Ether.fi commits $100M to Plume as tokenized RWA demand surges
Ether.fi has made a major push into tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), allocating an exclusive $100 million to a new Plume yield-bearing vault that will be accessible directly inside the ether.fi app.
The allocation, the companies said, comes from Ether.fi’s liquidity providers — a mix of funds, family offices and high-net-worth individuals — and includes managed capital from the protocol’s liquid ETH, liquid USD and liquid BTC vaults. Ether.fi’s liquid vaults together hold roughly $300 million in total value locked, Charles Mountain, head of ecosystem at ether.fi, said in the release.
Mountain framed the move as a response to rising institutional appetite for “earn” products that combine attractive yield with institutional-grade risk controls and fewer DeFi complexities. By integrating Plume’s Nest Vaults, ether.fi users can gain direct exposure to tokenized RWA yield within a platform they already use — a capability Mountain said was previously limited to select investors.
Plume positions the new vault as a bundled, structured-income product that packages multiple institutional asset strategies into a single, user-friendly vehicle. Rather than forcing users to manage several positions across protocols, the vault enables deposits and withdrawals through one contract while offering exposure to a diversified basket of institutional assets, Plume said. Those assets include overcollateralized credit pools, AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), and ETFs tracking the total bond market.
Plume co-founder and CEO Chris Yin told The Block the team spent months studying demand from ether.fi and its user base before sourcing assets, performing due diligence and building vaults tailored to ether.fi’s needs. The firm emphasized that the underlying managers behind assets in its vaults oversee more than $10 trillion collectively.
The launch comes amid a broader push by big financial institutions into tokenization. Over the past year, established firms such as Apollo, WisdomTree, Hamilton Lane and BlackRock have expanded tokenization initiatives as investors seek blockchain-based access to traditional financial products. Plume sees vaults as a convenient packaging mechanism that reduces the need for users to interact with multiple protocols to capture tokenized yields.
On compliance and custody, Plume described its vaults as non-custodial and built with compliance controls, pointing to its Bermuda Monetary Authority license and SEC transfer agent approval through Kimber Transfer Agency as evidence of its regulatory posture.
For Ether.fi, the partnership provides immediate distribution to one of the crypto economy’s better-known restaking and yield-focused user bases — as well as access to customers through its large crypto card business, the company noted.
The deal underscores growing momentum for tokenized RWAs as institutional-style, on-chain yield products become more widely available to a broader investor set.
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