, that’s been Bitcoin and memes. But going forward, it’s new structured products, new forms of leverage, new access points—all of which can attract different audiences.
Step two is embedding Plume into the places where users already are. Think Revolut, Nubank, or similar platforms. We’ve seen stablecoins lead growth into crypto—people come in because they want to hold U.S. dollars. As that becomes the entry channel, we can build on top of it, offering new products and experiences. Stablecoin adoption is still spreading globally, but once it’s more mature, that’s where we’ll tap in.
To break down the audiences:
- Crypto-first users — starting with BTC holders, who are mostly buy-and-hold. They align well with the types of products we’re building.
- DeFi power users — leveraged traders, yield farmers, people looping positions for APY. Also a natural fit.
- Stablecoin users — this is where things get big. They don’t care about leverage or DeFi strategies. They just want a better savings account—a place to hold dollars with more yield. That’s a huge potential market.
When we hit that third audience, that’s when adoption really takes off. But for now, because RWAs are still early and small, just growing within crypto is enough to 10x from here. After that, the next 10x will come from Web2 channels and the stablecoin-driven world.
Will:
Yeah, makes sense. Talk to us about Nest—and through Nest, maybe the broader concept of what it means to build an RWA-specific chain.
I think you guys had a unique strategic vision early on. I hadn’t seen anyone else do it—building an L1 or an L2 and, at the same time, developing many of the applications directly on your chain. You even took on business development around specific use cases on top of your chain.
I’d love to hear about that, and how that strategy is evolving over time.
Chris:
Just like you said, we were one of the early ones to take this approach. We’re not the only people doing it, but we’re among the very few who thought about the entire stack. And that’s because we were tethered more to solving a problem than to pushing a technology.
We started off building a tokenization engine—just trying to bring assets on-chain so people could use them. But as we pulled the thread, we realized we had to build all the other pieces to make it work. That meant creating legal systems, compliance frameworks, infrastructure—way more than we expected. Honestly, if you’re thinking of building a chain, I’d say: think twice. It’s taken years off my life. It’s a whole thing.
People think building a chain is just launching some code and signing a few developers. It’s not. You’re competing with every other chain out there. You need liquidity, a token, a developer community, an ecosystem—all of it. And when you add RWAs into the mix, it gets even more complicated. These aren’t purely crypto-native assets. They come with legal agreements, custodians, cash flows, and regulations.
When we first looked at tokenization, people told us it took 6, 12, even 36 months to bring a product on-chain—costing $100,000 to $200,000 just to launch. That reminded me of the early internet, when startups had to raise $10 million just to buy servers before they could ship a product. That’s where tokenization is today: slow and expensive.
We wanted to change that. Just like AWS transformed web infrastructure—letting anyone spin up servers with a credit card for a few cents—we wanted to make tokenization fast, cheap, and accessible. That was the starting point.
But once you get assets on-chain, the real challenge is usability. Even something as common in crypto as looping is very hard with RWAs. Pricing isn’t real time, liquidity is thin, oracles don’t exist. And then there’s KYC, AML, identity, tax filings, licensing. It’s all real-world complexity you have to abstract away.
That’s why we ended up building more and more ourselves. We started with a tokenization engine, but quickly realized the ecosystem we wanted didn’t exist. So we built the chain. Then we built our own applications on top. One of those is Nest, our yield distribution product. Nest takes all the complexity of RWAs and boils it down to a Uniswap-like experience: choose the contract, deposit, swap. Done. Five stablecoins in, a token out, yield paid automatically. That’s the magic of crypto—like the iPhone moment when you first saw Uniswap.
But to make Nest work, we had to do everything: register entities, integrate KYC, manage taxes, licensing, compliance. The infrastructure is useless if no one can build on top of it. So we built the whole stack. That’s why this journey is going to take 20 years—it’s massive.
But the result is powerful. On the crypto side, people see an RWA token and think, I know how to use this, I can build with this. On the RWA side, issuers see real money and real users for the first time. That bridge—making both sides see the opportunity—is why we had to build the stack end to end. The tools simply didn’t exist.
Will:
How much of your build has been pure tech versus legal, financial, and regulatory structuring around these assets?
It sounds like what you’re really trying to do is make financial assets easily accessible—often in a permissionless way. How much work have you done on the legal, financial, and regulatory side to make that possible?
Chris:
Honestly, it’s a lot of legal and regulatory work. The technology isn’t trivial either—just getting lending markets and looping systems to work with RWAs requires a ton of customization. Pricing isn’t real time, so you need specialized oracles. You need to manage leverage, withdrawals, and winding down positions in ways that are very different from pure crypto assets. That’s a big technical lift.
But before you even get there, you need the legal infrastructure. We spend huge amounts of time with regulators—in D.C., Hong Kong, the UAE—learning in real time what they’re doing and making sure we incorporate that into our business. Setting up structures is expensive. A feeder fund to host an asset can cost $25,000, $50,000, even $100,000. In some cases, $200,000. We do that work so issuers don’t have to.
Then there’s the ongoing operations: filing taxes, submitting paperwork, maintaining compliance. People don’t see that side of it, but it’s enormous. It’s not just the initial legal setup—it’s the ongoing structure and operations to manage it. That’s a huge part of the business.
So yes, the technology is important, but relative to a purely crypto protocol, where you can just spin something up, our reality is very different. We’re building an immense amount of infrastructure to make RWAs possible on-chain.
Will:
Right. And that’s such a powerful strategy. You could almost oversimplify it as “go-to-market.” The alternative, if you’re building on a neutral chain like Ethereum mainnet, is: bring your own legals, your own structuring, your own lawyers, your own SPV—everything. That’s the world where it costs $200,000 and takes six to twelve months just to get online.
That makes it very hard to bootstrap new asset issuance or build a financial business from scratch. But if you guys can centralize that work and take it over, it helps issuers get to market and prove value much faster.
Chris:
One hundred percent. That’s the entire point. When we set up Plume, we were inspired by what Stripe did with Atlas.
I’ve set up many companies before, and it used to be painful. If you went through LegalZoom or similar, you had to fill out huge, confusing forms. You’d deal with 83(b) elections—where you had to file by a certain date—but the process wasn’t clear. Where do you send it? Did they receive it? I remember just getting the right address and confirming delivery was a whole ordeal. There was so much physical paperwork, mailing, even faxing.
Stripe Atlas changed that. When we set up Plume, all I had to do was enter an email, click a few buttons, and it was live. Behind the scenes, Stripe handled the complexity. If I wanted to file a document, they’d print it, send it to the right office based on my incorporation, track it daily, and update the dashboard so I knew when it landed.
Even something like getting an EIN to open a bank account used to take weeks. You’d file, wait for approval, and sit stuck without a bank account. With Stripe, they pinged the IRS daily, and the second it was available—even before the physical letter arrived—it was in my dashboard. They abstracted all the complexity away.
That’s exactly what we want to do for assets. All the legal filings, structuring, tax forms, licensing, compliance—click a few buttons, and it’s handled. We’re not at perfection yet, but that’s the vision.
The internet shows what’s possible. Once anyone could swipe a credit card and spin up a web app on AWS, innovation exploded. Before that, you had to raise millions just to buy servers before you could even test an idea. The barrier to entry was massive. AWS collapsed it to nearly zero. That’s what catalyzed the wave of startups that reshaped the world.
Twenty years ago, no one imagined people would live entirely on the internet—working, shopping, banking, socializing from their phones. Back then it was just academics sending documents. But by simplifying the inputs, the scope of possibilities expanded beyond imagination.
That’s where we are with RWAs. Once we simplify the inputs—make tokenization, compliance, and access as easy as clicking a button—everything else will expand from there.
Will:
So Stripe offers that service for a few hundred bucks—a great deal for a startup founder. But of course, as those companies grow, Stripe monetizes them through payment processing. Since most of those are internet-native businesses, anytime they transact, Stripe captures value through its core product. So the real economics go far beyond the ticket price of Atlas.
What’s the Plume parallel? If I want to build an application on top of Plume—say, a levered looping vault for an asset—and maybe I bring the asset, or maybe I partner with someone who has it, how do you work with me to accelerate that build? And what do the economics look like over time?
Chris:
I mean, it’s essentially the same model. It depends on where you enter the cycle.
The first stage is tokenization. If you’re bringing an asset on-chain, we help you do that—similar to Stripe Atlas. We make it smooth, simple, and fast to tokenize.
The second stage is plugging into the ecosystem. Once the asset is live, how do you make it useful and valuable? How do you find users and capital? That’s where our ecosystem, our marketing engine, and our network of partners come in. We help position the asset so it actually gets traction, not just a token sitting idle on-chain.
Now, in terms of how we capture value, there are a few levers:
- Gas fees. Like Stripe monetizes through payments, we monetize through network activity. Every transaction on our blockchain carries a small gas fee, which powers the ecosystem.
- Products like Nest. Because most of the assets flowing through Plume are yield-bearing, Nest enables us to capture a small portion of that yield. We can hold it ourselves, redistribute to users, or use it to support the ecosystem.
- Bridging off-chain and on-chain. This is where it gets really interesting. In crypto, exchanges and arbitrage keep asset prices in line. With RWAs, you can do something similar between the real world and on-chain. For example, if an asset has a seven-day settlement period but a user needs liquidity now, a secondary market might not exist—or might not have enough depth. We can step in, provide early liquidity, and take a small cut for assuming that duration risk. That creates new products, new services, and new markets.
All of these activities not only generate revenue but also improve the user experience. They create moats, because these new “pockets” of opportunity have to be bootstrapped. Once they exist, they become defensible. It’s not unlike how MEV became a massive revenue stream in crypto. Arbitraging between the real world and the blockchain is a similarly obvious—and potentially huge—opportunity. And that’s just one example. There are many more to come.
Will:
Yeah. A lot of that ultimately results in a more frictionless user experience—a better UX. Sure, there’s a cost to it, but it creates the kind of real-time, internet-speed economy we’re all looking for.
Chris:
For sure. That’s exactly right. That’s the exciting part of all this.
Will:
And it collapses a ton of other costs in other areas. Who knows—time will tell—but it surely ends up being a net uplift, both financially and in terms of efficiency.
Chris:
Exactly. When you can go into crypto today, push one button, and have that money spread instantly across the best opportunities in the world—and then, with another click, pull it all back in—that’s transformative.
There’s a tremendous amount of money flowing through that process today, and in the traditional system it’s either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Collapsing all of that into a single click removes 90% of the cost. We can pass those savings back to users and the ecosystem, while still keeping five to ten percent ourselves—and it’s still an incredible business.
Will:
Chris, thank you so much for your time. Great conversation.
Chris:
Thanks so much for having us—really appreciate it. And of course, we’re on Telegram, Twitter, all of it. Ping us anytime. We see this as a very positive-sum space. We’re here to talk to anyone, any day of the week, to learn what else should be brought on-chain, what else should be built, and where new ideas can take us.
What excites me about RWAs is that people sometimes think of them as just a translation of the real world into crypto. That’s not it at all. We’re building a new world and a new market, where crypto and real-world assets converge into the same thing—no distinction. The most exciting ideas haven’t even been imagined yet.
So if anyone has something interesting, we’re always open to explore, to seed, to build, to collaborate. Because all of this is positive-sum—for everyone. Anyway, thanks again for having us. I really appreciate what you’re doing.
Will:
Great. Chris Yin, thank you very much for joining us today.
Chris:
Awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.