I tried out 1000 transactions on Plume Here’s my full experience (good and bad): Here’s the good: I first decided to tokenize a small piece of digital art I created, since Plume promised to make RWAs accessible. Using the platform’s end-to-end tokenization engine, I minted it as a RWA token within hours. a $40 mint wasn’t so bad. Staking it on Nest Credit’s nALPHA vault netted me a 7% yield in just two weeks, instead of letting it gather dust. Will be trying out what tokenizing a piece of jewelry could do. Found out I could also use that RWA token yield for swaps on Rooster. Speaking of Rooster, I’ve been hooked on their AMM. One time, I even swapped a small batch of nTBILL tokens for pUSD, and the slippage execution was at 0.2% slippage compared to 2% on other chains I’ve tried. When you start doing big swaps, if OTC isn’t an option, you’ll need to find low fee and low slippage platforms. That’s why I liked Rooster for my Plume play. The fact that I even earned extra $PLUME tokens for providing liquidity turned this casual trade into something really rewarding. Speaking of rewards… If you know me, you’ll know I love doing borrowed leverage loops. Ever since I made 27 ETH on Aave borrowing ETH at $900 and selling at $3200, I’ve searched for so many opportunities like this. It’s one of my favorite DeFi plays and SoleraLabs was what I used. I used their overcollateralized lending to borrow against my tokenized art and reinvested into a crypto yield vault. Criticisms: My Unique Challenges 1. As a newbie, my first attempt to join Plume was a bit of a maze. The custom KYC per pool on Mystic Finance’s lending vaults required multiple verifications, and I spent an afternoon uploading documents for a $500 loan. It’s great for security, but the process felt clunky, almost like I was applying for a traditional bank loan instead of a DeFi one. A streamlined onboarding tutorial could save future explorers like me from this initial stumble. I think I’ll create one on this. My excitement with Rooster Protocol turned into horror when PLUME dropped 8.14% in 24 hours. I’d staked some tokens they gave me from LPing and even bought some with my own money for liquidity incentives, but that dip shaved 15% off my expected rewards. Imagine losing $5k because of this. While the long-term and stable potential is clear with Plume’s $208 million market cap, the price swings made me wish for more stability tools, like hedging options or basket options on something like Nav Finance, to balance it out. I know how to use lending protocols, but when I used SoleraLabs’ structured products, I hit a wall of confusion. The leverage and vault mechanics were intriguing, but without detailed guides, I relied on trial-and-error, losing $200 in a miscalculated trade. I can only imagine how much a total newbie would have lost. In my opinion, more and more people using Plume need to come out with more personal guides. As someone who loves learning, I’d love to see Plume offer interactive and in-person tutorials or a “Guide to RWAs” to help users like me master the platform without costly missteps.