Plume subsidiary wins Bermuda license for on-chain vaults

Kimber Digital Assets Bermuda ISAC Ltd., a Plume subsidiary, was granted a Class M digital asset business license by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. The license authorizes the firm to operate a regulated on-chain vault manager and to issue and distribute vault tokens worldwide.

The Class M authorization is issued under Bermuda’s Digital Asset Business Act 2018. It places the firm under prudential supervision that includes net asset requirements, liquidity risk management and wind-down planning. The authorization allows permissionless token distribution to anyone with internet access and a stablecoin while requiring anti-money-laundering controls at the token level.

Plume’s vaults use an ETF-style framework: investors deposit assets, receive proportional shares, earn yield and can redeem at net asset value. The operational difference is that core functions run on immutable smart contracts. A curator manages and rebalances vault holdings according to predefined on-chain rules.

Vault reserves are held in non-custodial smart contracts. Plume says collateral is continuously verifiable through cryptographic proofs attested by Bluprynt. Freeze-and-seize features are embedded at the vault token layer to enable AML enforcement where required.

Each vault will operate as an incorporated segregated account under Bermuda’s Incorporated Segregated Accounts Act 2019. That structure provides statutory ring-fencing, separate legal personality and bankruptcy remoteness for each product. KDAB said its AML framework is modeled on standards applied to stablecoins under Bermuda law and provisions of the U.S. GENIUS Act, and described itself as the first regulated vault curator licensed to issue and distribute vault tokens under those rules.

The license activates a legal pathway for U.S.-registered master funds to be accessed by non-U.S. feeder structures at on-chain scale. The arrangement pairs a BMA-supervised feeder vehicle with a globally distributable vault token, offering U.S. asset managers a way to reach investors in some jurisdictions without establishing separate fund infrastructure.

Plume launched its mainnet in June 2025 and reported about $150 million in real-world assets tokenized at launch, including solar farms, private credit, Medicaid claims and mineral rights. Apollo Global Management made a strategic investment in Plume in April 2025. The company reported a blocked transaction rate of 0.000005%, compared with roughly 1% on other public blockchains.

Chris Yin, Plume co-founder and chief executive, said, “The ETF was the last great structural innovation in asset management. The BMA license makes this real. It means this is not an experiment. It is a regulated financial product, supervised by a regulator that has been overseeing global financial services since 1969.” Teddy Pornprinya, co-founder and chief business officer, added that the regulatory alignment will allow distribution of high-quality assets to a broader set of investors.

Plume noted that specific vault products to operate under the KDAB license will be announced in the coming days and weeks. Those products will be subject to ongoing regulatory oversight and reporting requirements under Bermuda law.