I keep seeing the same pattern in crypto, especially around early infrastructure projects. The moment incentives appear, activity spikes. People call it adoption. Timelines get louder. Community numbers inflate. And for a while it feels like the project has “arrived.” Then incentives reduce, attention moves elsewhere, and the activity collapses. That is not growth. That is rented activity.
So when I think about Plasma, one of the most important questions I’m asking myself is not whether the project can attract users. Almost any project can attract users temporarily if the reward is attractive enough. The real question is whether Plasma can create organic demand that survives after the incentives stop doing the heavy lifting.
I’m not saying incentives are bad. They can be useful. Incentives can bootstrap liquidity, attract early builders, and create momentum. In some cases, incentives are necessary to overcome cold start problems. But incentives are also a trap because they can hide the truth. They can make a weak product look busy and a shallow ecosystem look alive. When incentives are doing the work, it becomes hard to tell if people are there because the product is valuable or because the reward is.
That distinction matters more for infrastructure than almost any other category. Infrastructure is supposed to become invisible. The best infrastructure becomes the thing people use without thinking about it. It becomes reliable, predictable, and integrated so deeply that switching away would feel inconvenient. That kind of stickiness does not come from incentives. It comes from utility, habit, and trust.
This is why I try to separate two types of activity in my head. The first is performance activity. It is driven by rewards, campaigns, points, short-term programs, and attention cycles. It moves fast. It looks impressive. It creates screenshots and milestones. The second is product activity. It is driven by people solving a real problem repeatedly. It is slower, quieter, and usually more boring to watch. But it is the one that compounds.
When Plasma talks about stablecoin settlement as a focus, it lands in the category where organic demand is actually possible. Stablecoins are not theoretical. They are used daily across crypto for transfers, payments, trading collateral, remittances, and on-chain settlement. If a network genuinely improves stablecoin settlement in a way that is cheaper, more reliable, and easier to integrate, it has a chance to generate real usage. Not because someone is paid to show up, but because it becomes a better tool for a job that already exists.
The problem is that early on, the market cannot tell the difference between rented activity and organic demand unless you are disciplined about what you track. Most people look at surface metrics. They see transactions. They see wallet growth. They see social engagement. Those numbers can be useful, but they are also easy to distort. What I care about is the shape of the behavior behind the numbers.
If usage is organic, you tend to see repeat behavior patterns. The same types of transactions keep happening even when rewards change. The same apps keep using the network. The same users come back. You see a gradual increase in baseline activity, not just spikes. If usage is rented, you see bursts around incentive windows and then sharp declines. The baseline stays low. The participants churn quickly. The ecosystem feels like it is constantly “starting over.”
Another thing I watch is whether the activity is diverse or concentrated. When incentives drive the story, activity often concentrates in a few repetitive behaviors because people optimize for the reward, not for utility. You see a lot of similar transactions, similar wallets, similar flows. When demand is organic, activity becomes more varied over time because different use cases appear and users behave differently. Diversity is not a guarantee of success, but it is a healthier sign than a single mechanical pattern.
I also pay attention to builder behavior more than user behavior. Users will follow incentives. Builders are pickier. Builders do not want to maintain complexity for fun. Builders want stable tooling, clear documentation, predictable performance, and a pathway to users that makes business sense. If builders keep shipping and staying, even when there is no loud marketing push, that is a stronger signal than any short-term spike in transactions.
This is where the idea of retention becomes the center of the evaluation. Retention is the hardest metric to fake because it requires the product to be good enough that people choose it again. If Plasma is succeeding in real adoption, I would expect to see builders return to improve what they already deployed, not just deploy once and vanish. I would expect to see integrations deepen over time instead of appearing as one-time announcements. I would expect to see a gradual rise in recurring usage rather than a cycle of peaks and drops.
The other piece that matters is whether the network creates pull instead of push. Push is when incentives and campaigns force attention. Pull is when the network becomes useful enough that people talk about it because they need it. In infrastructure, pull shows up when developers recommend the platform to other developers, when users stick because the experience is smoother, and when businesses adopt because the economics and reliability work out. Those things do not happen overnight, and they rarely happen during the loudest phase. They happen after repeated proof.
So what would convince me that Plasma is not just rented activity. It would be seeing steady progress in baseline usage that does not collapse when incentives cool. It would be seeing builder stickiness, not just builder arrivals. It would be seeing practical integrations that change user behavior rather than add a logo to a list. It would be seeing the product become simpler to use over time, because real infrastructure wins by removing friction.
At the same time, I also think it is fair to acknowledge what incentives can do well. Incentives can bring people into the room. They can create initial liquidity and testing. They can stress the system and expose what needs improvement. If Plasma uses incentives to accelerate learning and product hardening, that is valuable. But if incentives become the primary driver of activity for too long, that becomes a warning sign. It means the network has not found its natural demand yet.
This is why I am careful about forcing opinions. I can respect the direction of Plasma and still keep my conviction conditional. I can acknowledge the potential and still want proof. That is not negativity. That is discipline. In crypto, discipline is the difference between being informed and being influenced.
The most dangerous habit in this space is letting excitement replace evaluation. People see momentum and assume inevitability. But infrastructure projects earn inevitability through repeatable utility. They become trusted because they keep working, not because they keep trending. If Plasma wants to be taken seriously long term, the best outcome is not a short-term burst of attention. It is a slow, steady increase in real usage that stays even when nobody is cheering.
I am going to keep watching it through that lens. Not headline by headline, not mood by mood, but signal by signal. If the signals get stronger, conviction gets stronger. If the signals stay dependent on rewards, then the story is still early, no matter how loud it sounds.
If you are observing Plasma too, I am curious in a simple way. When you think about real adoption, what do you personally trust more to judge it over time: consistent baseline usage, builder retention, or something else entirely.
