2026: The Differentiated Competition Between Plasma and Rollup
In 2026, the world of blockchain is no longer dominated solely by Rollup. Once, everyone thought that this "old-fashioned" technology had entered the museum, but no one expected that it would make a remarkable comeback this year with the help of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK). The current Layer 2 track resembles a competition between "all-rounders" and "specialists." On one side is the Rollup camp, represented by Arbitrum and zkSync, which hold the precious "land" of Ethereum; on the other side is the modern Plasma camp, led by XPL and INTMAX, which are riding the fast horse of stablecoins, trying to expand their territory in the uncharted areas of everyday payments and stateless scalability.
Ultimately, why should everyone pay attention to Plasma again? The most intuitive reason is 'saving money.' While the current Rollup is cheaper than the mainnet, they have an unavoidable hard cost—data on-chain fees. No matter how much you compress it, transaction data must still be sent to Ethereum for storage, leading to a perpetual 'floor price' for Rollup's Gas fees. Plasma, on the other hand, is like a lone wolf that boldly places all transaction data off-chain, anchoring only a tiny state root on-chain. Take the recently popular INTMAX as an example; a transaction leaves only a trace of 5 bytes on-chain, which is much smaller than the data submitted by Rollup through blob space. This minimalist approach of 'data off-chain' gives Plasma a cost advantage that Rollups cannot match when facing massive micro-payment scenarios. You probably wouldn’t want to pay Rollup's Gas fees for a cup of coffee, but on Plasma, it’s nearly a zero-cost experience.
