H A R E E M

When I look at Plasma, I don’t see another “faster EVM chain for payments.” I see a very deliberate attempt to flip the usual Layer-1 business model. The core idea is simple, but unusual in crypto: treat a plain USDT transfer as a loss-leader, and make XPL valuable by owning the economic perimeter that forms once large pools of stablecoins settle on one chain.

In other words, Plasma is not trying to tax the act of sending money. It’s trying to monetize what people inevitably do right after the money arrives.

This matters because their go-to-market is not developer-first or fee-first. It is balance-sheet first. In Plasma’s own launch material, the team framed the network around roughly $2 billion in stablecoins active from day one, deployed with 100+ DeFi partners (including integrations with projects such as Aave and Ethena). The same document states that the deposit campaign pulled in over $1 billion in about 30 minutes, and that the public sale attracted $373 million of commitments for a $50 million cap (about 7× oversubscribed). All of this comes directly from Plasma’s own site and launch write-ups.

Those numbers are not just hype signals. They tell you what Plasma believes is scarce. It’s not blockspace. It’s not even users in the abstract. It’s concentrated, on-chain stablecoin liquidity that people and applications will default to.

Once you accept that framing, the role of XPL looks very different.

On the live network, the data already supports the idea that Plasma is becoming a place where stablecoins sit first, and “paid activity” clusters around them. According to Plasmascan’s public dashboard (snapshot at the time of writing), the chain has processed about 150.0 million total transactions, with roughly 403,600 transactions in the last 24 hours, and about 18,855 XPL in total transaction fees over the same 24-hour window. The same dashboard shows throughput hovering around 4.9 transactions per second.

More importantly, the asset composition on the chain is extremely lopsided toward stablecoins. The USDT0 token page on Plasmascan shows an on-chain market cap of roughly $1.5 billion and about 183,900 holders (these are live figures and move constantly). Independent analytics from DeFiLlama currently estimate Plasma’s total stablecoin market cap at around $1.94 billion, up about 7.7% over seven days, and report roughly $21.5 million in 24-hour DEX volume.

Put together, this paints a very specific picture. The chain is not economically dominated by XPL transfers. It is dominated by stablecoin balances, and by the activity that tries to make those balances productive.

That is where Plasma’s “gasless USDT” narrative is often misunderstood.

If you actually read Plasma’s technical documentation, the free-transfer model is intentionally narrow. The zero-fee flow is handled by an API-managed relayer and is designed to sponsor only very simple USD₮ actions, specifically direct transfers. The relayer enforces eligibility and rate limits, and the system uses identity-aware controls to prevent automated abuse. Plasma’s own docs are explicit that more complex calls are not part of this sponsored path.

The Plasma FAQ is even clearer: only basic USDT transfers are gasless. Everything else—approvals, swaps, vault deposits, DeFi interactions, contract calls—pays fees in XPL to validators.

This boundary is not a technical detail. It is the business model.

Plasma is trying to remove the single biggest psychological and operational friction in stablecoin payments: the need to hold a separate token just to move dollars. But it is not removing the need for XPL in the parts of the stack where real economic value is created. Once a user has received USDT, the moment they want to do anything interesting with it—hedge, lend, loop, route through a DEX, bridge, or interact with structured products—they step out of the free lane and into the paid one.

The token design reinforces that this is meant to be a security and coordination asset, not a payment toll. According to Plasma’s tokenomics documentation, validator rewards start at 5% annual inflation, decline by 0.5% per year until reaching a 3% baseline, and—crucially—inflation only turns on once external validators and stake delegation go live. Until that decentralization phase begins, the network is operated under a progressive rollout model.

That detail is easy to gloss over, but it directly ties XPL issuance to a concrete network transition: the moment when security actually becomes a market and not a bootstrapped service.

A common pushback is that the relayer model and identity-aware controls introduce centralization and weaken the neutrality story, especially for a chain that also talks about Bitcoin-anchored security and censorship resistance.

I think that criticism misses the real separation Plasma is making.

The subsidized rail is not meant to be the sovereignty layer. It is a customer-acquisition surface for payments. In a world where gasless transfers are completely open and unlimited from day one, the dominant users are not merchants or consumers—they are bots farming subsidy. For a payment network, abuse resistance is not a philosophical trade-off; it is a survival requirement. Plasma is choosing to centralize the subsidy mechanism precisely so that the rest of the execution environment can remain economically viable.

The important part for XPL holders is not whether the relayer is perfectly decentralized today. It is whether the paid execution layer, validator set, and staking market actually become independent and competitive when external validators are introduced—because that is when XPL stops being a placeholder token and becomes a priced security asset.

So the clean way to think about Plasma is this: it is trying to become a stablecoin balance-sheet chain first, and only then extract value from the financial and operational complexity that grows on top of those balances.

If you value XPL as “gas for sending USDT,” you are modeling the wrong surface.

The real questions to watch over the next phase are very concrete and measurable. Does the 24-hour fee total in XPL grow faster than the 24-hour transaction count on Plasmascan, signalling that higher-value actions are becoming a larger share of activity? Do the number of USDT0 holders and the on-chain stablecoin market cap continue to compound, rather than flatten after the launch incentives fade? Does Plasma’s reported DEX volume and application usage on DeFiLlama scale alongside stablecoin supply, showing that balances are being actively deployed rather than parked? And finally, when external validators and delegation go live, does staking meaningfully absorb circulating XPL as inflation activates?

If Plasma succeeds, its moat will not be sub-second finality or EVM compatibility. Those are table stakes. Its moat will be the habit of holding and routing real dollars on one chain—and XPL will matter not because it moves money, but because it secures and governs everything that happens once the money arrives.

#Plasma @Plasma $XPL

Most people look at Vanar and see another Layer-1 trying to bundle gaming, metaverse, AI and brand tooling under one roof. I think that framing misses what is actually unusual about this network.

Vanar’s real bet is much narrower and much harder: it is trying to make a blockchain behave like a consumer product pricing system, not like a marketplace for blockspace. And that completely changes what the VANRY token must succeed at.

The mental model I find more useful is this: Vanar is building a UX-subsidy chain. The protocol itself absorbs volatility and complexity so users experience something that feels closer to a fixed, almost invisible fee. In that world, VANRY is not mainly a scarce commodity. It becomes the exchange layer that continuously translates a human-friendly price into a volatile crypto environment.

That sounds subtle, but it has very concrete consequences.

Vanar’s documentation states that the network targets a fixed transaction fee as low as $0.0005, maintained through a built-in price update system that regularly aggregates market prices from multiple sources such as CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap and Binance. This is not just a UI abstraction. The chain itself depends on that price feed to decide how much VANRY is charged for a given transaction.

If you take that design seriously, fee capture becomes a pure volume game.

Right now, the Vanar mainnet explorer reports 193,823,272 total transactions, 8,940,150 blocks, and 28,634,064 wallet addresses. If we apply the minimum published fee target of $0.0005 to every single transaction (which is only a lower-bound estimate, because not all transactions fall into the lowest tier and the USD peg can vary slightly), the cumulative minimum-tier fee volume implied so far is about $96,900.

The exact number is not the point. The slope is.

Vanar is deliberately choosing a world where the network does not get meaningfully more valuable by pushing fees higher. It only becomes economically relevant if usage becomes enormous.

That design makes the usual metrics people quote feel misleading. “Total wallets” looks impressive at 28.6 million. But when you divide total transactions by total addresses, you get roughly 6.8 transactions per address.

For a chain that claims to be built for consumer experiences – games, virtual worlds, branded experiences and everyday interactions – this ratio matters far more than raw wallet counts. Consumer platforms do not win because people sign up once. They win because people come back.

If Vanar’s ecosystem is actually producing game loops, item transfers, event participation, AI-driven actions and brand interactions, the on-chain footprint should slowly shift toward higher repeat behavior per user. In a fixed-fee network, the token only benefits if activity per real user compounds over time. One-off interactions and address churn look good on dashboards, but they do not build durable demand for VANRY.

There is another detail that quietly reinforces this interpretation.

Vanar’s architecture targets a 3-second block time and 30 million gas per block, combined with first-come-first-served transaction ordering. These are not DeFi-native optimizations. They are consumer UX optimizations: predictable confirmation, stable throughput and minimal fee games.

Now look at the token structure alongside this.

VANRY has a maximum supply of 2.4 billion, with about 2.29 billion already in circulation according to CoinMarketCap. That means more than 95% of the eventual supply is already live. A public breakdown distributed half of the supply to the original TVK swap, 41.5% to validator rewards, 6.5% to development and 2% to community incentives.

This matters because Vanar’s fee system depends on continuous, reliable price discovery. The protocol literally queries market prices and filters them before converting USD-denominated fees into VANRY units. If liquidity dries up or price feeds become fragile, the user-experience promise itself becomes harder to uphold.

So VANRY is structurally pushed toward being a liquidity-critical unit rather than a scarcity narrative token. Its market depth and pricing integrity are part of the network’s operational reliability, not just something traders care about.

There is an obvious counterargument: if Vanar succeeds in onboarding consumer applications at scale, even tiny fees will eventually add up.

That is true in principle. But Vanar’s own tiered fee table reveals the real tension. The lowest tier covers up to 12 million gas for $0.0005. Higher tiers jump sharply to $1.50, $3.00, $7.50 and $15 for increasingly heavy computation.

This means the network has only two realistic paths to meaningful token-level economics.

Either Vanar achieves extremely large-scale consumer repetition at the lowest tier – the kind of activity density you only see in real consumer platforms – or a growing share of activity migrates into heavier, higher-tier actions that still feel product-like to users rather than “expensive blockchain transactions”.

This is where Vanar’s recent emphasis on AI-native infrastructure becomes strategically important rather than cosmetic. AI inference, semantic operations and data-heavy workflows naturally live in higher computational tiers, but can still be hidden behind clean consumer interfaces. That creates a plausible bridge between Vanar’s UX promise and higher on-chain value per action.

In other words, the project is quietly trying to move value capture away from “users pay more for blockspace” and toward “users do more meaningful things, and some of those things are computationally rich”.

Seen through this lens, Vanar is not competing with other Layer-1s on throughput or composability narratives. It is competing with Web2 infrastructure expectations.

The real question for VANRY is therefore not how many partners are announced or how many wallets exist. It is whether the network can steadily increase how many on-chain actions a real user performs every month, while keeping the experience psychologically cheap and operationally stable.

What I would actually watch next is very simple and very unglamorous.

First, whether total transactions grow faster than total addresses on the mainnet explorer, which would indicate rising repeat behavior per user. Second, whether contract-heavy interactions begin to dominate over simple transfers. Third, whether the realized fee mix slowly shifts upward into higher tiers without breaking the “almost free” user experience.

If those three signals start moving together, VANRY begins to look less like a token attached to a bundle of verticals and more like a liquidity-backed unit quietly underwriting consumer-scale on-chain behavior. That is a much rarer – and much more defensible – outcome than being remembered as another general-purpose L1 with good intentions.

#vanar @Vanarchain $VANRY