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Haun Ventures: Plume’s investment and its deep understanding of RWAfi

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The TVL of the RWA market has grown from US$1 million to over US$7 billion, covering non-correlated assets such as government bonds, precious metals, and collectibles, driving the diversification of the DeFi ecosystem.

Original source: Haun Ventures

Haun Ventures is a well-known venture capital firm focusing on blockchain and cryptocurrency, dedicated to supporting the development of innovative projects and technologies. As one of the industry's leading investment institutions, Haun Ventures' investment strategy is known for its small but excellent investment strategy, and has invested in some outstanding projects, including Aptos Labs, Conduit, Fireblocks, Thirdweb and OpenSea.

Katie Haun is the founder of Haun Ventures. She was the first female investment partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and was responsible for leading the company's crypto investment fund. Katie served as a U.S. federal prosecutor for 12 years, was the first independent director of Coinbase, and served as chairman of the board of directors for 7 years.

Haun Ventures led Plume Network’s seed round, with participation from Galaxy Digital, Superscrypt, Reciprocal Ventures, Selini Capital, Portal Ventures, SV Angel, a_capital, and several angel investors.

According to Katie Haun, one of the clearest use cases for blockchain is to provide a highly transparent and efficient market for assets. Open, decentralized protocols enable anyone to create assets through digital mappings and securely and transparently transfer them to others, while programming these assets according to a set of rules.

This use case has already begun to develop in real-world assets (RWAs). Over the past three years, the RWA market has grown rapidly, rising from $1 million in locked value (TVL) to over $7 billion today. The market covers a wide range of asset classes, such as treasuries, money market funds, gold, precious metals, and collectibles. RWA has unique properties compared to other crypto assets. RWA has no correlation with other crypto assets, meaning that the value fluctuations of RWA are not affected by other crypto assets. Such uncorrelated assets are critical to building a robust DeFi ecosystem because they promote portfolio diversification and serve as the basis for financial derivatives, allowing buyers to effectively hedge against volatility.

Despite the unique potential of RWA, RWA projects face two major challenges.

First, they are difficult to launch; second, they are relatively fragmented across different ecosystems. The launch of an RWA project is very complicated because it may involve compliance supervision, entity creation, identity verification, and other complex legal and administrative matters. These obstacles have slowed down the progress of RWA projects. Currently, RWA projects are still fragmented between L1 and L2. Since RWA is a specific field in DeFi, project parties are looking for mature ecosystems and high-value users, and high-value users are also looking for reputable projects and ecosystems.

Haun Ventures believes that this is the significance of Plume. Plume is building the infrastructure of RWAfi, which is a combination of real-world assets (RWA) and decentralized finance (Defi). Plume simplifies the complex workflow of RWAfi to a few mouse clicks. This greatly reduces the threshold for launching RWA ecological projects. In addition, because Plume focuses on RWAfi, it is beginning to build a network effect between users and project parties. In many ways, Plume's focus on vertical networks of specific RWAfi is similar to the vertical market strategy in Web2, such as Airbnb, Zillow, or Uber. With this innovative support, Plume has attracted more than 180 projects committed to launching on Plume, and 3.75 million+ testnet addresses.

Haun Ventures partner Chris Ahn said, "I have known Plume's founding team for many years, and their vision for asset tokenization goes beyond the understanding of other conventional RWA projects. Plume will reshape the way blockchain interacts with the real world through RWAfi to achieve real on-chain value from real-world assets (RWA)." Chris Yin is the founder of Plume Network and a successful serial entrepreneur. Plume's founding team members include Teddy Pornprinya and Eugene Shen from backgrounds such as dYdX, Coinbase, and Robinhood. What's special about this team is that they are both natives of the crypto space and have a traditional financial background. They understand the needs and requirements of traditional asset issuers while maintaining the ultimate vision of building a strong DeFi ecosystem based on RWA. The real potential of RWAfi lies in the intersection between crypto-native markets and traditional assets, and the Plume team deeply understands this opportunity.

Haun Ventures' investment is not just a capital injection, but also a trust and support for Plume Network. As a highly recognized investment institution in the blockchain and encryption fields, Haun Ventures' participation marks the industry's high recognition of Plume Network's technical strength, market potential and team capabilities. This investment also symbolizes the confidence of mainstream Silicon Valley capital in the prospects of the RWA track, and encourages more investors and capital issuers to participate in the exploration and innovation of this field.

About Plume

Plume is the first fully modular integrated chain focused on RWAfi. It has built the first modular and composable EVM-compatible chain focused on RWA, aiming to simplify the on-chain process of various assets and achieve efficient capital introduction through native infrastructure and RWAfi-specific functions. For the first time, Plume provides a composable solution for the DeFi ecosystem built around RWAfi, integrating a full-process tokenization engine and a network of financial infrastructure partners for developers to plug and play.