Onchain finance builds new index products

Traditional financial instruments are moving onchain, with stablecoins reaching a $300 billion market valuation (Wu Blockchain). Beyond simple tokenization, this shift enables the construction of novel index products that combine disparate asset classes—such as Bitcoin, AI-related compute, and traditional technology stocks like Nvidia and Google (Wu Blockchain). This infrastructure uses onchain composability to create financial products that remain difficult to build within traditional market systems, allowing investors to trade and hold combined assets natively.

Plume and other developers are now prioritizing regulatory infrastructure, including U.S. broker-dealer licenses, to bridge the gap between crypto-native users and traditional issuers like Fidelity and WisdomTree. While this technology increases efficiency, it does not inherently guarantee decentralization, as institutions may maintain control over account access and transaction finality (Mari Savic from Mari’s Crypto Alpha). Investors face a challenge in balancing the liquidity of digital, programmable assets against the historical resilience of tangible stores of value like gold, which has outperformed U.S. residential real estate since 2000 (GoldFix).