Plume affiliate lands broker-dealer license to bring real U.S. assets onchain

Kimber Labs, a real-world assets company that operates under the name Plume, said it took a major regulatory step forward in the race to put “real” U.S. assets onto blockchain rails.

Its Kimber Digital Securities (KDS) affiliate secured registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and won membership approval from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), becoming a broker-dealer.

The approvals allow it to buy and sell securities for customers, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Tuesday.

In practice, this means the platform bypasses the synthetic "wrapped tokens" common in crypto and hooks directly into the bedrock of U.S. financial market infrastructure — giving digital tokens the exact same legal rights, dividends, and voting power as traditional investments.

Access to DTC

The registration gives KDS customers access to the Depository Trust Company (DTC), the central securities depository for U.S. markets, which it says custodies over $100 trillion in assets, according to the statement.

“Broker-dealer registration also gives our customers access to the core of U.S. market infrastructure: the Depository Trust Company,” the company said. “Investors will be able to hold eligible stocks, ETFs, and bonds in their self-custodial wallets while keeping the book-entry claim that’s already recorded at the DTC.”

The tokens represent an entitlement that carries the same rights as conventional assets, including dividends, voting rights, direct claim on the underlying asset.

In other words, the registration pulls the legacy U.S. market plumbing directly onto a public EVM (Ethereum-compatible) blockchain. So, once KDS launches, users will be able to hold digital claims on U.S. financial assets directly inside a self-custodial wallet.

“DTC entitlements give these tokens what most onchain assets lack: a settled, recognized claim on the real U.S. equity, ETF, or bond asset,” the company said.

The target audience is users of stablecoins, or digital tokens with values pegged to an external reference such as the U.S. dollar. KDS will let stablecoin apps offer customers “access to SEC-regulated yield-bearing products, including tokenized shares in funds managed by leading U.S. asset managers,” as U.S. stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act come online.