Author: Daniel Li, CoinVoice
In recent years, stablecoins have quietly changed the global payment landscape. By October 2025, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, with an annual transaction volume reaching $27.6 trillion, even exceeding the payment scale of Visa and Mastercard, becoming the true "hard currency" of the crypto market. Whether for cross-border remittances, DeFi transactions, or everyday small payments, stablecoins are stepping into the spotlight.
However, challenges have arisen. Today's mainstream public chains—Ethereum, Tron—still appear cumbersome when faced with large-scale payments: high transaction fees, delayed transaction confirmations, and the requirement for users to hold additional native tokens to pay for Gas. These pain points create a gap for stablecoins to achieve "true widespread adoption" as everyday payment tools.
Thus, a new trend has begun to emerge: public chains dedicated to stablecoins. They are no longer content to be "vassals of the crypto market," but are specifically designed for payments, aiming to be as efficient as Visa, yet more open, lower cost, and more global.
Plasma is one of the most representative attempts. Jointly built by Silicon Valley venture capital and crypto giants, Plasma's vision is to create a zero-fee, instant payment network with Bitcoin-level security. It boldly uses Bitcoin as the settlement security layer and natively supports stablecoin payments in its underlying protocol, striving to solve the persistent issues of traditional public chains in payment experiences.
Plasma is not just a new chain; it is reconstructing the value chain of stablecoins, attempting to disrupt the existing rules of on-chain payments.
Plasma's Distribution, Community, and Marketing: From Capital Endorsement to Viral Growth
Plasma's rapid rise is inseparable from its solid financing foundation and clever distribution strategy. Since its launch in 2024, the team has completed multiple rounds of financing, totaling $74 million, with a valuation of approximately $500 million. The investment lineup is impressive, including top institutions such as Framework Ventures, Bitfinex, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Capital not only provides funding and credibility but also brings channels and resources. Tether's deep involvement allows Plasma to inherit the vast ecosystem of USDT; Bitfinex's experience ensures its global payment implementation. This capital endorsement is comparable to the early VC support for Ethereum, enabling Plasma to accumulate sufficient momentum before its mainnet launch.
In terms of distribution mechanisms, Plasma has shown innovation. Its token XPL has a fixed total supply of 10 billion, with an initial circulation of about 18%, and an inflation rate gradually decreasing from 5% to 3%, balancing incentives and sustainability. The team and early investors hold 50% of the shares, but they are locked for three years (including a one-year cliff), effectively alleviating selling pressure. Unlike "money-spraying airdrops," Plasma adopts a model of "pre-depositing stablecoins for XPL": users deposit USDT, USDC, or DAI into the Plasma treasury on Ethereum, with the quota decreasing over time and amount. This design not only avoids "sheep shearing" but also successfully ignites market enthusiasm. The initial quota of $500 million was snapped up in minutes, and subsequent limits sold out within half an hour, with users even spending tens of thousands of dollars in Gas during the "buying frenzy." This method achieved viral spread through user word-of-mouth and social sharing, fully reflecting its "inclusive" positioning.
Exchange partnerships have also become another ace for Plasma. Before the mainnet launch, it integrated with Binance, allowing 280 million users to directly connect stablecoins to Aave on Plasma. The Binance HODLer event distributed 75 million XPL (accounting for 0.75%), and an additional 25 million XPL rewarded early stakers, with average earnings reaching $8,000. The USDT locked product sold out within an hour, attracting $250 million in funds. Subsequently, Bitget Launchpool launched XPL, offering 2.2 million rewards; OKX Boost introduced a 15 million XPL reward pool, requiring users to stake OKB or stablecoins on X Layer. These collaborations brought a large user base while enhancing participation and stickiness through airdrops, points, and community interactions.
In community marketing, Plasma also operates efficiently. The team is active on X (Twitter) and Chinese social media, leveraging media outlets like Odaily Planet Daily and BlockBeats for promotion. On the launch day, DragonFly Capital founder Avichal Garg publicly praised Plasma as "the new settlement layer for stablecoin payments," quickly sparking discussions on social platforms. Meanwhile, Plasma rapidly integrated with the ecosystem on a technical level: it launched with over 100 protocols, including Aave, Curve, and Maker, and joined the Chainlink Scale program. On October 3, 2025, Plasma completed integration with Chainlink, providing oracle, CCIP, and Data Streams services, expanding cross-chain and payment scenarios; collaboration with Trust Wallet further lowered the access threshold for global users.
The synergy of capital, distribution, exchanges, and community has directly laid the foundation for Plasma's explosive growth. In the first week after launch, TVL quickly climbed to $8.7 billion, with over $7 billion injected in stablecoins, making it one of the top five in DeFi. Pendle attracted $318 million in new liquidity just four days after Plasma's launch, showcasing the ecosystem's strong appeal. Overall, Plasma has achieved a rapid breakthrough from 0 to 1 by closely integrating financing, distribution, exchange collaboration, and community marketing, paving the way for subsequent technological implementation and ecosystem expansion.
Core Design and Gameplay of Plasma Chain: From Zero-Friction Payments to Modular Ecosystem
Plasma's design closely addresses the core pain point of "stablecoin payments," aiming to provide a user experience akin to traditional mobile payments like Alipay and WeChat Pay. Its underlying structure employs an improved HotStuff PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, with TPS exceeding 1000 and transaction confirmation times under 1 second, particularly suitable for high-frequency small transactions. The EVM-compatible Rust client ensures smooth migration of DApps. At the same time, Plasma deliberately avoids entertainment applications like NFTs and meme coins, focusing resources on payments, lending, and settlement, positioning itself as a dedicated "settlement layer" for stablecoins.
The most representative innovation is the zero-fee transfer mechanism. The system classifies transactions based on complexity: ordinary one-to-one transfers are completely free; complex operations involving multiple contract calls or batch settlements are charged based on resource consumption. To prevent abuse, Plasma introduces low-threshold staking or lightweight verification (such as email/phone number), with a Paymaster maintained by the foundation subsidizing Gas, allowing for "zero friction" transfers in most scenarios. Additionally, users can directly use USDT, pBTC, or BTC to pay for Gas without needing to hold XPL, significantly lowering the usage threshold. For newcomers, migration is easier; for merchants, instant settlement means higher efficiency.
In terms of security, Plasma adopts a hybrid strategy anchored to Bitcoin. It enhances cross-chain security through threshold signature bridges, isolates consensus and transfer functions with a dual-validator architecture, and regularly anchors the state to the Bitcoin PoW network to guard against rollback risks. This mechanism leverages Bitcoin's finality to add external security anchors to the network, alleviating trust concerns associated with centralized sidechains. On the privacy front, Plasma employs a "controllable transparency" design: on-chain data is publicly available for auditing by default, but users can choose to hide addresses or amounts, disclosing them only in compliance or authorized scenarios, striking a balance between privacy and regulation.
Plasma's modular architecture lays the foundation for its ecosystem expansion. It is deeply integrated with Chainlink, supporting Data Streams and CCIP, covering over 60 chains, achieving low-latency price feeds and cross-chain communication, and supporting cross-border payments and multi-chain settlements. In terms of application implementation, Plasma pays special attention to offline payment scenarios: it has integrated with African payment giant Yellow Card (a Visa partner covering 20+ countries) and supports regional stablecoins like BiLira, tapping into the cross-border remittance and local settlement markets. Meanwhile, Plasma One, as a new neobank product, offers deposit, consumption, and wealth management functions for the unbanked population, combining a payment card with 4% cashback and over 10% annualized returns, bridging on-chain and offline channels.
In the DeFi ecosystem, Plasma has also quickly gathered liquidity. Aave attracted over $2 billion in TVL on its first day, and Pendle added $318 million in liquidity within four days; Balancer provided Boosted pools and StableSurge hooks to enhance capital efficiency; Clearpool launched the yield-bearing stablecoin cpUSD to empower institutional credit; Ether.fi allocated $500 million in staking vaults. Even AI tools like ZyFAI automatically manage 867,000 USDT on Plasma, with an average APY of 21.84%. Through these integrations, Plasma not only accumulates liquidity but also creates diverse gameplay, allowing users to earn XPL incentives through lending, liquidity mining, and cross-chain operations.
Overall, Plasma's design consistently adheres to "usability first." Whether through tiered fees, multi-asset Gas, Bitcoin anchoring, controllable privacy, or modular architecture, all innovations point to a single goal: to make stablecoin payments truly "everyday." This is both a correction of existing public chain pain points and a strong response to the needs of emerging markets and institutions.
Plasma's Medium to Long-Term Challenges and Future Outlook: Opportunities and Risks Coexist
Plasma's performance since its independent mainnet launch has undoubtedly been remarkable, but as it rapidly ascends, its future remains filled with uncertainties and challenges.
In the competitive landscape, dedicated stablecoin chains have begun to bloom in multiple areas. Circle's Arc chain focuses on USDC payments, emphasizing extreme compliance: it uses a permissioned PoA consensus, built-in KYC/AML mechanisms, and USDC as the Gas token, directly anchoring on-chain expenses to dollar costs, naturally aligning with regulated institutional users. Stripe's Tempo chain takes a different route, strengthening the integration of the payment ecosystem: it supports any stablecoin to pay Gas through an AMM mechanism, avoiding excessive reliance on a single issuer, and leveraging resources from giants like Visa and Shopify to attempt to create a "user payment—merchant collection" closed loop. In contrast, Plasma focuses more on emerging markets and high-frequency small payments, attracting ordinary users and Web2 migration groups with a "zero-friction experience," positioning itself differently from Arc and Tempo. Whether it can stand out depends on Plasma's ability to establish its own ecological moat.
Regulation is another major challenge. Currently, global regulation of stablecoins is tightening. Circle, backed by the compliance advantages of the United States, makes it easier for Arc to integrate into the European and American markets; Tether, on the other hand, has long been at the center of regulatory controversy due to the dollar-pegging mechanism of USDT and issues related to information disclosure. The deep binding of Plasma with Tether can quickly mobilize massive liquidity but will also make it directly affected by regulatory dynamics. In the future, if Plasma wants to become a truly compliant payment infrastructure, it must present more flexible responses across different jurisdictions, especially in finding a balance between privacy protection and audit transparency.
User retention and the sustainability of token incentives are also of great concern. On the day of its launch, Plasma attracted over $2 billion in TVL into applications like Aave, and the futures trading volume once exceeded $600 million, but the enthusiasm did not last long. Currently, the price of XPL has fallen from a peak of $1.69 to $0.75. Therefore, the community is generally worried that if early incentives are exhausted or mining rewards decline, users may experience a mass exodus. The release rhythm of the token economy, the actual returns of ecological applications, and the sustainability of the "zero-fee" model subsidies will all directly impact Plasma's long-term stickiness.
On the technical level, Plasma's innovations also come with risks. The free transfer model, if lacking effective risk control, may encounter spam transaction attacks; the high dependence on USDT raises concerns about centralization and censorship; the limited number of early validators may lead to questions about decentralization; while the Bitcoin bridging solution enhances security in design, it still lacks sufficient time for validation. Meanwhile, established public chains like Ethereum, BSC, and Solana have significantly reduced fees, making it challenging for Plasma to persuade users to migrate to a dedicated chain.
Overall, Plasma is not telling a new "stablecoin story," but is attempting to reconstruct the underlying logic of the stablecoin value chain: making settlements lighter, cheaper, and more widespread. Whether relying on Tether's liquidity advantage or entering payment scenarios with zero fees, Plasma is pushing stablecoins from speculative tools towards global infrastructure. Competition, regulation, retention, and security remain hurdles it must overcome, but these also present opportunities. If Plasma can continuously expand applications within a compliant framework and establish a solid network in emerging markets, it may indeed have the chance to disrupt the on-chain payment landscape in the coming years, becoming a true "digital dollar settlement layer."
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