TL;DR:
- Plume obtained a Class M digital asset license for its subsidiary KDAB, issued by the Bermuda Monetary Authority.
- KDAB has become the first regulated manager of onchain vaults, with oversight and immutable smart contracts as infrastructure.
- The vaults will allow global access to high-quality assets without intermediaries, with AML standards equivalent to those applied to stablecoins.
Plume announced that its Bermuda-based subsidiary, Kimber Digital Assets Bermuda ISAC Ltd. (KDAB), received a Class M license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) under the Digital Asset Business Act of 2018. With this significant achievement, Plume joins a select group of companies that have chosen Bermuda’s regulatory framework for their international operations, alongside firms such as Circle, Coinbase, and Kraken.
KDAB is positioned as the world’s first regulated manager of onchain vaults. Users deposit assets, receive proportional shares, generate yield, and can redeem at net asset value. The entire process operates on immutable smart contracts, with no administrators or intermediary custodians. A curator manages and rebalances assets within the rules predefined in the contract. It does not have the ability to alter the structural logic of the system.
Plume: Onchain Vaults for Financial Democratization
Chris Yin, co-founder and CEO of Plume, drew a comparison with ETFs: just as those vehicles transformed access to capital markets in the 1990s for any investor with a brokerage account, KDAB’s vaults aim to do the same for anyone with an internet connection. According to Yin, a lawyer in Lagos, a freelancer in Manila, or a small business owner in São Paulo will be able to access yields in seconds with a smartphone and a stablecoin, under the same regulatory protections as a pension fund in London.
The vaults will be backed by regulated funds and high-quality assets from the United States, Hong Kong, and other major jurisdictions. In addition, vault tokens will be usable as composable collateral in DeFi, with no market hours or settlement delays.
The compliance infrastructure includes continuous transaction monitoring, AML screening at the vault token level —regardless of the blockchain protocols to which it is bridged— and freeze and confiscation capabilities built directly into the contract. Plume reports a blocked transaction rate of 0.000005%, compared to approximately 1% on other public blockchains.
BMA: A Regulatory Framework with a Clear Competitive Edge
Salman Banaei, General Counsel of Plume, highlighted that the framework applied by the BMA represents a milestone in the development of global onchain capital markets, with standards that in several respects exceed the goals typically set by traditional regulators.
Each vault operates through its own segregated account incorporated under the Incorporated Segregated Accounts Act of 2019, with independent legal personality and full asset separation. Reserves are preserved onchain with cryptographic verification of collateralization on a continuous basis, attested by Bluprynt.
Plume announced that in the coming days it will unveil the first vaults regulated under this framework.
