Xiao Lin from the finance department sits diagonally across from me.

He always has three piles of documents stacked on his desk, the rightmost pile has an orange label that says 'Overseas Payable'. In late months, the time he spends staring at that pile of labels noticeably increases.

Last Wednesday afternoon, he suddenly came over with a thermos in hand, lowered his voice and said: 'I have a question for you, that... what chain is it, can you accept dollars?'

I said you specify.

He handed over his phone, and the screen showed an Excel screenshot with dozens of lines. The cursor was on one entry: Vancouver, design service fee, 3000 dollars.

"This cooperation has been going on for three months, everything is good, except for the payment hassle." He pointed to the following few columns, "Wire transfer fee 35, intermediary bank cut 20, waited a week for the funds to be credited, and the exchange rate was 0.02 lower than what I checked that day. All in all, this order worked 8% for the bank and exchange rate differences."

He paused, smiled wryly: "The clients are indeed straightforward, never waiting for me to urge them. It’s just that every time the amount received doesn't match, I have to manually add a note for 'exchange loss.' At the end of the month, that note has to be explained separately."

I didn't respond immediately.

Not because I didn't know how to answer, but because I noticed on his phone screen, the note for that $3000 read three words: 'tuition fee.'

After Xiaolin left, I opened that Plasma wallet that I had saved for three months but hadn't dared to use.

In fact, I should have used it long ago.

During this time, I wrote tens of thousands of words, from A Jie to Old Zhang, from foreign trade to coffee shops. I wrote about the zero-fee design of Paymaster, wrote about sub-second confirmations, wrote about how revolutionary the experience of paying gas with USDT is...

But I have never transferred a single cent on this chain.

Like a shipbuilder who has never set sail, drawing blueprints for a lifetime, then writing articles praising the ship's buoyancy.

That afternoon, I transferred the 100 USDT I withdrew from the exchange into my wallet. The interface was so clean it didn't look like a blockchain product: no dropdown for 'select network,' no gas slider, no red warning saying 'insufficient mainnet tokens to trade.'

Enter Xiaolin's address and click send.

3 seconds. The other party showed 'received.'

The fee section: $0.0003.

I took a screenshot.

The next day at noon, I sat down with my meal opposite Xiaolin.

"The one you asked about yesterday, I tried it out."

He looked up.

I handed him my phone, it was that $0.0003 screenshot.

"What is this?" He frowned.

"That $3000 from Vancouver, if the other party uses this to pay, the fee is this much."

He stared at the number for five seconds. It wasn't shock, it was that kind of 'are you kidding me' doubt.

"Is this... compliant?"

"Still in the early stages. Many regulations haven't fully landed, and big companies are afraid to use it. But this is the direction we're heading."

He returned the phone to me without asking further. In the afternoon, I passed by his workstation and saw that pile of orange-labeled 'overseas payments' documents still there, and he was bent over, entering data into the system one by one.

But I noticed that the note for that $3000 had changed from 'tuition fee' to blank.

He didn't say why. I didn't ask.

Later I learned that what attracted me to Plasma was never the technical label of 'zero fees.'

It's how it handles that $0.0003 transaction - not free, but cheap enough to be ignored; not fast, but fast enough not to need to be waited for.

This experience will change one's mental account regarding 'transfers.'

You no longer need to calculate 'is the cost worth it' before sending; you no longer need to save a few dollars in fees by having the client register for some unknown wallet first; you no longer need to explain each entry in the 'exchange loss' notes in Excel when reconciling at the end of the month.

These subtle, seemingly insignificant frictions constitute the moments when Xiaolin empties his mind at the end of each month.

What Plasma aims to do is simply to prevent these moments from happening.

Of course, this is still far from Xiaolin actually being able to use it.

He couldn't ask his Vancouver client to learn what USDT is, what a wallet address is, what a private key is for a $3000 payment. The migration cost is far higher than that 8% loss.

And I also noticed that Plasma itself was still catching up.

Its interest-bearing stablecoin, SyrupUSDT, allows Xiaolin’s payment to 'automatically earn interest' while waiting for exchange. This was the most exciting feature I had read about in the documentation. But opening that wallet supporting interest-bearing assets, the interaction path was still complicated enough that I needed to flip through tutorials. It's still several versions away from 'just opening Alipay and using it.'

Its token, XPL, had a staking yield on-chain that was astonishingly high at one point, attracting a large number of arbitrageurs, while real paying users were pushed outside the door. The project team later adjusted the parameters, but this revealed a deeper contradiction: do you want network activity or network health? Sometimes these two things are in conflict.

I had written these confusions into the previous articles and then deleted them.

Because I was afraid of seeming 'not optimistic.' Afraid of being misunderstood as bearish. Afraid of being too harsh on projects still under construction during a bear market.

But that day Xiaolin asked me 'is this compliant,' and I suddenly realized:

Those who truly care about the project's life and death don't ask 'how much can it increase,' but rather 'can this thing actually be used?'

He uses Excel, bank statements, and end-of-month reconciliations to verify the reality of the world.

And I used the block explorer, fee screenshot, and transfer record from three in the morning.

We were all waiting for the same answer.

The day before yesterday afternoon, Xiaolin walked over with his thermos cup.

"That last one of yours, $0.0003," he paused, "what's that wallet called?"

I told him the name.

He didn't say thank you, didn't say he wanted to try, just lowered his head and wrote down two words in his phone's memo.

Then I returned to my workstation, continuing to face that pile of orange-labeled documents.

It was getting dark outside, his screen was bright, and the cursor in Excel was paused on that $3000 note.

The note is still blank. But I know, about the story is not over...

📣 The above analysis only represents my personal thoughts based on publicly available information and industry observations and does not constitute any investment advice.