Picture this. You get a payment in a stable deposit and put your wallet in a regular payment. You enter the sum and press send and the next thing you do you get another message requesting another token you have not even thought of making any purchase. The app wants gas, not the stablecoin, which you actually use, but a token on which it has swings and balance to deal with.
You guess how much the deal fails, you put in some more, some one on the other end is waiting. It is as trying to pay for coffee with dollars and the shop assistant requiring you to fill up some small pre-paid card first in some random unit. Stablecoins has the promise of digital cash but more likely than not it is more of a debugging of a line of code that are meant to transfer money.
That discrepancy is the one that Plasma is supposed to bring together. On its official website, Plasma describes itself as a high performance layer 1 blockchain dedicated to stablecoins, that is built entirely on a foundation to support almost instant fee free payments with enterprise grade security. It is not attempting to be a general purpose chain which does everything.
It is found as stablecoin infrastructure to a new global financial infrastructure with instant transfers, minimal fees and EVM compatibility to enable existing tooling to continue to work. According to its most recent published measures, Plasma boasts of approximately 7 billion dollars of stablecoin deposits, backing over twenty five stablecoins, a hundred plus collaborations and a spot as the fourth biggest network by USDT balance, indicating that this is already being utilized as a solemn settlement track of digital dollars.
Ask actual users why wallets of stablecoins are stressful there, it appears that there are the same pains over and over.
The former is the billing interference. One can have many transferless stablecoins but a transfer does not exist as they do not own the distinct gas token or they do not have sufficient of the token.
The second is the psychological congestion due to the balancing and network juggling. Rather than operate on a single currency, users need to be concerned about which chain they are on, which bridge to cross and what is in what corner of their portfolio.
The third pain is fee anxiety. Though the fees may not be high but the fact that it is unstable, the fact that money in one currency is the same as money in another currency, makes the users feel that they are gambling each time they tap confirm.
The fourth problem is opaque failure. A transaction fails due to technical fault and the user is left wondering of the money that is lost or is in between.
A fifth is time uncertainty. The waiting game, in which there is no definite feedback, is what money shouldn't feel like in the case of confirmation that may take long.
The solution of plasma is to start with the UX and work down to protocol design. The lowest level is that of payment like traffic chain optimization. The main location dwells on the fact that Plasma is capable of making more than one thousand transactions per second and they have block times less than a second that gives the network enough headroom to accommodate micro payments and high volume flows without congestion.
Records on network charges, Plasma continues to use the traditional EVM gas model, which means that programmers are uncovered in well-recognized cost organization, nonetheless, most of the time getting common transactions are lower than one cent, and gas fees are held low and predictable.
Below the network it runs PlasmaBFT, a high performance implementation of Fast HotStuff that provides Byzantine fault tolerant consensus with low finality latency, that is, consensus blocks can be finalized in less than seconds, and yet provides the deterministic guarantees typical of a serious settlement layer. This is all serving the purpose of a single idea which is the concept of stablecoins being first class citizens on-chain.
The actual UX innovation however is the way Plasma handles the transfer charges on stablecoin transfers. In the description of network charges, Plasma describes that the chain is additionally keeping a protocol that is paymaster contract, which is gas payment for transferable USDT in qualified transactions.
In simple transfer and transferFrom calls, the payment of the gas is made by the paymaster on behalf of the user in light identity checks and protocol level rate limits in order to keep the system sustainable. The network itself is intervening in the layman terms, to the extent to which the everyday dollar like transfers are paying the toll, so a user can send USDT without having any XPL whatsoever.
Another native gas token paymaster is also mentioned by the same docs which allows developers to register approved ERC 20 tokens (e.g. stablecoins or assets specific to the ecosystem) and actually spend them directly on gas. The protocol paymaster does not charge any fee on top, so the application programs can admit users to the pay network charge in the tokens that they already possess rather than to get some XPL each time they interact. It is protocol-level fee abstraction, as opposed to protocol-level fee abstraction which leaves it totally to custom middleware.
To the eyes of the user it is the combination of paymasters and fee abstraction that causes the difference between struggling with infrastructure, or just sending money.
Remember about that irritating experience with the wallet in the first part and now again play that on Plasma. You have a wallet which is connected to an account of Plasma based. Your balance is in USDT. You pick one of your contacts you type in the amount and this little line appears that it costs you nothing or so little that you do not really notice it. No second token-bank to have to contend with, no halting in the stream of things and descending to purchase some gas, no computing what the fee slider must be. Upon sending a transaction, it gets picked in a flash since the chain has been designed with high throughput and low latency and finality is received in seconds courtesy of PlasmaBFT. The paymaster of that protocol has sponsored the gas underlying the protocol with the rules that Plasma has mapped out, although none of that complication is exposed in the user interface.
Story is also smoother to the developers. They do not require having their own distinct infrastructure to maintain a paymaster so that they could be able to sponsor the transfers of stablecoins. Rather, they are able to call it here paymaster of the protocols and encrypt a custom token in case required in order that the charges are denominated in the same local stablecoin that users of the token are already familiar with.
That is why it will be possible to develop retail wallets, cross border payment apps and stablecoin first financial tools, which will target non technical audiences. This is summarised in the docs of the chain: Fee abstraction is among the largest USX barriers to crypto, and Plasma can be used to eliminate the barrier to apps written in stablecoins to ensure that the user does not have to hold XPL in their hands, and the apps and developers do not have to deal with wrapping native tokens or deploying their own paymasters.
When the XPL token is inserted in the middle of this. The materials of Plasma itself refer to XPL as the native token of the blockchain and the primary asset of the blockchain binding the system together the same way base assets bind other major networks together. It functions to facilitate network level transactions as well as compensate the individuals that provide network support by verifying blocks that would be matched with long term incentives as the number of adopters of the stablecoin increases.
Another task carried out by XPL has been to be the economic backbone to the validator network a fixed initial supply of ten billion at mainnet beta which is allocated to the public sale, ecosystem growth, team and investors in a manner that is expected to finance infrastructure and yet leave space on the system to accommodate community aligned growth. The most significant aspect of UX is the fact that although XPL might be necessary to the very existence of the chain and its comfort, the way Plasma is designed is such that nobody, who is merely sending money around on a daily run should think of it.
Combined, Plasma and its system of paymaster based fees provide another example of how wallets of stablecoins have to be. The thing which the user see and comprehend is always stablecoins. The protocol hides the worst of the costs of running fees, provides reasonably good throughput and rapid finality and provides a basic, predictable surface area to payments.
To creators, traders and just simple people that simply want to own digital dollars that can behave like money, that is the core of the story behind Plasma, the token called XPL and the entire system called the ecosystem of plasmid.
What is the most annoying to you so far experience with the use of stablecoin wallets is to desire a next-generation wallet on Plasma to get right the first ?