Plume Unit Registers as Broker-Dealer for Tokenized Securities

Plume announced on November 10, 2026 that its subsidiary Kimber Digital Securities had been approved for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority membership and registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a broker-dealer, and outlined plans to represent entitlements to U.S. equities, exchange-traded funds and bonds onchain within the established custody system.

Parent company Kimber Labs Inc., operating as Plume, develops the Plume blockchain and Plume Vaults. The registration adds a regulated intermediary to a structure that already includes Kimber Transfer Agency, which registered with the SEC as a transfer agent in September 2025. That affiliate’s functions include managing digital securities, maintaining onchain and offchain shareholder records, and handling share issuance, transfers and dividends.

Plume says the broker-dealer’s safeguards include best execution, independent oversight of operational and cyber risk, and clear, continuous disclosure, while its blockchain and vault protocol embed sanctions and anti-money-laundering transaction screening at the protocol level.

Tokens Would Represent Existing Securities Entitlements

The planned model begins with the custody arrangements through which U.S. securities are commonly held. An investor does not hold direct legal title to the security, but instead holds a security entitlement against the broker-dealer acting as securities intermediary. Plume defines that entitlement as a pro rata property interest in the pool of the security that the broker-dealer holds for customers.

In the custody chain Plume describes, the broker-dealer participates in the Depository Trust Company (DTC) and holds a matching security entitlement against DTC. DTC records that position in its book-entry records and holds the securities through its nominee, Cede & Co. Cede & Co. is the registered holder on the issuer’s securities register, which is maintained by the transfer agent.

Plume says tokens offered through the firm are intended to represent that base-tier entitlement onchain, the same legal interest investors hold today, rather than a wrapper around an asset held outside the chain. The position would be supported by the broker-dealer’s DTC entitlement and settled on established DTCC infrastructure. The intended claim is on an underlying U.S. equity, ETF or bond, carrying rights such as dividends and voting. Investors would also be able to use ACATS to move entire portfolios between offchain and onchain formats in either direction.

Plume says DTC custodies more than $100 trillion in assets, indicating the potential universe of securities reachable through this structure, not the assets of Kimber Digital Securities. That universe includes a growing set of mutual funds issued in tokenized, unwrapped form, where the token is the fund share recorded onchain.

Stablecoin Offerings Remain Under Development

A second planned use is distribution through stablecoin applications. Plume expects Kimber Digital Securities to enable those applications to offer access to SEC-regulated yield-bearing products, including tokenized shares in funds managed by U.S. asset managers, as payment-stablecoin regulations under the GENIUS Act come online in the coming months.

Plume reported $250 million in total value locked and approximately $1 billion in volume for Plume Vaults as of September 30, 2026. Those figures cover the Plume protocol and affiliated vaults rather than the broker-dealer, describing the scale of the existing protocol operation instead of business generated by the registration.

“Registration is a threshold, not a finish line. It lets us do something tokenization has long promised but rarely delivered at scale: move real, unwrapped securities onto open, programmable infrastructure without giving up the protections investors count on,” said Salman Banaei, general counsel at Plume.

Plume cautions that DTC tokenized-entitlement access and stablecoin-related offerings are under development, may not yet be available and are not assured to be offered or function as described. FINRA membership and SEC registration also do not constitute regulatory approval or endorsement of Kimber Digital Securities, Plume or their products.

The registration supplies the regulated intermediary for Plume’s design. Whether the planned entitlement and stablecoin services can deliver the ownership rights and portfolio transfers described is now the central test of the model.