When discussing the quality of a blockchain, most people's first reaction is to ask, "Are the transaction fees cheap?" But if we look at this topic from the perspective of stablecoin payments and settlements, you'll find that low fees are not everything—the real bottleneck is: can users transfer directly with stablecoins, or do they have to exchange to another currency first?

This may sound like a minor issue, but it can directly prevent stablecoins from moving from niche to mainstream. It is precisely this pain point that has driven the emergence of solutions like Plasma—by allowing stablecoins to pay gas fees directly, or even supporting application providers to cover fees, this problem is thoroughly solved.

On a general public blockchain, the logic of paying gas fees with native tokens is justified: network security requires incentives, users pay to maintain system operation, forming a complete closed loop. But once you switch to payment scenarios, this logic becomes a nightmare for user experience.

Imagine a new user receives USDT and is eager to transfer or spend it. What happens? The system tells them, "Buy some native tokens first." Then comes a series of operations: deposit, exchange, transfer—most ordinary users would give up long before completing all these steps.

For products that care about growth, this isn't just a "slight inconvenience," but a direct cut in conversion rates.

Plasma adopts a different approach, more akin to traditional payment industry methods: hiding all costs and complexities at the underlying layer, so users only see one type of currency experience—being able to complete all operations with USDT. When gas fees can be paid with stablecoins or covered by the platform, users' mental models become especially unified: stablecoins are no longer just "assets I hold," but become "cash tools I can use directly." This mental unification is crucial for the entire payment ecosystem because the core of a payment product's competitiveness lies here.