The truth about payments obscured by the myth of high performance: How Plasma reconstructs on-chain settlement logic
Even if Solana's TPS looks fast on paper, as long as I still need to buy Sol specifically to act as Gas for transferring a few dollars worth of stablecoins, this sense of friction will forever prevent blockchain from truly entering the mainstream. Recently, while deeply running Plasma nodes and interaction processes, I found that everyone's pursuit of 'performance' might be going in the wrong direction. What truly determines the payment moat is not peak speed, but the extreme simplification of account abstraction and settlement mechanisms. Plasma directly uses stablecoins as the underlying payment fuel, which fundamentally reduces the so-called 'Web3 threshold' from the product level.
Compared to Tron, which I used to often rely on, although it supports a large number of U-type transfers, the rigidity of centralized nodes and the threshold of staking bandwidth that often reaches dozens of U is almost devastating for high-frequency small payments. When I practically used Plasma, I found that its execution layer based on Reth indeed has more flexibility in handling complex instructions. In contrast, today's Base or Arbitrum, while ecologically prosperous, still face efficiency issues when handling cross-border payments in this vertical scenario due to multi-signatures and fragmentation of cross-chain assets. The logic of Plasma is more like re-laying the foundation of the payment track, allowing settlement to be completed directly at the consensus layer, rather than relying on cumbersome contract nesting.
Of course, the current ecosystem still has serious flaws, such as insufficient cross-network liquidity depth, especially under extreme market fluctuations, where the response delays of third-party gateways can occasionally drive people crazy. But this is precisely why I am optimistic about it: it does not take the universal approach, but rather focuses intensely on payments. Compared to those who shout slogans on Twitter every day and can't even create a smooth transfer wallet, this type of project, which dares to simplify at the underlying logic, is closer to the original intention of cryptocurrencies. This attempt to solve the pain points of payments from a protocol level is much more meaningful than simply competing for TPS.
