Stablecoin Exclusive Blockchain: How Plasma Changes the Market Landscape

Stablecoins are becoming the core medium for on-chain payments, asset settlement, and financial services, but the existing blockchain infrastructure has not been optimized for their characteristics, and issues such as high transaction costs, performance bottlenecks, and centralization risks still exist.

In response to these challenges, Plasma proposed an innovative solution: to build a high-performance Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoins. This solution offers zero transaction fees, enhanced security, and scalability while being compatible with EVM.

This concept has attracted widespread attention from the market. In February 2025, Plasma announced the completion of a $24 million financing round, with a strong lineup of investors including several well-known institutions and individual investors. Additionally, the Echo platform's first ICO product, Sonar, chose Plasma's initial token offering as its debut.

The Necessity of Dedicated Stablecoin Blockchain

According to predictions from research institutions, the annual trading volume of stablecoins in 2024 is expected to reach $15.6 trillion, far exceeding mainstream payment networks. As a "killer application" in the crypto space, stablecoins play a key role in multiple scenarios, attracting a large number of projects and enterprises to accelerate their layouts.

The Plasma team believes that the mainstream public chains on which current stablecoins rely have obvious flaws: the high gas fees of Ethereum make it perform poorly in payment scenarios; while some low-fee public chains, although fast in transaction speed, are overly centralized and pose security risks.

To address these challenges, Plasma has proposed a new type of blockchain designed specifically for stablecoins. Its plan is to create a sidechain on the Bitcoin Blockchain that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This design aims to meet the fundamental needs of decentralized financial activities while leveraging the security of Bitcoin and providing zero-fee stablecoin transactions to unlock the potential of the trillion-dollar stablecoin market.

Inheriting Bitcoin network security, launching a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism

The Plasma team chose to build a Bitcoin sidechain because they recognized the unparalleled security and decentralization features of the Bitcoin network, believing it provides an ideal foundation for global stablecoin settlements.

In terms of core consensus mechanisms, Plasma has independently developed PlasmaBFT, which evolved from Fast HotStuff and supports processing thousands of transactions per second. PlasmaBFT is written in Rust and is optimized for low end-to-end latency.

In addition, Plasma achieves trust-minimized security inheritance by anchoring the state root to the Bitcoin network. This design allows Plasma to reach a security level comparable to Bitcoin without relying on a single validating node or intermediary, thereby reducing the risk of single points of failure or attacks.

The deployment of the Plasma consensus mechanism will be carried out in three phases: trusted validator phase, expansion and scalability testing phase, and fully decentralized phase. This incremental approach aims to ensure the stability and security of the network.

To address the pain point of high transaction fees, Plasma has introduced a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism for stablecoins. The network adopts a block-based architecture, designed with two parallel processing layers: one layer is responsible for regular fee transactions, which are faster; the other layer exclusively handles free transactions, which are slightly slower. Users can choose different transaction methods based on their needs. To ensure smooth channels, Plasma has also incorporated an ordering mechanism, including rate limits, minimum balance requirements, and replacement strategies.

XPL Token Issuance and Lock-up Rules

XPL is the native token of the Plasma network, used to maintain consensus and security and serve as fuel for the execution layer. XPL plays a core role in the system, not only ensuring the security of the PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, supporting EVM execution based on Reth, but also underpinning a minimal trust Bitcoin bridge.

The public sale of XPL will take place on the Plasma official website, and participants must complete KYC identity verification and other compliance procedures. Pre-storage will open on June 9, and the actual sale will begin a few weeks later. This round of public offering plans to sell 10% of the total amount of XPL, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of $500 million.

The participation process includes the deposit phase, lock-up period, and token distribution phase. In the deposit phase, participants deposit stablecoins into the Plasma Vault on Ethereum, accumulating "units" to determine the guaranteed allocation share of XPL. After the deposit period ends, the Vault enters a lock-up state for at least 40 days. When the Plasma mainnet Beta goes live, participants will receive the corresponding allocated XPL tokens.

It is worth noting that this public offering is only open to qualified regions. US users must verify their accredited investor status, and the purchased XPL tokens will be locked for 12 months. Plasma emphasizes that this issuance structure reflects the core values of its network: encouraging long-term participation, maintaining aligned interests, and strengthening transparency to ensure that early contributors can fairly share in the benefits of network growth.