Stablecoin Exclusive Blockchain: Plasma Raises $24 Million to Build High-Performance Infrastructure

Stablecoins have become an important vehicle for on-chain payments, asset settlement, and financial services, but existing Blockchain infrastructure still faces many challenges in terms of performance, cost, and decentralization. Plasma has proposed an innovative solution: to build a high-performance Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoins, providing zero transaction fees, enhanced security, and scalability while being compatible with EVM.

This concept has attracted widespread attention in the market. In February of this year, Plasma announced the completion of a $24 million financing round, with investors including several well-known institutions and individual investors. In addition, the first ICO product of the Echo platform, Sonar, has also chosen Plasma's initial coin offering as its debut.

The Necessity of Stablecoin Dedicated Blockchain

According to a report released by a research organization earlier this year, the annual trading volume of stablecoins is expected to reach $15.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing the trading scale of mainstream payment giants. As a key application in the cryptocurrency field, stablecoins play a core role in multiple scenarios, attracting numerous projects and companies to accelerate their布局.

The Plasma team believes that current mainstream public blockchains have shortcomings in supporting stablecoins: Ethereum's high Gas fees are not conducive to payment scenarios; while some public blockchains have low fees, they are overly centralized. To address these challenges, Plasma has proposed a new blockchain solution specifically designed for stablecoins.

Technological Innovation and Design Philosophy

The Plasma project aims to create a sidechain on the Bitcoin Blockchain that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This design is intended to meet the fundamental needs of decentralized financial activities while leveraging the security of Bitcoin and providing zero-fee stablecoin transactions.

In terms of core consensus mechanisms, Plasma has independently developed PlasmaBFT, which is evolved from Fast HotStuff, supporting thousands of transactions per second. PlasmaBFT is written in Rust and is optimized for low end-to-end latency.

In addition, Plasma achieves trust-minimized security inheritance by anchoring the state root to the Bitcoin network. This design allows Plasma to reach a security level comparable to Bitcoin, reducing the risk of single points of failure or attacks.

Phased Deployment Strategy

The deployment of the Plasma consensus mechanism will be carried out in three stages:

1. Trusted validators: The mainnet is initially launched with selected trusted entities starting the validation.
2. Expansion and Scalability Testing: Expand the validator set to test the network's horizontal scalability and performance.
3. Fully Decentralized: Transition to a permissionless model to achieve complete decentralization and enhance network security.

Innovative Trading Fee Mechanism

Plasma has launched a stablecoin "zero fee" transfer mechanism, enhancing the universality and convenience of stablecoin payments. The network adopts a block-based architecture, designed with two parallel processing layers: one layer is responsible for normal fee transactions, which are faster; the other layer specifically handles free transactions, which are slightly slower. Users can choose to wait in line for free but need to "queue up", or they can pay directly to use the fast track.

XPL Token Issuance and Lock-up Rules

XPL is the native token of the Plasma network, used to maintain consensus and security and as fuel for the execution layer. The public sale will take place on the Plasma official website, and participants need to complete identity verification and other compliance processes. Pre-deposits will open on June 9, and the actual sale will begin a few weeks later.

This round of public offering plans to sell 10% of the total XPL, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of $500 million. American investors must be qualified investors, and the XPL tokens they receive will be locked for 12 months after the mainnet launch.

Participants can deposit stablecoins into the Plasma Vault on Ethereum, and the vault contract will deploy funds to certain DeFi protocols to generate returns. After the deposit period ends, the Vault will enter a lock-up period of at least 40 days. When the Plasma mainnet Beta goes live, participants will receive XPL tokens corresponding to their allocation.

Plasma emphasizes that this issuance structure reflects the core values of its network: encouraging long-term participation, maintaining aligned interests, and enhancing transparency to ensure that early contributors can fairly share in the benefits brought by the network's growth.