Systems That Make Sense

The more time I’ve spent working with real-world assets onchain, the more I’ve noticed something: most systems are harder than they need to be.

This is especially true in crypto. We’ve built incredible infrastructure, but too much of it looks like scaffolding left over from construction. It holds everything up, but it isn’t what you’d want to use every day.

At Plume, my work has been about translating finance into something observable and verifiable onchain. That sounds abstract, but the principle is simple: if someone puts $2 million into a vault, they should be able to see what’s happening to it without relying on anyone’s reassurance. The system should explain itself.

And yet, so often it doesn’t.

The Problem with State

Most blockchains treat “state” as the thing that matters. The balance in your wallet. The number in a dashboard. The TVL of a vault. But state is only the result. What actually matters is history.

Investors don’t trust numbers just because they’re there. They trust them when they can trace them back to the actions that produced them.

That’s what working with real-world assets has taught me: observability is not a feature, it’s the foundation. Without it, everything collapses back into “don’t worry, trust us.”

Trust Is a Graph

When you zoom out, finance is less about numbers and more about relationships: who vouched for whom, who signed which agreement, who attested to which valuation.

In other words, trust is a graph. It’s built on credentials, roles, and attestations. Traditional finance buries this in PDFs. Crypto often ignores it completely. But if you want systems people can actually use with confidence, you have to model trust as it really works.

The Developer Test

One way I judge any system is by asking: could a single developer build something meaningful on it in a weekend?

Most blockchains fail this test. To do anything, you need wallets, RPC endpoints, testnet tokens, indexers, bridges, and a half-dozen other services. That complexity is not a sign of maturity—it’s a sign of drift.

The systems that last are the ones small enough to understand, yet structured enough to trust.

Personal Learnings

Designing for real-world assets forces you to strip away what doesn’t matter. Tokens, hype, complexity—none of it is useful when you’re trying to convince someone to move serious capital onchain.

What matters is clarity:

• Identities and roles that map to how the real world works.

• Assets with lifecycles, not just tickers.

• Histories that can be replayed, not just numbers to glance at.

• Systems that explain themselves without hand-holding.

If a system can do that, people will use it—not because it’s “crypto,” but because it makes sense.

Where This Leads

Finance is just the first frontier. The principle applies everywhere: real-world systems become trustworthy when they are observable and verifiable.

Today it’s vaults, credit, and tokenized treasuries. Tomorrow it could be credentials, supply chains, or even governance itself. Whatever the domain, the lesson is the same: the winning systems won’t be the flashiest, they’ll be the clearest.

The ones that don’t just tell you the result, but show you the path that got there.

That’s the future I want to build toward—systems that don’t need to be explained because they explain themselves.