XPL has been fluctuating around 0.14, with the K-line showing small shadows and small shadows repeatedly pulling back and forth. It looks very calm, but the underlying issues behind this are worth pondering—what is the market digesting? The answer actually points to last year's crash, which fell from 1.67 all the way down to 0.18, a nearly 90% decline that would be enough to deter anyone trying to bottom fish. I chose to observe quietly at that time; now that I think about it, even if I had rushed in back then, it would have just been moving from one low point to another.

The truly interesting question arises: what allows Plasma to stand firm in the red ocean of L2 solutions? The answer lies in a detail overlooked by most competitors—USDT zero-fee transfers. This isn’t a flashy gimmick, but it hits the core point. Once traditional L2 gas fees soar, users immediately vote with their feet and leave. Plasma’s approach is more aggressive: it makes USDT itself serve as gas fuel, reducing the base transfer costs to nearly zero, only requiring XPL when dealing with complex contracts and staking operations. This dual-model design essentially pushes the concept of Account Abstraction to the extreme—paymaster is no longer an optional configuration but directly integrated into the protocol layer, making institutional users feel as if the underlying chain doesn’t exist.

EVM compatibility might seem unremarkable at first glance, but it solves the biggest pain point for developers migrating to a new chain. No one wants to learn a strange programming language from scratch just for a new chain; directly porting existing code is the smarter choice. And after migrating? Payment gateways, merchant settlements, cross-border remittances—these real-world scenarios form Plasma’s application landscape. The cross-border remittance track is already large enough; the slow speed of the SWIFT system has long been recognized as a flaw in the industry. Stablecoins are faster but are constrained by fee structures and finality guarantees. Plasma’s solution introduces Bitcoin as a security backbone—locking BTC through the Babylon staking mechanism to back the network, providing enough confidence for institutional users.

Have institutions really come in? With a TVL of $200 million at launch, strong promotion from major exchanges, and scenarios of multiple oversubscribed public rounds, it seems to give a positive answer. The funds are ample, and the ecosystem fund is substantial. However, by early 2026, the TVL has pulled back, but the transfer volume of USDT has actually increased—this contradictory phenomenon is quite intriguing.