Today, the 1.75 million XPL creator event jointly organized by #币安广场 and @Plasma officially concluded. Over the course of four weeks, thousands of high-quality content pieces were produced across the internet.
What truly touches me is not the activity's popularity, but the on-chain data of Plasma over the past six months—like a silent declaration against inflated metrics.
Last October, during Plasma's peak, the daily average transactions reached 58.9 million, with 1.8 million monthly active users. Everyone was shouting "the next Solana." Then the bubble began to deflate: by January this year, transaction volume fell back to 6.3 million, with 260,000 monthly active users, a decrease of over 85%.
The pessimism was overwhelming.
But few asked: of the 85% of lost users, how many are real people, and how many are bots?
The truth is: during the peak period, 62% of new users were real merchants from Africa—Nigerian vendors settled with Chinese suppliers using zero-fee USDT, and Ghanaian workers sent their wages home. This is not a group of opportunists, but genuine high-frequency demand.
Even more surprisingly: while monthly active users dropped by 85%, the transaction frequency of the remaining 260,000 users tripled compared to the peak period.
Those who remained are not "bots"; they are people who genuinely need to make daily transfers.
Plasma did something that most L1s dare not do: it would rather see its data halved than allow scripts to persist. Other projects rely on farms to inflate daily active users, but Plasma has true users coming from Africa. In January, just the B-end service fees contributed by these real merchants already accounted for 70% of the protocol's revenue, with a monthly transaction fee of $52,000 covering operational costs.
A payment chain survives by collecting B-end fees to support free C-end services. This is not a PPT; it is a proven business model.
Ironically, how many projects that rely on inflated metrics to maintain daily activity are still around? Meanwhile, Plasma's TVL remains stable at $6.8 billion, with prices hovering around $0.09, but the daily transactions running through it in the tens of billions are all real trade payments, cross-border wages, and merchant settlements.
I believe that in the crypto world, "realness" itself is counter-consensus.
#Plasma attracts genuine demand with zero fees, uses real demand to solidify B-end payments, and feeds the network with B-end payments. This model may seem too slow in a bull market, but in a bear market, it is the only one that can survive.
Today, as the event concludes, there won't be any bots on the Top 500 creator list, nor will there be any scripts among the 260,000 monthly active users on-chain.
Plasma may not be the most beautiful data chain, but it is the "cleanest" in terms of data.
