In January Sony went live with its Soneium blockchain, with the promise of taking web3 mainstream. Now Soneium has announced a collaboration with real world asset (RWA) tokenization blockchain Plume, aiming to make tokenized Treasuries and private credit available to Soneium users. At a practical level, there’s Sony Bank, a digital only bank that has already offered its customers NFTs as rewards as well as tokenized assets, mainly in the form of real estate to date. Hence, apart from direct users of the Soneium blockchain, Sony Bank customers would make a good audience.
But before that happens, the Plume network needs to launch, which is rumored to be imminent. Plume is a permissionless Layer 1 blockchain, that’s compatible with Ethereum and dedicated to tokenization. It has many backers, including some firms linked to traditional finance (TradFi). Brevan Howard Digital and Nomura’s Laser Digital participated in a $20 million Plume funding in late 2024. And earlier this month, Plume announced an investment from Apollo Global, the private credit leader.
“The ability to offer access to real-world yield through tokenized assets is a major step forward in making blockchain services relevant to mainstream financial use cases,” said Ryohei Suzuki, Director of Sony Block Solutions Labs. “This partnership with Plume unlocks a compelling new layer of value for our ecosystem and users.” One of the challenges with the proliferation of blockchains, is the need to move assets between chains. Plume has a solution it refers to as SkyLink which uses LayerZero.
For this partnership it would involve either burning or locking a token on the Plume network and simultaneously minting or unlocking a token on the Soneium network. In the past cross chain bridges have been a source of hacks, but the situation has dramatically improved in the past year. By enabling access to traditional investments like Treasuries and private credit through tokenization, Sony continues its strategy of bridging mainstream audiences with web3 digital innovation.
