Watching Solana’s chart shoot up like bamboo after rain these past few days, I’ll admit something stirred inside me.
Nobody wants to be that person holding stablecoin infrastructure assets that don’t move during a bull market while everything else pumps.
But then last night the news dropped. Tether issued another 1 billion USDT on Ethereum.
That suddenly woke me up completely.
The Flow of Funds Never Lies
The liquidity overflow effect behind such a massive issuance will eventually find a new outlet somewhere.
I glanced at my Plasma holdings sitting there doing nothing on the floor. And I decided not to chase the already overcooked AI sector highs driven purely by sentiment.
Instead I’d calm down and actually run through the interaction logic of this payment focused chain again. To see if it’s swimming naked or quietly holding back something bigger.
The Current Public Chain Narrative Is Dull
The current narrative around public chains is actually pretty boring and repetitive.
Either they’re boasting about being performance monsters with parallel EVM like Monad. Or they’re designing complex liquidity proof systems like Berachain.
Plasma’s approach is genuinely wild and different. It directly targets the core revenue source of all Layer 1s. Gas fees themselves.
I Spent a Night on Testnet
I spent an entire night actually playing around on the testnet.
My biggest feeling wasn’t speed or throughput. It was a strange sense of silence and smoothness.
Usually when you interact on chain, Metamask constantly pops up telling you how much ETH you still need to spend at every single step. That friction caused by constant billing is actually the biggest barrier preventing Web2 users from ever entering.
Plasma’s Paymaster mechanism completely smooths this entire process out.
I moved USDT back and forth between several DApps and hardly felt the blockchain’s presence at all.
This Reminded Me of 360 Antivirus
This dimensionality reduction in experience reminded me of the story of how 360 free antivirus software completely eliminated Rising in China.
When a basic service becomes free, the original business model collapses instantly overnight.
Current Ethereum Layer 2s are also working on account abstraction. But that’s patch style optimization bolted on afterward.
Plasma fundamentally allows application parties to pay gas on behalf of users from the ground up. This changes the operational logic of DApps entirely.
Comparing to Sui
Let’s compare it with the recently popular Sui for context.
Sui’s technology is genuinely hardcore. The security of the Move language is unquestionable.
But its learning curve is extremely steep. Making it difficult for the developer ecosystem to explode quickly in the short term.
Plasma cleverly chose full EVM compatibility instead. Which means well tested DeFi protocols on Ethereum can be directly ported over without rewriting everything.
I Checked Their GitHub
I checked their recent code submissions on GitHub.
The team is deeply optimizing state synchronization under high concurrency conditions. Although this dirty engineering work isn’t glamorous at all, it’s absolutely necessary foundation for financial grade applications.
The current crypto space is too obsessed with volatility. Everyone’s issuing memecoins. Yet nobody’s willing to repair the underlying payment infrastructure pipelines.
Plasma’s stubborn engineer mindset makes me feel there’s something genuinely valuable here.
But I Have to Point Out the Fatal Weakness
However since this is an honest evaluation, I must point out its fatal weakness without any reservations.
The current Plasma network is simply a ghost town. Only highways exist but no cars are driving on them yet.
Although the transfer experience is smooth, there’s a severe lack of high yield protocols on chain that can actually hold funds productively.
I tried to transfer a significant amount across chains.
But found that apart from the official staking pool, there was no second lending platform with TVL exceeding ten million dollars.
This Is Extremely Dangerous
This is extremely dangerous for large capital.
Without a place for funds to go productively, they will eventually flow back out. Which explains why XPL’s price has been completely unable to rise.
Without a wealth effect, technology alone cannot retain people long term.
The Zero Fee Model Has Hidden Dangers
Moreover the zero fee model has also brought a hidden danger. Garbage transaction attacks.
Last night while browsing the block explorer, I noticed several addresses frantically sending tiny transactions of just a few cents repeatedly.
Although the official team claims to have witch defense mechanisms, the network’s stability still needs to be genuinely tested when facing such low cost or zero cost attack vectors.
The Secondary Market Game Is Clear
For us participants in the secondary market, the current game point is very clear.
We are betting on whether Tether will forcibly shift part of its settlement business to Plasma to break away from dependence on Tron and Ethereum.
If this happens, even if only 10 percent of volume shifts, XPL’s current market value would multiply several times over.
But if Tether only treats it as a backup option, the time cost of this investment will be extremely high and painful.
I Looked at the Chip Structure
I examined the latest chip structure and distribution.
The early market making participants who got hurt have been selling off around 0.15 dollars. And the current bottom is being formed by retail investors and a few new large players using real capital.
Although this chip exchange process is painful to watch, it also means that selling pressure is genuinely weakening.
My Current Strategy
My current strategy is to not view Plasma as a typical public chain at all.
But rather as a bank stock with a payment license.
Bank stocks never surge violently like tech stocks do. But their certainty in big cycles is consistently the highest.
Especially as I’ve recently seen PayPal also getting into stablecoins seriously. The boundaries between traditional finance and the crypto world are rapidly blurring.
Plasma with its fully compliant attributes is very likely to be the first landing point for Wall Street institutional funds.
Don’t Get Dazzled
So don’t be dazzled by Solana’s current surge. That track is already too crowded with attention.
Instead, in this neglected corner, I’m holding onto cheap chips and gambling on the eventual transformation of the payment infrastructure sector.
When Tether needs to diversify settlement rails and Wall Street needs compliant stablecoin infrastructure, Plasma will be sitting there ready.
Not exciting. Not pumping. Just quietly building the pipes that eventually everyone depends on.