Imagine approaching a coffee house to buy a coffee, a latte. You tap your card to pay $5. But the machine causes you to beep and rejected. The cashier looks at you and says "Sorry, you have enough dollars for the coffee, but you don't have any 'Network Credits' to pay for the swipe fee."
This sounds ludicrous in the real world. However, this is how most blockchains today function.
If you encounter the situation that you want to send stablecoins on a traditional network, you can not just send them. You also have to have a completely different and volatile "native token" you have to pay to pay for the gas. For example, if $1,000 of your assets is stablecoins and your assets have worth of $0 in the native token your money is basically frozen.
This is what's known as the "two-token friction" problem, and is the one of the biggest stoppers to crypto becoming a true global payment rail.
Plasma (XPL) is correcting this and reworking the model of gas from scratch.
In the standard model of blockchain, it means that the network is protocol-centric and the user is not at its center. The logic is rigid. You have to pay the toll in the network's own currency no matter what transaction you are trying to make in the network.
For a crypto native user this is a mere annoyance. But to a normal person attempting to transfer money to a friend or pay a merchant, it is a dealbreaker. It is creating a complex mental hurdle where the users have to juggle multiple balances, calculate exchange rates, and worry about "dust" (leftover small amounts of crypto).
This friction is why Web3 payments are behind the smooth experience of the traditional finance apps.
The Solution: The rules are changed by plasma using a feature known as Gas Abstraction.
Instead of requiring users to hold onto a volatile asset just so that they pay fees, the Plasma network has a "Paymaster" mechanism. This is a tool which is available at the protocol level and facilitates payment of fees in the same token which is being transferred.
This implies that if you are sending stablecoins (USDT) the very small transaction fee can be taken from that stablecoin balance directly.
The user is not required to hold any XPL in order to have the transfer occur. To the user it will be just like a normal banking transfer. The fee is exactly that - invisible (subsidized by the app) - or, in a small slice of the transaction itself.
This change may sound technical but the implications are psychological.
When you eliminate the requirement of a second token, you eliminate the "crypto anxiety" from the process. Users don't have to worry about changing tokens anymore or top-up of the gas balance. They can simply download a wallet, receive funds and spend them up instantly.
This architecture has allowed developers to create payment applications that appear "Web2" on the front end but contain all the security and decentralization of "Web3" on the back end. It fills the gap between ease of use that people demand, and self-custody that they deserve.
You might ask yourself: If users have to pay for gas in stablecoins, does the native token ($XPL) even have value anymore?
The answer is yes. In fact, it becomes more valuable with its pure utility asset.
While it is the user who pays using stablecoins, in the background the background protocol will still settle everything on-chain. The "Paymaster" changes the amount to XPL behind the scenes in order to reward the validators that lock in the security of the network. This provides a powerful loop in the economy.
Usage: The more people that use the network the easier it is (frictionless payments).
Volume: When there is high volume of transactions, there are consistent fees.
Burn & Staking: These fees are used to create a demand for $XPL which is staked by validators in order to secure the chain.
Eliminating the friction for the end-user, Plasma actually raises the amount of potential volume for the network. It stops being a toll booth that annoys visitors and starts being a superhighway that everybody wants to drive on.
The future of payments is not about educating everyone on how gas limit and gwei work. It is about rendering the technology invisible.
Plasma's model helps to prove that we can have decentralized and permissionless payments without the headache of having to deal with native gas management. It is one small change to code, but a massive leap in user experience.