Invest2 publishers3 min readPublished
Plume wraps Fidelity's actively managed bond ETF in a vault that adds duration and credit risk onchain
Plume launched nBND, an onchain vault backed mainly by shares of FBND, Fidelity's $26.6 billion multi-sector bond ETF. It brings duration and credit risk to tokenized fixed income, though Plume has not said how many shares the vault holds.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- FBND is actively managed, and its managers can move money among government bonds, investment-grade corporate debt, high-yield bonds and emerging-market securities.
- Plume cited tokenized U.S. Treasuries growing from $12 billion in April to $15 billion in June to argue for wider bond products onchain.
- Investors deposit stablecoins into the vault and receive a receipt token, tradable on Plume's own blockchain, that represents a claim on the vault's FBND shares.
- Plume and ether.fi formed a partnership in June 2026, and their Etherfi Liquid RWA vault launched with $25 million toward a projected $100 million.
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Why it matters
- contradiction Early coverage called nBND a tokenized $28 billion ETF. That figure is FBND's total assets, so any count of tokenized bonds that includes it overstates what has actually moved onchain.
- exposure Holders coming from tokenized bills take on FBND's rate and credit swings. Crypto Briefing adds the smart-contract and platform risk of the receipt layer.
- constraint The launch material does not make nBND holders registered FBND shareholders, so a buyer's claim on the bonds runs through Plume's vault and its ownership records.
- precedent Because nBND wraps an existing fund, Plume can add products without managing a portfolio. It says more Fidelity assets are next.
By Fidelity's count, FBND held $26.6 billion on June 30 [2]. That is about 1.8 times the $15 billion of tokenized Treasuries Plume cited for the same month [1]. Third-party data now put the fund nearer $28.2 billion [3].
Plume has not disclosed the vault's balance [6], so the only demand with a published size comes from the ether.fi vault. Its $25 million opening deployment would be about 0.09% of FBND even if every dollar sat in the fund [3]. Not every dollar does, because that vault also holds BlackRock's iShares AAA CLO ETF [18].
Plume is wrapping a fund it does not run (or rather, shares of one). The launch material ties nBND to an existing ETF instead of a newly built bond portfolio [21]. Fidelity's managers choose the bonds [4]. Plume supplies the token, and in October 2025 it obtained SEC transfer-agent registration, the role that keeps the official record of who owns a security [19]. Crypto Briefing gives the product's formal name as the Nest Fidelity Total Bond ETF Vault, or nFBND [14]. Crypto.news reports the name in Plume's announcement as nBND [1].
Bills and money-market funds went onchain first because their short maturities and simple structures suited blockchain distribution, according to Crypto.news [22]. Yin called them the "starting points" for onchain fixed income [10]. He said institutional investors "want duration, and active management" [9]. FBND has been an ETF since Oct. 6, 2014 and charges a 0.36% expense ratio [5]. Crypto Briefing put its yield at around 4.88% [16]. (Reports that credit FBND with a 20-year ETF record appear to confuse it with Fidelity's older Total Bond mutual fund, per Crypto.news [13].)
The launch could go one of three ways. Holders of tokenized Treasuries could add nBND as their duration position, and Plume would then have a balance worth publishing. nBND could instead end up mostly as an ingredient in mixed vaults like ether.fi's, sized in the tens of millions. Or rising rates could mark FBND down, and the first test would be whether the receipt token trades near the value of the shares behind it.
For now I expect the second. The one vehicle with a published size opened at $25 million [17]. FBND is also a U.S.-listed ETF [23], so an institution with a brokerage account can already hold it. The token's narrower advantage is a route from stablecoins into the fund that skips the brokerage account [15].
The case against my view is pace. Tokenized Treasuries added $3 billion in two months [2], and the holders of those balances are the obvious buyers for the duration Yin described. If Plume discloses an nBND balance above the ether.fi vault's $100 million target [17], I have this wrong.
What to watch
- Redemption terms for the nBND receipt token: how quickly, and in what asset, a holder can get stablecoins or FBND shares back.
- Whether Fidelity takes a named role in the further launches Plume says it plans to bring onchain.