Just recently, I came across the mainnet data of Plasma, and I casually executed a few transactions. To be honest, this huge contrast made me reevaluate the logic of the payment track. Many so-called high-performance public chains boast about their TPS capabilities, but for users like us who frequently transfer funds, as long as there are no traffic jams, receiving money in one second and 0.5 seconds makes no difference; the real pain point is always that damn Gas fee.
What impresses me most about Plasma is not some complicated consensus mechanism, but its Paymaster design. When I was transferring on the testnet, I didn’t need to buy a bunch of native tokens for fuel like on Ethereum or Solana. As long as you have U in your wallet, the protocol layer directly helps you settle this in the background. This is simply forcing the Web2 experience into Web3. I looked at their GitHub repository, and this part of the code is written very concisely, not the kind of modular stacking just for narrative purposes. It straightforwardly tells users, since you want to create a payment public chain, then don’t make users understand what Gwei is.
However, this chain is not without its faults. As an early payment network, its ecosystem is as desolate as a newly developed ghost town. Although the transfer experience crushes Tron, the problem is where do you spend the U you transferred? The current DEx depth is too shallow; entering large amounts of capital can cause a bit of slippage that will hurt you. It's like having a high-speed highway that is also unlimited in speed, with a surface that is impeccably smooth, but there isn't even a gas station or service area along the way. Moreover, I also noticed that the current degree of decentralization of nodes, although better than the super representative model of Tron, still has too much early computing power concentrated in a few large mining pools; we have to recognize this risk.
From the K-line chart, the trend of $XPL is clearly undervalued. Market funds are flocking to the AI and Meme sectors, causing such infrastructure projects to have little premium. But I've always felt that the payment track is one of those seemingly boring fields with a very high ceiling. If Tether's official team can later migrate a substantial portion of the native USDT over, then this current price is simply a bargain.
