From WLFI to Pumpfun to Plasma, IDO public sales in the bull market are getting hotter and hotter.
After Pumpfun set the market on fire, what has attracted the most attention in the market recently is Plasma, a new stablecoin-dedicated blockchain jointly invested by stablecoin giant Tether and legendary Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
In just two months, this project, which has been invested in by first-tier capitals such as Bitfinex (Tethers parent company), Peter Thiels Founders Fund and Framework, has received nearly US$27.5 million in financing, and its valuation has soared to US$500 million.
Why has Plasma quickly become the new favorite in the market?
Before the public sale started, the Plasma team released a set of rigorous and clear rules of participation. If users want to participate in the public sale of XPL, they must first deposit stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, DAI or USDS into the official vault (Plasma Vault) on the Ethereum mainnet.
The earlier and longer you save, the more unit value your account will accumulate, and these unit values determine how much XPL you can buy at that time.
Therefore, when the government recently released the XPL governance token quota to allow users to deposit liquidity, the first batch of $500 million was snapped up in a few minutes, and the newly added $500 million deposit limit was sold out in 30 minutes. What’s even more exaggerated is that some big investors spent $100,000 in fees on the Ethereum mainnet to grab a spot.
So what’s so special about Plasma?
The uniqueness of Plasma lies in using the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of the UTXO model, while being fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) at the execution layer, ensuring that smart contracts can be migrated seamlessly.
Most importantly, all transactions on the Plasma chain can use USDT to pay for gas directly, and ordinary transfers of USDT are completely free.
In addition to the fee advantage, Plasma also has two important features: the first is the native privacy function. On-chain transactions are public by default, but users only need to simply check the box to hide the address and amount information, and can selectively disclose it when needed; the second is Bitcoin liquidity. Plasma introduces BTC to the chain through permissionless bridging technology, and cooperates with Tether’s own deep US dollar pool to achieve low-slippage exchange and BTC-collateralized stablecoin lending.
How much more can Plasma earn for Tether in a year?
Although Plasma offers zero fees for USDT transfers, it does not mean that Plasma has no income.
The reason why Plasma dares to shout to users that USDT transfers are completely free is not because Tether subsidizes with real money, but because it divides all transactions into two billing methods based on complexity and priority. To put it in a simple way, it is like children under 1.2 meters are free of charge.
Ordinary USDT transfers occupy a small block, just like children under 1.2 meters tall. Nodes directly pack such transactions into blocks and do not charge users for gas. However, in order to prevent spam transactions, Plasma has a basic throughput limit. At the same time, in order to avoid malicious spam transactions, users also need to leave a small collateral on the chain to serve as a margin: once the abuse threshold is triggered, the collateral will be automatically confiscated. This not only preserves the free experience, but also blocks spam traffic.
Other requests beyond simple transfers, that is, more complex operations, such as calling multiple contracts at a time, batch clearing, institutional-level ultra-fast settlement, etc., will be recognized by the system and will need to pay fees. The main income of Plasma nodes comes from here, plus the micro-fees collected from cross-chain assets and custody services, the entire network has the ability to generate its own blood. Precisely because simple transfers are no longer charged, the unit price of the charging model can be more flexible: according to current estimates on the chain, thousands of free payments per second consume only very low resources, and nodes can cover costs and maintain a surplus with a small amount of high-level services.
The mechanism is supported by Plasmas double-layer skeleton. The bottom layer regularly anchors the block status back to Bitcoin, outsourcing security to BTCs proof of work; the upper layer is directly compatible with EVM, and developers can move Ethereum contracts over and run them. After removing the traditional Gas calculation, the execution efficiency is higher. Messari mentioned in the evaluation report that Plasmas improved consensus can stably process thousands of payments on a single-core CPU in stress testing, and the nodes reward comes entirely from that part of the complex transaction.
So how does Plasma make money? The answer is obvious.
First, enterprise-level dedicated lines - if cross-border remittance companies or game publishers want to push transfers from milliseconds to sub-milliseconds, they have to enter the paid lane and pay a fixed USDT monthly fee to ensure bandwidth.
Second, contracts and batch liquidation - DeFi protocols still require the payment of Gas to call complex logic, but the unit of measurement has changed from ETH to USDT.
Third, bridging and custody - when assets are transferred from other chains to Plasma or redeemed from Plasma, a small export tax must be paid. This money goes into the Plasma treasury and is then distributed to nodes and foundations according to the rules.
Fourth, the inflation of the governance token XPL - validators stake XPL to obtain block rewards, and the Plasma Treasury reserves a portion of it for auction over time to continuously subsidize peer-to-peer USDT 0g as payments.
The combination of these four is enough to feed back the network expenses of free transfers and even bring a new cash flow to Tether.
Assuming that Plasma can successfully take over the vast majority of USDT traffic running on Tron and Ethereum, the first direct income will be the majority of on-chain fees intercepted by Tron and Ethereum - the annual income can reach about 1 billion to 2 billion US dollars, plus enterprise services and cross-chain fees, the new income range is expected to reach 1.2 to 3 billion US dollars. And Plasma may have other hidden benefits and ecological spillovers: such as attracting new large-scale liquidity and projects to join, collecting certain taxes; providing SDK, enterprise node access, charging commercial fees for on-chain applications, etc.
However, because Plasma does not require ordinary USDT transfer fees, it is conservatively estimated that Plasma can bring Tether $1 billion in revenue a year.
In addition to income, the more important thing is the right to speak. In the past, Tether had to follow the pace of Ethereum and Tron. Once the other party increased the fee rate and modified the rules, USDT could only passively cooperate. The infrastructure supporting USDT (settlement, execution, bridging, etc.) was also largely out of Tether’s control.
Now, Tether has promoted USDT as a clearing currency and hoarded BTC as a reserve asset. The two merged in Plasma, bringing together $150 billion of USDT scattered across more than a dozen networks into a unified clearing layer, allowing transfers, exchanges, and recycling to take place on Tethers own territory. Tether will also gain more pricing power and voice, and naturally control the charging gate of this network.
Plasma’s XPL Public Sale Participation Details
As the public sale date approaches, the Plasma team has also announced detailed rules of participation.
Users of the XPL public sale must first deposit stablecoins (USDT, USDC, DAI or USDS) into the official treasury (Plasma Vault) on Ethereum. The system will calculate the unit value based on the deposit amount and duration of each wallet, and these unit values ultimately determine the users guaranteed subscription amount. In short, the earlier the deposit is made and the longer the funds stay, the more XPL can be purchased during the public sale.
In order to prevent large users from monopolizing the quota, the team set a deposit limit of $50 million for each Sonar account, and each account can only be bound to three wallets at most. This means that no matter how many wallets the user uses to accumulate unit values, the total amount must not exceed $50 million. Although the overall treasury does not set a hard total limit, the team will flexibly adjust the total deposit amount, with the initial amount set at $100 million, and gradually open it up according to market demand to ensure the health and balance of the distribution.
In addition, it is important to note that after the public sale is launched, users need to submit additional new stablecoins to actually subscribe to XPL tokens, and the deposit balance in the vault will not be automatically used to purchase tokens XPL. If a user does not use up his or her subscription quota, the excess share will be automatically redistributed to those oversubscribed in proportion. This means that users can moderately oversubscribe when purchasing to obtain additional XPL.
From a compliance perspective, all users participating in the public sale must complete a strict KYC audit on the Sonar platform, including users who already have an Echo account. US users are required to provide proof of qualified investors, and the subscribed XPL tokens will be locked for an additional 12 months after the public sale ends; users in the UK, China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Ukraine will not be able to participate in this public sale.
The deposited stablecoin assets will first be exchanged for USDT by whitelisted market makers on the Ethereum mainnet at a 1:1 ratio, and then securely transferred to the Plasma network with the help of LayerZero cross-chain bridge technology and stored as USD₮ 0. After the mainnet Beta phase is launched, users can withdraw their principal and all accumulated earnings during the period. The withdrawal process is transparent and fast, generally not exceeding 48 hours. During this period, the deposit receipt token held by users is only used as an internal voucher, and any transfer behavior will be regarded as an early withdrawal. The official strongly recommends that users avoid using this token to participate in any DeFi activities.
The treasury facility used by Plasma for this public sale is provided by Veda, which has been widely used and safely manages more than $2.6 billion in assets. In addition, all contracts have passed strict audits by top security auditing agencies such as Spearbit and Zellic. The audit report will be published before the mainnet Beta is launched to further ensure the security and transparency of funds.
As the public sale date approaches, Plasmas IDO is expected to ignite market enthusiasm again. Most participants believe that Plasma will directly compete with Tron in the future and become the new stablecoin public chain king, which is why this public sale has received so much attention.
