Plume Network, a blockchain specializing in real-world assets (RWA), is launching a tokenized ‘Mineral Vault’ amid strong demand for high-yielding private assets onchain, Chris Yin, Plume’s CEO, told Cointelegraph on Sept. 9.
Created by asset manager Allegiance Oil & Gas, the Mineral Vault represents tokenized mineral interests, a form of real estate that earns royalty revenues from natural resource extraction and sales.
The Vault aims to provide “financial exposure to resource production like gold, silver, coal, and primarily crude oil and natural gas” in the United States, Plume said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph.
Tokenized RWAs currently command nearly $12 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to RWA.xyz. They may eventually represent a $30-trillion market opportunity globally, Colin Butler, Polygon’s global head of institutional capital, told Cointelegraph in August.
RWA segments by total market capitalization. Source: Galaxy Research
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“If you look at [RWA] adoption it’s very clear there is a specific area that is the fastest growing — yield-bearing assets,” Yin said.
The highest-TVL RWAs include tokenized US treasury bills and money funds, such as BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) and Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX). According to RWA.xyz, the funds hold approximately $514 million and $443 million in TVL, respectively.
Lately, “we’ve seen an increased demand in accessing more private, liquid assets like mineral interests (that are traditionally very difficult to access) as the yields are upward of 10%+, paid out in stablecoins,” Yin said.
“[T]he natural evolution is to go slightly upstream where the products have a very similar look and feel, but now provide some extra yield on top,” he added.
Plume seeks to develop an RWA-centric ecosystem—dubbed RWAfi—aimed at “imbuing real-world assets with the same properties that crypto native assets have,” including using RWA tokens as collateral for loans, among other common decentralized finance use cases, Yin said.
“For instance, $10 worth of tokenized mineral interests can easily be worth 1.5-2x more if collateralized and borrowed against properly within Plume’s RWAfi ecosystem, unlocking more liquidity and yield for the end-user,” according to Yin.
Plume launched its testnet in July in partnership with data availability layer Celestia and is not yet live on mainnet.
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