H A R E E M

Lần đầu tiên tôi nhìn nhận Vanar một cách nghiêm túc, tôi đã cố gắng phớt lờ các khẩu hiệu. “3 tỷ người dùng tiếp theo” là điều mà gần như mọi dự án Web3 nghiêm túc đều nói ở một thời điểm nào đó. Điều thu hút sự chú ý của tôi không phải là tham vọng - mà là âm điệu của kiến trúc. Nó không giống như một chuỗi được xây dựng để gây ấn tượng với những người trong ngành tiền điện tử. Nó giống như một chuỗi được xây dựng bởi những người đã chán việc giải thích phí gas cho game thủ.
Sự khác biệt đó nghe có vẻ nhỏ, nhưng nó thay đổi mọi thứ.
Nếu bạn mở trình khám phá Vanar hôm nay, bạn sẽ thấy điều gì đó thú vị: khoảng 8.9 triệu khối được sản xuất, gần 194 triệu giao dịch được xử lý, và hơn 28 triệu địa chỉ ví được tạo ra. Những điều đó không phải là chỉ số trừu tượng. Chúng gợi ý về một cái gì đó có cơ sở hơn - một mạng lưới đã xử lý một nhịp độ ổn định của hoạt động thay vì sống dựa vào một cú sốc virut. Nó trông ít giống như một động cơ thổi phồng và nhiều hơn như một cơ sở hạ tầng đang thực hiện công việc của nó.

Most people still look at Plasma through the same lens they use for every new Layer-1: faster blocks, cheaper gas, nicer UX. That lens misses what Plasma is really trying to do.

Plasma is quietly testing a different economic structure. It is treating stablecoin settlement as a two-sided market, not a fee market. One side is ordinary users who only want to move dollars. The other side is applications, liquidity, and financial infrastructure that can be monetized. The rail itself is deliberately being made unprofitable.

That is the real bet.

If you frame Plasma as a clearinghouse, XPL stops being a “payment token” and starts looking more like the capital buffer that makes free settlement possible and later captures value when activity upgrades into paid financial use.

The clearest signal is the way Plasma handles USDT transfers. According to Plasma’s own network fee documentation, the chain uses a protocol-level paymaster that sponsors gas for specific USDT operations. The important detail is not that transfers are gasless. It is that only a narrow class of actions is subsidized: simple transfer and transferFrom calls. Everything else remains a normal fee market.

That design choice is extremely intentional. Free only works if it is small and predictable.

This directly attacks what still limits real stablecoin usage on most chains: the need to first acquire a volatile token just to move a stable asset. Even on the dominant stablecoin rail today, Tron, fees have not remained negligible. A DL Research report shows USDT transfer fees on Tron drifting upward over time and cites historical ranges that reach roughly 3.94 to 8.01 dollars, with more recent experience described as creeping toward the 1 to 3 dollar range. For a payments network, that is not noise. It is margin.

Plasma is saying something simple but uncomfortable: even one dollar of friction is enough to break small-value payments and remittances at scale. So instead of trying to be the cheapest gas market, it removes the market entirely for the one action that actually matters for distribution.

The interesting part is that this is not happening in a vacuum. The public chain data already shows that Plasma is operating at a scale where the subsidy question is real, not theoretical. Plasmascan currently reports about 3.53 million addresses, roughly 151.44 million total transactions, and around 389,801 transactions in the last 24 hours. At the same time, the network still collected about 4,821 XPL in transaction fees over that same day.

That combination matters. A pure “free chain” would show activity without any meaningful fee flow. A pure DeFi chain would show fee flow without mass usage. Plasma is deliberately sitting in the uncomfortable middle.

This is exactly what a clearinghouse does. It loses money on access and makes money on what happens after access.

The performance side reinforces this interpretation. Plasma is not trying to win a generalized throughput war. It is optimizing for what stablecoin flows actually look like. DL Research estimates that stablecoins settled more than 28 trillion dollars on-chain in 2024, and Reuters reports roughly 187 billion dollars of USDT in circulation. That is the market Plasma is pointing at.

But stablecoin transfers are computationally light. The same DL Research report compares a typical ERC-20 transfer at around 65,000 gas with a Uniswap V3 swap at around 185,000 gas. In other words, most of the settlement volume that actually matters does not need complex execution. It needs speed, reliability, and predictable confirmation.

This is why Plasma focuses so heavily on short block times and fast finality. DL Research cites PlasmaBFT finality around two to three seconds. On the live network, Plasmascan shows a block time of roughly one second. For payments, this is not a bragging right. It is a product requirement. The user experience of “did it go through?” is often more important than theoretical decentralization metrics in the first interaction.

Now comes the part most people struggle with.

If users can move USDT for free, and if Plasma even supports paying fees in stablecoins for other actions, where does XPL fit?

Plasma’s own token design gives a very direct answer. According to its tokenomics documentation, base transaction fees are burned using an EIP-1559-style mechanism. Validator rewards, however, do not exist yet. Inflation only starts when external validators and delegation are enabled. When that happens, issuance begins at about 5 percent per year and gradually declines by 0.5 percent annually until it reaches 3 percent.

This is not a cosmetic detail. It means XPL is not meant to be demanded by retail users. It is meant to be demanded by the system itself.

In the clearinghouse model, the rail does not generate value directly. The capital that secures the rail does.

XPL becomes the asset that backs validator security, absorbs volatility created by subsidized activity, and captures value when higher-order usage starts producing burn. The chain is deliberately trying to move value capture away from “every transfer pays a toll” and toward “economic activity creates security demand and supply reduction.”

This is a much harder model to execute than a normal gas token, because it requires a successful conversion funnel. Plasma has to turn free users into paid users without forcing the token on them.

That conversion funnel is also why Plasma is spending so aggressively on distribution infrastructure. The project’s token supply is 10 billion XPL. Forty percent is allocated to ecosystem and growth, and eight percent is unlocked at mainnet beta for incentives, liquidity, and exchange integrations. This is not hidden. It is explicitly designed to finance the early clearinghouse phase.

There is also a very real future supply event. Ten percent of the supply is allocated to the public sale, and the documentation states that US purchasers unlock on July 28, 2026 after a twelve-month lockup. Whether that becomes material sell pressure depends entirely on whether Plasma can demonstrate a functioning upgrade path before that date.

If the clearinghouse does not work, this becomes exactly what critics fear: subsidized growth followed by dilution.

That is the strongest counterargument.

A free rail can attract usage, but usage alone does not pay for security, validators, and long-term neutrality. Without a strong second layer of monetized activity, XPL would struggle to justify itself.

The reason this criticism does not immediately kill the model is that Plasma has structurally limited how much it gives away. Only basic transfers are sponsored. Everything that creates real economic density, trading, lending, automation, structured finance, and cross-application flows still sits in the paid execution layer.

In other words, Plasma is not removing fees. It is relocating them to where users already expect to pay.

There is also a second, quieter pillar that supports this structure: liquidity portability. Plasma recently became integrated into NEAR Protocol Intents, which was reported as enabling swaps across more than 125 assets and over 25 chains and supporting USDT0 flows. Whether those integrations produce sustained volume remains to be seen, but strategically they matter. A clearinghouse that traps liquidity inside itself becomes a silo. A clearinghouse that allows capital to move in and out cheaply becomes infrastructure.

So what should actually be watched next, if you take this model seriously?

Not TVL headlines and not raw transaction counts. The real metric is the mix. How much of daily activity is sponsored stablecoin transfer volume, and how much is paid contract interaction? Plasma data is now available on Dune, which makes it possible to track this transition directly rather than guessing from anecdotes.

The second metric is burn versus future issuance. Once external validators and delegation go live and inflation activates, the network will have a visible net issuance curve. If burn does not grow alongside paid usage, the security-as-capital thesis weakens.

The third is liquidity behavior. The NEAR Intents integration creates technical access, not economic certainty. If it results in persistent inflows and outflows rather than one-time bridging spikes, Plasma’s clearinghouse role becomes much more credible.

Plasma is not trying to out-Ethereum Ethereum. It is trying to turn stablecoin settlement into an on-chain utility that behaves like financial infrastructure, not like a fee-extracting application platform.

If that works, XPL will not look like a gas token at all. It will look like the balance sheet of the network that made free dollars on-chain viable.

#Plasma @Plasma $XPL