Q3 2026 was the quarter Plume put RWA yield inside the platforms institutions and users already rely on.

• RWA Leadership: We closed Q3 with over $220M in RWA TVL with over $1b in total assets minted.
• Institutional partnerships: We signed an MOU with Shinhan Asset Management, one of Korea's largest asset managers, to build a proof of concept for a KRW-denominated tokenized fund. It's a first step toward connecting compliant, high-quality KRW assets to investors worldwide.
• New RWA Yield Distribution Channels: Plume Vaults reached new users and institutions through Binance Wallet (nBASIS), Bybit (nOPAL) and Fordefi Earn (nOPAL and nFXCF), while nOPAL crossed $100M in AUM and expanded to Avalanche and BNB Chain. Nest also expanded to Arc, bringing a book of $1B+ in institutional assets to 100+ builders on a chain purpose-built for financial markets.
• Asset Suite Expansion: Q3 saw the launch of FACTOR, bringing invoice factoring and working capital financing onchain, and nPRIME, giving users access to Figure's $30B+ home equity lending ecosystem.
• Brand Development: We introduced Plume Vaults, the institutional entryway to earning yield on real-world assets, growing open finance. Alongside it came a new look for Plume, with the same conviction to bring the world's highest-quality assets onchain for institutions and investors everywhere. 
• Regulation and Policy: We continued to be an active voice in shaping the rules and rails for onchain finance, joining DTCC's Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group and Blockchain Association's new Vaults Workstream.

Letter from the CEO

This is one of the first quarters where tokenized assets entered full swing in the market. The TVL for the market grew a tepid 7%, up from $36.3B to $38.9B. The story for this quarter was really around the growth in equities. Of the TVL growth, equities made up more than 50% of the growth with more than $1.3B added this quarter. The real growth story was in users trading equities. Equities saw incredible growth in RWA volume up 1,155% on the quarter, up from $1.7B to $19.6B. And RWA perps OI also skyrocketed 124.37%, up from $5.8B to $13.1B.

One of the more notable moments of this quarter was the launch of HOOD chain. Paired with memecoins, it was the first moment where RWAs found an intersection with what we often think of as crypto – highly in demand, volatile, and speculative assets. This attention and volume brought on increased listings from both existing and new providers, including Binance’s bStocks, Kraken’s xStocks, Bitget’s Reality, Robinhood, Coinbase, Ondo GM, and more. In tandem, exchanges rushed to list more RWA perps as volume flowed from crypto native flows towards TradFi assets. 

This rapid growth in equities and tradable assets pairs nicely with the solidification of what we’re seeing across yield-bearing tokenized assets. In Plume Vaults, TVL grew more than 200%, up from $73M to $223M. In particular, BlackOpal hit its stride, growing more than 320% this quarter from $25M to $105M. Plume Vaults introduced nPRIME in partnership with Figure’s Democratized Prime asset, growing from nothing to more than $13M in TVL over just a few weeks. The partnerships with Etherfi, Bybit, Binance Wallet, and many others are beginning to not only mature, but expand, and the momentum Plume has built is materializing. 

As mentioned last quarter, the market for tokenized assets has moved from cautious experimentation to rapid adoption. Plume was excited to announce its inclusion into the DTCC working group in order to partner with other industry leaders in TradFi such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, etc as well as leading fintech/onchain natives such as Circle, BitGo, Robinhood, and more to push the industry forward towards mass deployment & adoption. The train has left the building and the entire industry is partnering together to drive the next phase of financial innovation. 

We’ll continue to see meaningful advancements over the next months as the work being done behind the scenes now begins to come out. Everyone from regulators, major financial institutions, centralized exchanges, onchain protocols, asset managers, technology companies, and more are all coming together to embed tokenized assets deeply into their operations and infrastructure. The beginning of the rapid transformation of the global financial economy has begun, and we’re incredibly excited to be building alongside these greats in this time. Onwards!

- Chris Yin, CEO and Co-Founder of Plume

State of the Tokenization Market

Tokenized Assets Grew 7% in Q3 

Tokenized RWAs grew 7% in Q3, from $36.3 billion to $39.0 billion, according to RWA.xyz. Treasuries were no longer the engine; growth came from almost everywhere else:

• Stocks grew 66% to $3.3 billion, adding $1.3 billion and accounting for nearly half of the market’s growth.
• Active strategies grew 22% to $4.2 billion.
• Credit grew 12% to $8.1 billion, led by specialty finance, up 29%.
• Commodities grew 13% to $5.2 billion.
• US Treasuries slipped 5% to $14.7 billion, though they remain the largest category.

Traditional market infrastructure moved onchain in parallel: DTCC completed its first live production trades of tokenized securities with close to 40 institutions, and Securitize began trading on the NYSE.

The continued focus is utility. Issuing an asset onchain is no longer the hard part; making it useful once it’s there is. As the market grows, the assets that win will be the ones investors can lend against, trade and put to work across the onchain economy.

Plume’s Q3 Review

Expanding Distribution for RWA Yield

This quarter, we doubled down on opening new institutional distribution channels for RWA yield. Every new channel gives more capital a direct route to institutional-grade assets, and in Q3, we opened those routes across wallets, custody platforms, exchanges and DeFi markets, putting RWA yield inside the platforms institutions and users already rely on.

• Wallets & Custody: Rather than asking institutions to adopt new workflows, we're bringing better yield into the platforms they already use. Through Fordefi Earn, 300+ institutions moving $120B a month onchain can now access two Plume Vaults as standard Fordefi transactions: nOPAL, BlackOpal's Brazilian credit card receivables vault, and nFXCF, our FalconX prime brokerage lending vault with capacity to scale to around $1B. On Binance Wallet, users gained access to nBASIS, backed by Bitwise's $225M+ crypto carry fund and Invesco's $950M+ short duration treasury fund. This puts institutional-grade strategies usually reserved for large allocators inside a wallet millions already use, making access as simple as a single tap.
• Centralized Exchanges: Building on our Q2 launch with Bybit, nOPAL joined Bybit RWA Earn, opening the $3 trillion Brazilian credit card financing market to retail users, with yields of up to 12% APY. 
• Onchain Infrastructure: nOPAL reached more networks this quarter, expanding to Avalanche and BNB Chain. Vault positions also became more useful. We shipped one-click looping on Plume, letting holders build leveraged vault positions in a single transaction. Lending, borrowing and looping also expanded to Solana through Kamino, where holders can borrow against nOPAL, and to Ethereum through Aerie Capital's Morpho market for nALPHA, nOPAL, nBASIS and nFALCON. Through Strata, nOPAL became the first fully onchain structured credit market on Plume Vaults, split into srnOPAL for protected exposure and jrnOPAL for leveraged exposure, with the senior tranche now trading on Pendle.
• New Assets: We launched two new vaults, FACTOR, created in partnership with Tradable and Deep Ocean Partners, and nPRIME, Hastra’s yield-bearing token backed by Figure's Democratized Prime home equity lending market. While most tokenized credit is a single fund wrapped in a token, FACTOR is a curated book of invoice factoring and net working capital financing facilities, where each dollar is recycled 4–12 times a year, targeting 14%+ net APY with weekly liquidity. nPRIME opens up Figure's home equity lending market, where Figure and its partners have originated $30B+ in loans and its Consumer Loan Marketplace processed $2.9B in Q1 2026 alone.
• Institutional Partnerships: We signed an MOU with Shinhan Asset Management, one of Korea's largest asset managers, to develop a KRW-denominated tokenized fund for global investors. With Korea's tokenized securities framework going live in February 2027, it's an early step toward bringing high-quality Korean assets to investors worldwide through open finance.

Regulation: Bringing Vaults and Tokenized Securities into Policy

This quarter, Plume took a seat at the table where the rules for RWAs are being written. We joined DTCC’s Digital Assets Solutions Industry Working Group, alongside Charles Schwab, Nasdaq and Ondo, to help standardize settlement for tokenized securities, bringing real infrastructure to that work: AML built in at the sequencer level, and Kimber Transfer Agency, our SEC-registered transfer agent. We also joined the Blockchain Association’s new Vaults Workstream with FalconX, Morpho and others to help shape how vaults are regulated, building on our SEC filings since May 2025.

Beyond the working groups, we also took that conversation to Washington D.C., where the team met with the SEC and engaged with the US Treasury on how vault providers, like Plume, should be regulated. The meetings followed Commissioner Peirce's invitation for vault protocol builders to help shape new rules and guidance, and we submitted written input on the regulatory architecture we believe can unlock a new era of onchain capital formation. 

Alongside this, Salman Banaei, our General Counsel, has remained a strong public voice on how those rules should be drawn, arguing that the SEC’s Innovation Exemption opens the door and the next step is to widen it so DeFi tools can sit inside registered broker-dealers, ATSs, and exchanges.

Product and Engineering

Plume Vaults

This quarter, we launched Plume Vaults, one unified brand for everything we've built. It's a new access point designed for institutions, with the same vaults and the same mission behind it. Plume vaults are the next evolution of real-world institutional products. Just as ETFs became a trillion-dollar industry, not by changing what you could invest in, but by changing the wrapper, Plume Vaults take institutional products like credit and private equity and make them programmable, composable and globally accessible. Explore our new interface here. 

Nest Has a New Home on Arc

We were excited to announce that Nest deployed to Arc, Circle's blockchain built for global financial markets, as its public mainnet went live. That means Arc launched with access to leading tokenized real-world assets from day one. Arc’s EVM technology means Nest vaults were deployed without being rebuilt and connect directly to the protocols already live on Arc, including Aave, Morpho, Uniswap, FalconX and Galaxy.

Nest has already settled over $1 billion in total assets minted, with strategies from Bitwise, WisdomTree and Apollo, and distribution through EtherFi, Binance and Bybit. With every asset coming from regulated issuers and custodians, Nest on Arc puts our core thesis into action and shows what tokenization is for: changing the access, not the assets.

Improving the User Experience

This quarter, we made Plume Vaults easier to use, easier to understand and safer to hold, and we rebuilt the systems behind them so we can launch and run vaults faster.

• Easier deposits: Through our LI.FI integration, users can now deposit from almost any chain or token without bridging or swapping first. One wallet connection now covers both EVM chains and Solana, and a single portfolio view shows your positions across every network.
• Clearer information: Users can now track their holdings more easily and see how yields are reported. Yield smoothing keeps displayed returns steady instead of jumping around day to day. New redemption guidance explains how and when you can withdraw
• Smoother operations: Routine tasks like paying out yield, managing liquidity, and collecting fees are now largely automated. This cuts the chance of human error and frees our engineers to focus on new products.
• Stronger security: Changes to vaults now go through an implemented 48-hour time lock before they take effect, and we can block any change that looks wrong. We also added more automated testing, live security monitoring and a 24/7 on-call team to respond to issues quickly.

Marketing and Brand

Our New Look

Plume introduced a new look this quarter, built around the idea we have spent the last year proving: the future of finance is open. Finance has always had gatekeepers from mandatory minimums and geographic limitations to rules that keep the best-performing assets available to the fewest people. Plume was built to take those gates down. Since day one, that mission hasn't changed: an open financial system where the best institutional products are available to any qualified investor, anywhere, with the compliance, transparency, and protections they deserve. Check out our new look. 

Media Placements

Q3 brought coverage across The Block, Crypto.news,  Cointelegraph, and Bloomingbit, covering our Binance Wallet launch, our seat on DTCC's tokenization working group, our MOU with Shinhan Asset Management, and commentary from our General Counsel, Salman Banaei, on the CLARITY Act. Salman and Ryan Wen, our Chief Operating Officer, also joined The Rollup to break down CLARITY negotiations from Capitol Hill and why the SEC is moving on tokenization either way.

Conferences

Q3 had Plume on stage across New York, Hong Kong and Seoul. Our CBO, Teddy Pornprinya, represented Plume’s 195,000+ RWA holders at RWA Summit in Brooklyn, while our GC, Salman, spoke at The Digital Chamber’s Convergence Forum and Solidus DACOM. Over in Hong Kong, our CSO, Shukyee Ma, spoke at Money Frontier 2026. 

Korea was the big focus. We sponsored The Frontier with Deloitte Korea and Tiger Research, where around 300 Korean banks and asset managers discussed bringing KRW onchain. We then stayed for Korea Blockchain Week, where our CEO, Chris Yin, and Korea lead, Soomin Kim, spoke at EastPoint, GWDC, STO Summit and a Stellar x DCENT session.

Looking Ahead

• Doubling down on esoteric assets: In Q4, we’re going deeper into novel or esoteric assets that are hard to access in traditional markets but work well onchain. These give users access to yield they can’t easily find anywhere else.
• New distribution channels: Building on our momentum in Q3, we’ll keep opening new channels to bring these assets to more investors, institutions and platforms.
• Opening up finance: Everything we ship this quarter has one goal: making real-world yield accessible to everyone, everywhere, onchain.

We’re grateful to be building in this market alongside all of you. Much love, and we can’t wait to share what’s next.