From WLFI to Pumpfun and then to Plasma, the IDO public sales during the bull market have been increasingly heated.
Following the market explosion caused by Pumpfun, the most eye-catching recent development is the new stablecoin-specific blockchain—Plasma—jointly invested by stablecoin giant Tether and Silicon Valley legend investor Peter Thiel.
In just two months, this project, which has attracted investments from top-tier capital such as Bitfinex (Tether's parent company), Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and Framework, has secured nearly $27.5 million in funding, with its valuation skyrocketing to $500 million.
Why has Plasma quickly become the new darling of the market?
Before the public sale launched, the Plasma team released a rigorous and clear set of participation rules. Users who wish to participate in the public sale of XPL must first deposit stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, DAI, or USDS into the official treasury on the Ethereum mainnet (Plasma Vault).
The earlier and longer you deposit, the more "unit value" your account accumulates, which determines how much XPL you can buy later.
Therefore, when the official released the governance token XPL quota allowing users to deposit liquidity, the first batch of $500 million was snatched up within minutes, and the newly added $500 million deposit cap was sold out in just 30 minutes. Even more astonishingly, some large holders spent $100,000 in fees on the Ethereum mainnet to secure a spot.
So what is so special about Plasma?
Plasma's uniqueness lies in using the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of the UTXO model while being fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) at the execution layer, ensuring seamless migration of smart contracts.
Most importantly, all transactions on the Plasma chain can be paid for directly with USDT, and ordinary transfers of USDT are completely free.
In addition to the cost advantage, Plasma also has two important features: first, a native privacy function where on-chain transactions are public by default, but users can easily check a box to hide address and amount information, with the option for selective disclosure when needed; second, Bitcoin liquidity, where Plasma brings BTC on-chain through permissionless bridging technology, combined with Tether's own USD deep pool, enabling low-slippage exchanges and BTC-collateralized stablecoin lending.
How much more can Plasma earn for Tether in a year?
Although Plasma offers zero fees for USDT transfers, it does not mean that Plasma has no income.
Plasma's ability to proclaim "USDT transfers are completely free" does not rely on Tether subsidizing with real money, but rather on categorizing transactions by complexity and priority, breaking all transactions into two billing methods. To put it simply, it's like saying "children under 1.2 meters are free."
Ordinary USDT transfers occupy small blocks, akin to "children under 1.2 meters," and nodes directly package these transactions into blocks without charging users gas fees. However, to prevent spam transactions, Plasma has a basic throughput limit. Additionally, to avoid malicious transaction spamming, users need to leave a small deposit on-chain, serving as collateral: once the abuse threshold is triggered, this deposit will be automatically forfeited. This preserves the "free" experience while blocking spam traffic.
Requests that exceed simple transfers, such as more complex operations like calling multiple contracts at once, batch settlements, and institutional-level rapid settlements, will be recognized by the system and will require payment. The main income for Plasma nodes comes from here, along with small fees collected from cross-chain asset transfers and custody services, giving the entire network self-sustaining capabilities. Because simple transfers are no longer charged, the pricing model can be more flexible: based on current on-chain estimates, thousands of free payments per second consume very low resources, allowing nodes to cover costs and maintain surplus with a small amount of high-level business.
Supporting this mechanism is Plasma's "dual-layer framework." The lower layer periodically anchors the block state back to Bitcoin, outsourcing security to BTC's proof of work; the upper layer is directly compatible with EVM, allowing developers to migrate Ethereum contracts seamlessly. By removing traditional gas calculations, execution efficiency is actually higher. Messari's evaluation report mentioned that Plasma's improved consensus can stably handle thousands of payments with a single-core CPU during stress tests, and node rewards come entirely from that portion of complex transactions.
So how does Plasma make money? The answer is becoming clear.
First, enterprise-level "dedicated lines"—cross-border remittance companies or game publishers that want to push transfers from millisecond to sub-millisecond levels must enter the paid lane and pay a fixed USDT monthly fee to ensure bandwidth.
Second, contracts and batch settlements—DeFi protocols calling complex logic still need to pay gas, but the pricing unit changes from ETH to USDT.
Third, bridging and custody—bringing assets from other chains to Plasma or redeeming from Plasma incurs a small exit tax, which goes into the Plasma treasury and is then distributed to nodes and the foundation according to rules.
Fourth, governance token XPL inflation—validators staking XPL receive block rewards, and the Plasma treasury retains a portion for auction over time to continuously subsidize point-to-point USDT's 0 gas payments.
The combination of these four factors is sufficient to cover the network's expenses for free transfers and even bring Tether a new cash flow.
Assuming Plasma can successfully capture the majority of USDT traffic currently running on Tron and Ethereum, the first direct income would be the majority of on-chain fees intercepted by Tron and Ethereum—annual revenue could reach approximately $1 billion to $2 billion. Additionally, with enterprise services and cross-chain fees, the new income range is expected to reach $1.2 billion to $3 billion. Plasma may also have other hidden benefits and ecological spillovers: for example, attracting new large liquidity and projects to join, collecting certain "taxes"; providing SDKs and enterprise node access, charging commercial fees for on-chain applications, etc.
However, due to Plasma's zero fees for ordinary USDT transfers, a conservative estimate suggests that Plasma can bring Tether $1 billion in revenue per year.
Beyond revenue, more importantly, is the influence. In the past, Tether had to follow the pace of Ethereum and Tron; once either raised rates or changed rules, USDT could only passively comply, and the supporting infrastructure for USDT (settlement, execution, bridging, etc.) was largely beyond Tether's control.
Now, Tether enhances USDT's role as a settlement currency, hoarding BTC as a reserve asset, merging both in Plasma, consolidating the $150 billion USDT scattered across dozens of networks into a unified settlement layer, allowing transfers, exchanges, and redemptions to occur on Tether's own territory. Tether will also gain more pricing power and influence, naturally controlling the tollgate of this network.
Details of Plasma's XPL public sale participation
As the public sale date approaches, the Plasma team has also announced detailed participation rules.
Users participating in the XPL public sale must first deposit stablecoins (USDT, USDC, DAI, or USDS) into the official treasury on Ethereum (Plasma Vault). The system will calculate "unit values" based on the deposit amount and duration for each wallet, which ultimately determines the user's guaranteed subscription quota. In simple terms, the earlier and longer the deposit, the more XPL can be purchased during the public sale.
To prevent large holders from monopolizing quotas, the team has set a deposit limit of $50 million for each Sonar account, and each account can bind a maximum of three wallets. This means that regardless of how much unit value users accumulate across multiple wallets, the total limit cannot exceed $50 million. Although there is no hard total limit set for the overall treasury, the team will flexibly adjust the total deposit limit, initially set at $100 million, and gradually open it based on market demand to ensure healthy and balanced distribution.
Additionally, it is important to note that after the public sale starts, users will need to submit new stablecoins to actually subscribe for XPL tokens; the deposit balance in the treasury will not be automatically used to purchase XPL tokens. If users do not use up their subscription quota, the excess will be automatically redistributed proportionally to those who over-subscribed. This means users can moderately over-subscribe when purchasing to obtain additional XPL.
From a compliance perspective, all users participating in the public sale must complete strict KYC verification on the Sonar platform, including users with existing Echo accounts. U.S. users must provide proof of accredited investor status, and the subscribed XPL tokens will be locked for an additional 12 months after the public sale ends; users from regions such as the UK, China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Ukraine will not be able to participate in this public sale.
The deposited stablecoin assets will first be exchanged 1:1 into USDT by whitelisted market makers on the Ethereum mainnet, and then securely transferred to the Plasma network using LayerZero cross-chain bridge technology, stored as USD₮0. After the mainnet Beta phase launches, users can withdraw their principal and all accumulated earnings within a transparent and rapid process, generally not exceeding 48 hours. During this period, the deposit receipt token held by users serves only as an internal certificate; any transfer action will be regarded as an early withdrawal, and the official strongly advises users to avoid using this token for any DeFi activities.
The treasury facility used for this public sale by Plasma is provided by Veda, which is currently widely used and manages assets exceeding $2.6 billion in security. Additionally, all contracts have passed strict audits by top security auditing firms such as Spearbit and Zellic, and the audit reports will be published before the mainnet Beta launch to further ensure fund safety and transparency.
As the public sale date approaches, this IDO from Plasma is expected to reignite market enthusiasm, with most participants believing that Plasma will directly compete with Tron in the future, becoming the new "stablecoin public chain king," which has garnered such significant attention for this public sale.
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