Plume Opens Onchain Door to Fidelity’s $28B Bond Giant

Plume opened nBND on Oct. 5, giving investors blockchain-based exposure to Fidelity’s roughly $28 billion Total Bond ETF. But there’s a small catch. The exchange-traded fund (ETF) itself wasn’t tokenized, and its $28 billion hasn’t moved onchain. The nBND vehicle is a receipt token for a Nest vault holding FBND shares, and hours after launch, the new vault contained only about $48 in onchain assets.

A roughly $28 billion Fidelity bond ETF just acquired a blockchain doorway, but almost none of that mountain of money walked through it. Plume launched nBND on Oct. 5, offering onchain exposure to Fidelity Total Bond ETF (FBND), an actively managed fund spanning government, corporate, mortgage, high-yield, and emerging-market debt.

The wrinkle is considerable. Fidelity hasn’t tokenized FBND, and the fund’s billions remain firmly offchain. Instead, Plume’s Nest protocol wraps exposure to shares held inside a vault and issues investors a receipt token. Hours after the announcement, using the ticker nFBND, Defillama showed roughly $48 in onchain assets.

That tiny starting balance doesn’t make the structure trivial. Onchain fixed income has largely revolved around short-duration U.S. Treasuries and money-market-style products. Plume is betting institutional investors eventually want the rest of the bond counter, too.

“While the onchain fixed income market was originally concentrated in short-duration Treasuries and money market equivalents, these are the starting points, not the destination. Institutional allocators want duration, and active management, the same building blocks they use offchain,” Plume CEO and co-founder Chris Yin said on Monday.

FBND certainly brings duration. The traditional finance (TradFi) giant Fidelity launched the ETF in October 2014, and its own June figures put net assets at $26.6 billion. Third-party estimates around early October placed