The market in the past few days has been like an emotional rollercoaster. Bitcoin quickly rebounded from a low of around sixty thousand dollars to the seventy thousand dollar mark, with sharp rises and falls that hardly gave anyone time to adapt. It reminds every participant that what is called right or wrong judgment is just surface-level; what truly determines whether you can keep up with the rhythm is whether you can timely reduce risks at the moment of a crash and whether you can timely redeploy funds at the moment of a rebound.
At the same time window, another seemingly more absurd event suddenly grabbed attention. On the prediction market Polymarket, a contract about whether Jesus Christ will appear in 2026 saw its implied probability double in a very short time, rising from less than 2 percentage points to about 4 percentage points, with a trading volume close to one million dollars. Many people compared its increase to that of Bitcoin, claiming it had a better stage return.
Looking at the two matters side by side, you will find that they are not two unrelated stories, but rather projections of the same market psychology on two battlefields.
The first layer is that volatility makes people desire asymmetry more.
The rebound after Bitcoin's crash does not bring certainty, but rather stronger uncertainty. You know it can rebound, but you do not know when it will rebound, where it will rebound to, or whether it will crash again. In such an environment, it is easier to foster a trading preference willing to buy a vast possibility space at a very low cost, even if that space is not realistic. The structure of Jesus contracts precisely satisfies this psychology: buy in for a few cents, worst case is zero, best case cashes out for one dollar. The price rising from 1.8 cents to 4 cents looks like a doubling myth, but it is essentially just a very low-probability asset being repriced under attention-driven conditions.
The second layer is that probabilities have become a new narrative carrier.
In the past, the cryptocurrency market was best at creating narrative assets, talking about the future, revolutions, and disruptions. Now, more and more narratives are being compressed into probabilities, into a number, into a tradable button. Probabilities bring a false sense of certainty because they appear to be scientific, like something calculated. However, the price in the prediction market does not equal objective probability; it often resembles a mixture of emotions and liquidity. A niche contract has a thin order book, and a couple of funding actions can push the price to a more exaggerated position. So what you see is probabilities doubling, but what you are actually seeing is attention betting on attention itself.
The third layer is also the most critical one; real big money does not make money through bizarre narratives but survives on settlement efficiency.
Jesus contracts can attract attention, but they cannot support systemic capital migration. However, the rebound after Bitcoin's crash will immediately trigger real moving actions: some people reduce their positions back to stablecoins, some add margin, some transfer chips across platforms, and some lock in profits in stablecoins waiting for the next entry point. These actions are the market's background noise and the most stable demand.
If you break down the recent market trends into funding actions, you will find a very simple chain.
During a crash, risk appetite shrinks rapidly, and funds need a short anchorage; stablecoins take on this role. During a rebound, risk appetite rises quickly, and funds are mobilized again from the anchorage; the speed of buying determines the slope. The more frequently these switches occur, the higher the requirement for settlement. If you are slowed down by transaction fees, confirmation times, or cross-chain steps during the transfer process, you will lose faster in the same market because your time cost becomes an invisible slippage.
This is precisely why Plasma is more worth discussing in this environment. It is not here to seize the narrative spotlight; it is more like an infrastructure focused on the stablecoin settlement as its main business. According to the latest on-chain metrics, the scale of stablecoins on Plasma is about $1.97 billion, with a nearly 7.86% growth in the past 7 days, and the stablecoin structure is relatively concentrated, with USDT accounting for about 76.99%.
More importantly, the fee and income structure. The chain layer's 24-hour fee is about $281, which can almost be understood as making basic transfers' friction approach invisibility; while the application layer's 24-hour fee is about $282,000, with application layer income around $21,900.
Looking at trading activity, the on-chain decentralized trading volume in the past 7 days is about $154.11 million, with a week-over-week growth of about 36 percentage points. The bridged TVL is about $6.766 billion, indicating that it is not just an empty chain; there is a considerable scale of cross-network assets staying and circulating here.
These numbers, when placed in the context of Bitcoin's rebound after a crash, can yield several conclusions that are closer to the essence of business.
Conclusion one: the more intense the market, the more it rewards low-friction settlement channels.
The rebound after a crash means high-frequency switching, and high-frequency switching magnifies each friction into visible losses. Plasma's chain fees are extremely low, indicating that it prefers to make basic transfers into a public pipeline while leaving true commercial value in higher-level services and applications. For users, this means less being swallowed by the system during relocation, and for the ecosystem, this means being able to provide richer services around settlement instead of relying solely on basic transaction fees.
Conclusion two: the attention market is responsible for creating noise, while the settlement network is responsible for accommodating cash flow.
The hype surrounding Jesus contracts will pass, and next week it may be replaced by other bizarre themes. However, Bitcoin's volatility will continue to exist, and the movement of stablecoins will also persist. What can truly traverse cycles are the underlying infrastructures that support the moving process. The growth of Plasma's stablecoin scale indicates that it is accommodating a portion of real anchorage demand; the presence of scale in application layer fees and income suggests that this is not just about transfers but also includes more complex funding actions.
Conclusion three: the value anchor of tokens should shift from storytelling to examining the durability of data.
The price and market capitalization of XPL will fluctuate with risk appetite, which is inevitable. However, the paradox of payment networks is that to grow larger, it cannot rely on high chain fees; lower chain fees are more conducive to expansion. Therefore, a more reasonable way to observe is to see whether the scale of stablecoins behind it, application layer income, trading activity, and bridge asset accumulation can maintain resilience through multiple rounds of volatility. The latest data shows that the XPL price is about $0.079, with a market capitalization of about $169.7 million.
Whether it can establish a more stable mid-term curve depends not on a single trending search, but on whether these underlying indicators can continue to expand, especially when Bitcoin experiences the next rebound after a crash; whether this chain can continue to maintain low friction and high capacity.
Returning to the bizarre comparison at the beginning, the doubling of Jesus contracts and their outperformance against Bitcoin's staged returns is valuable not because of its absurdity, but because it reveals a new normal. The market is splitting into two layers. The upper layer is a casino for attention, where the more absurd the themes, the easier they spread, and the more extreme the odds, the easier it is to attract small funds for testing. The lower layer is the settlement infrastructure, silent yet essential; the greater the volatility, the busier it gets, and the more panic, the more important it becomes. Smart money will utilize both layers simultaneously, but it will place the survival of its main position in the lower layer, for only the lower layer can reduce the cost of action.
So my judgment during this period is very simple.
If you only focus on trending searches, you will feel that the world is increasingly becoming a joke.
If you focus on funding actions, you will find that the world is becoming more realistic; what everyone is competing for is not faith-themed stories but speed, friction, and transferability.
The rebound after Bitcoin's crash will continue, and the predictive market will continue to create even more exaggerated contracts. However, what ultimately determines whether you can survive in the market is often not which story you bet on, but whether you have a smooth enough path that allows your money to switch between fear and excitement with minimal cost. Plasma is betting on this path.
