Plasma: Building a High-Performance Blockchain Optimized for Stablecoins

Stablecoins are gradually becoming a key vehicle for on-chain payments, asset clearing, and financial services. However, the current blockchain infrastructure has not yet been optimized for their characteristics and still faces issues such as high transaction costs, performance bottlenecks, and centralization risks.

To address these challenges, Plasma has proposed an innovative solution: to build a high-performance Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoins. This solution provides zero-fee transactions, enhanced security, and scalability while being compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

This concept has sparked widespread attention in the market. In February 2025, Plasma completed a $24 million financing round, with investors including several well-known institutions and individuals. In addition, Echo platform's first ICO product, Sonar, also chose Plasma's initial token offering as its debut project.

The Necessity of a Stablecoin-Specific Blockchain

According to research reports, the annual trading volume of stablecoins is expected to reach $15.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing the transaction scale of mainstream payment networks. As a key application in the cryptocurrency field, stablecoins play an important role in multiple scenarios, attracting numerous projects and enterprises to accelerate their layout.

The Plasma team believes that there are significant flaws in the mainstream public chains that current stablecoins rely on: Ethereum's high Gas fees make it unsuitable for payment scenarios; while some public chains have low fees and fast transactions, they are overly centralized and pose potential risks.

In response to these challenges, Plasma has proposed a new blockchain solution specifically designed for stablecoins. Its plan is to create a sidechain on the Bitcoin Blockchain that is fully compatible with EVM. This design aims to meet the fundamental needs of decentralized financial activities while leveraging the security of Bitcoin and providing zero-fee USDT transactions to unlock the immense potential of the stablecoin market.

Core Technical Features

Plasma chooses to base its operations on the Bitcoin network, primarily valuing its unparalleled security and decentralization features, which provide an ideal infrastructure for global stablecoin settlements.

In terms of consensus mechanisms, the Plasma team has independently developed PlasmaBFT, which is evolved from Fast HotStuff and supports processing thousands of transactions per second, meeting the speed requirements for global stablecoin payments. This mechanism is written in Rust and optimized for low end-to-end latency.

In terms of security, Plasma achieves trust-minimized security inheritance by anchoring the state root to the Bitcoin network. This design enables Plasma to achieve a security level comparable to that of Bitcoin while reducing the risk of single points of failure or attacks.

To address the issue of high transaction fees, Plasma has introduced a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism for stablecoins. The network employs a sharding architecture and features two parallel processing layers that handle fee-based and free transactions separately. Users can choose different transaction methods based on their needs, while the system has also incorporated relevant mechanisms to maintain overall efficiency and the normal operation of the network.

XPL Token Issuance

XPL is the native coin of the Plasma network, used to maintain consensus and security and as fuel for the execution layer. The public sale will be conducted on the Plasma official website, and participants must complete the relevant compliance procedures. This round of public fundraising plans to sell 10% of the total amount of XPL, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of $500 million.

The issuance process is divided into three stages: deposit, lock, and distribution. In the deposit stage, participants can deposit stablecoins into the designated contract and accumulate "units" based on the deposit time, which will ultimately determine the allocation share of XPL. After the deposit period ends, the funds will be locked for at least 40 days. When the Plasma mainnet Beta goes live, participants will receive the corresponding allocated XPL tokens, and the funds from the deposit period will also be bridged to the Plasma network and can be withdrawn.

It is worth noting that this public offering is only open to qualified regions and has strict compliance requirements. U.S. users who wish to purchase XPL must verify their accredited investor status, and the purchased 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 early contributors can fairly share in the benefits brought by network growth.