Plasma loses receipts.
Not the transaction hash. The meaning of it.
USDT moves. PlasmaBFT finality snaps shut. Wallet balance updates before anyone in ops has finished scrolling. The chain is already calm again.
Then the receipt job wakes up late.
A merchant stack expects a soft window. Payment, confirm, generate receipt, attach metadata, ship confirmation. On Plasma, that ordering is optimistic. Plasma's Finality lands while the receipt worker is still assembling context it assumes it can finish stitching together.
Amount is fixed. Sender is fixed. Everything else is still catching up.
The receipt worker retries because it didn’t get an ack back in time. Not chain ack. Internal ack. A second receipt gets minted with the same tx hash but a different internal reference. Same payment. Two documents. Both “correct.” Neither one you want to swear on.
Accounting notices first. Not because balances are wrong. Because downstream exports don’t line up. One receipt has tax metadata. The other doesn’t. One made it into the daily file. The other arrived after cutoff and sat in a queue nobody checks unless something already feels off.
Support gets the ticket later. The customer has a receipt. The merchant has a different one. Both point at the same Plasma transaction. The chain says nothing is wrong.
And it isn’t.
What breaks is the ordering your systems assumed would exist. On slower settlement, receipt generation borrows time from lag. Plasma doesn’t lend you that time. Finality lands, and your internal “meaning layer” is still mid-build.
The debate starts, predictably, then gets messy.
“Generate only after PlasmaBFT confirmation.” “We already did. That’s the point.” “So why did it retry at all?” …because the tx hash was known, but the receipt state wasn’t.
None of those arguments undo the mismatch.
I’ve seen teams try to patch it with delays. Artificial waits. Sleep calls. “Give it 500 ms.” It works until volume picks up and retries overlap again. The issue isn’t raw speed. It’s letting a mutable receipt mutate after the ledger already stopped moving.
So receipts get uglier. Stripped down. Less enrichment. Fewer late mutations. Metadata freezes earlier than anyone is comfortable with. The UI still looks clean. The compromise sits behind it, where only ops and accounting feel it.
PlasmaBFT can keep closing in sub-second windows.
Your receipts just have to stop pretending they’re allowed to arrive late and still be the truth. #Plasma
