Plasma: A High-Performance Blockchain Optimized for Stablecoins

Stablecoins have become a key vehicle for on-chain payments, asset settlement, and financial services. However, the existing Blockchain infrastructure still faces numerous issues in handling stablecoins, such as high transaction costs, performance bottlenecks, and centralization risks. To address this, Plasma has proposed a targeted solution: to create a high-performance Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoins, providing zero transaction fees, enhanced security, and scalability while being compatible with EVM.

This innovative concept has sparked widespread attention in the market. In February 2025, Plasma announced the completion of a $24 million financing round, with a strong lineup of investors that includes several well-known institutions and individual investors. Additionally, some platforms founded by industry leaders have also chosen Plasma's initial coin offering as their first ICO product.

The Necessity of Stablecoin-Specific Blockchain

According to a report released by a certain research institution, the annual trading volume of stablecoins is expected to reach $15.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing the trading scale of mainstream payment giants. As a key application in the cryptocurrency field, stablecoins play a core role in multiple scenarios, attracting a large number of new projects and traditional enterprises to accelerate their layout and build a new product ecosystem. Plasma takes stablecoin infrastructure as an entry point, aiming to create a high-throughput, scalable Blockchain specifically designed for stablecoins, and is expected to become the global settlement and issuance layer for the digital dollar.

The Plasma team believes that current mainstream public blockchains have some shortcomings in supporting stablecoins. For example, Ethereum's high Gas fees result in poor performance in payment scenarios; while some public blockchains have won the market with low fees and fast transactions, their networks are overly centralized, posing security risks.

To address these challenges, Plasma proposed a new type of blockchain designed specifically for stablecoins. It plans to build a sidechain based on the Bitcoin blockchain while maintaining full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This design meets the basic needs of decentralized financial activities, leverages the security of Bitcoin, and offers zero-fee stablecoin transactions, with the potential to fundamentally unlock the multi-trillion-dollar stablecoin market.

Inheriting the security of the Bitcoin network, launching a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism

The reason the Plasma team chose to build a Bitcoin sidechain is due to the unparalleled security and decentralization of the Bitcoin network, which provides an ideal foundation for global stablecoin settlements. The robust, trustless network of Bitcoin offers immutable security guarantees, laying a solid foundation for the Plasma system.

In terms of core consensus mechanisms, the Plasma team independently developed PlasmaBFT, which is based on the evolution of Fast HotStuff and supports processing thousands of transactions per second to meet the high-speed demands of global stablecoin payments. PlasmaBFT is written in Rust and is optimized for low end-to-end latency.

Plasma achieves trust-minimized security inheritance by anchoring the state root to the Bitcoin network. This design allows Plasma to reach a security level comparable to Bitcoin without relying on a single validating node or intermediary, reducing the risk of single points of failure or attacks, and providing a reliable trust foundation for the large-scale settlement of stablecoins.

The deployment of the Plasma consensus mechanism will be carried out in three phases, starting with trusted validators, gradually expanding the validator set, and ultimately transitioning to a fully decentralized model.

In response to the pain point of high transaction fees, Plasma has launched a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism for stablecoins, which will greatly enhance the universality and convenience of stablecoin payments, particularly suitable for a large number of daily micro-payment scenarios. The Plasma network adopts a block architecture and is designed with two parallel processing layers, handling normal fee transactions and free transactions separately, allowing users to choose different transaction methods based on their needs.

XPL Token Issuance and Lock-up Rules

XPL is the native token of the Plasma network, used to maintain consensus and security, and serves as fuel for the execution layer. XPL plays a core role in the system, not only ensuring the security of the PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, supporting EVM execution based on Reth, but also underpinning a minimal trust Bitcoin bridge.

The public sale of XPL will be conducted on the Plasma official website, and participants must complete the necessary identity verification and compliance processes. Pre-funding will open on June 9, and the actual sale will begin a few weeks later. The number of units for each participant corresponds to a guaranteed allocation quota, and XPL can be purchased using various stablecoins. This public offering plans to sell 10% of the total amount of XPL, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of 500 million USD.

The participation process includes the deposit phase, lock-up period, and token distribution. In the deposit phase, participants deposit stablecoins into the Plasma Vault on Ethereum, accumulating "units" to determine the guaranteed allocation share of XPL. After the deposit period ends, the funds will be locked for at least 40 days. When the Plasma mainnet Beta goes live, participants will receive the corresponding allocated XPL tokens, and the deposited funds will also be bridged to the Plasma network and can be withdrawn.

It is worth noting that this public offering is only open to eligible regions and has strict compliance requirements. Although US users can participate in deposits to earn units, purchasing XPL requires verification of accredited investor status, and the purchased XPL tokens will be locked for 12 months and cannot be resold.

Plasma emphasizes that this issuance structure reflects the core values of its network: encouraging long-term participation, maintaining aligned interests, and enhancing transparency to ensure that early contributors can fairly share in the benefits brought by the network's growth.