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Stablecoins are entering their supercycle, and they require chains purpose-built to operate at financial scale. Plasma is a Layer 1 chain that takes on that role.
In 2009, WhatsApp proved a simple idea: messaging should be instant, global, and free. Sixteen years later, money is set to have its WhatsApp moment. Stablecoins are exploding in scale and relevance, outpacing Visa and Mastercard in yearly transaction volume and establishing themselves as the rails of a new monetary OS. But unlike WhatsApp, the infrastructure of this new money movement is not yet unified or purpose-built. Stablecoins today are routed through smart contract platforms which are not specifically designed for financial-grade execution.
Plasma represents the first Layer 1 blockchain architected to fill this gap, built from first principles for stablecoin-native finance. Its architecture is anchored to Bitcoin for root-of-trust validation, equipped with dual-layer consensus, and engineered for fee-exempt, jurisdiction-aware stablecoin transfers. In doing so, it aims to provide a path toward infrastructure that is jurisdiction-aware, programmable, and financially modular.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Plasma’s architecture addresses the structural shortcomings of existing blockchains in supporting stablecoin flows at scale. Specifically, it asks whether it can provide superior infrastructure for global stablecoin settlement compared to modular rollups, monolithic high-throughput chains, payments-first networks, and privacy-focused alternatives. To do so, the analysis follows three dimensions: the regulatory context shaping adoption, the architectural choices that differentiate the chain, and its potential to function as dedicated infrastructure for global monetary flows across both core and emerging use cases.
The intended primary audience are blockchain developers, enterprises, and policymakers who need to understand how stablecoin infrastructure is evolving. For developers, it details how Plasma’s EVM-compatible design introduces primitives built specifically for monetary logic; for regulators, it explains how programmable compliance can align blockchains with legal frameworks; and for enterprises, it highlights the new rails available for payroll, remittances, and cross-border settlement.
For all other readers, it is a timely analysis of a promising chain that, if successful, could make global stablecoin payments instant, free, and settlement-grade, while saving households and businesses billions otherwise lost to intermediaries.
Between September 2024 and September 2025, stablecoin throughput scaled to institutional size, with USDT processing over $1 trillion per month and peaking at $1.2 trillion in July 2025, while USDC monthly volumes ranged between $480 billion and $1.7 trillion¹. These figures reflect adjusted transfer volumes, which filter out internal flows to better capture real economic activity. However, jurisdictional fragmentation continues to limit infrastructure capabilities on existing general-purpose chains, leading to duplicated liquidity, transfer fees burdened by gas or intermediaries, and settlement risks that constrain adoption at full scale.
It’s important to consider this jurisdictional fragmentation in order to contextualize Plasma’s design choices. The GENIUS Act, passed in the United States in July 2025, established a dual-track framework that gave federal legitimacy to fiat-backed stablecoins, ones directly redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars, while explicitly excluding algorithmic and yield-bearing models from that regulatory umbrella. This structure introduced legal clarity for regulated entities but formalized the divide between compliance-grade and yield-embedded stablecoins. An additional CLARITY Act is expected to pass by late 2025 or early 2026. When it does, platforms issuing stablecoins will finally fully know which rules apply, who regulates them, and how to comply.
In Europe, the MiCA framework limits stablecoin issuance to regulated e-money institutions, with foreign-currency stablecoins facing restrictions on use in payments. This makes it difficult for developers to build global applications in Europe without encountering frictions that fundamentally limit user and volume growth. As a result, such rigidity may push developers to chains and jurisdictions that allow programmable compliance rather than fixed regulation.
Hong Kong has moved from exploratory working groups into a formal regime. Its Stablecoins Ordinance, effective August 1, 2025, requires fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers to be licensed by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, with strict rules on 100% reserves, redemption guarantees, and risk management. The government authority has stated that the first licenses are expected to be issued in early 2026.
Singapore and Japan are tilting toward optionality. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has finalized a framework that focuses on SGD- and G10-pegged stablecoins, with operational details and transition timelines still rolling out. Japan’s digital payment token categories, established under its Payment Services Act, acknowledge that stablecoins can function as both monetary instruments and programmable financial assets, depending on context.
Stablecoins are also experiencing rapid adoption in high-volatility jurisdictions. In countries like Argentina and Nigeria, where inflation can erode local currency value overnight, consumers increasingly turn to stablecoins like USDT as digital cash. In Argentina alone, over 60% of crypto users regularly convert pesos into stablecoins to hedge against inflation, which peaked near 300% in mid-2024, per Reuters. Other key markets such as Indonesia are also seeing rising stablecoin flows, but regulatory approaches vary widely, from Argentina’s strict VASP registration to Nigeria’s tightened oversight, Turkey’s new transfer limits, and Indonesia’s regulatory sandbox framework.
A challenge that remains central for stablecoin infrastructure today is that all of these compliance rules are often hard-coded or applied off-chain, creating fragmentation and regulatory friction for cross-border use. This makes rules inconsistent and difficult to adapt across jurisdictions, slowing adoption and limiting the role of stablecoins in global payments. As Citi Bank highlights in their “Stablecoins 2030” Report, “high TPS demonstrates the capacity for stablecoins to move at speed, but delays [in traditional systems] often come from layers of compliance, checks, and settlement processes.” Overcoming this requires infrastructure that can integrate compliance directly into its design rather than layering it on afterward.
General-purpose blockchains tend to optimize for flexibility, leaving payments and compliance as afterthoughts. Plasma takes the opposite approach: it is a purpose-built Layer 1 designed from the ground up for stablecoin-centric financial workflows. At launch, Plasma will integrate directly with Tether through USDT0, a zero-fee, native variant of USDT, ensuring that dollar liquidity is embedded at the protocol level from day one.
The blockchain’s consensus layer, PlasmaBFT, is a customized Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism derived from Fast HotStuff. It separates block production from attestation, allowing validators to attach modular compliance metadata to transactions without interfering with ordering or state progression. These attestations can represent whitelists, rate limits, jurisdictional approvals, or blacklists. Because block production and attestation are structurally independent, the protocol supports pipelined consensus, enabling blocks to be produced continuously while attestations operate on slightly lagged state. This ensures that economic incentives and compliance incentives remain decoupled: block producers optimize for throughput, while attestors optimize for jurisdictional or institutional rulesets.
A key architectural distinction is Plasma’s dual-validator model. Rather than relying on a single unified validator set, Plasma separates consensus validators from those executing high-frequency USDT transfers. This division ensures that monetary transactions do not compete for blockspace with broader smart contract activity. In practice, this allows stablecoin transfers to scale predictably without being crowded out by other workloads, a necessity for monetary flows and global payments where throughput and certainty cannot fluctuate with network congestion.
The execution layer is similarly purpose-built. Powered by Reth, a modular Rust-based Ethereum client, Plasma retains full EVM compatibility while introducing monetary primitives directly at the precompile and opcode level. These include identity-aware, gas-exempt transfer calls for protocol-registered stablecoins like USDT0; FX hooks for intra-contract cross-currency settlement; and treasury batching functions for multi-party flows such as payroll, vendor disbursement, or recurring invoices. In other words, developers can interact with Plasma using standard Ethereum tooling, and smart contracts can execute complex financial logic with jurisdiction-specific rulesets. For example, in a cross-border payment flow between Brazil and the United States, a wallet app could convert BRL-denominated stablecoins into USDT0 through Plasma’s FX modules while enforcing identity limits and compliance attestations.
On most L1s and rollups, users are forced to acquire the native token to initiate any interaction. This is a non-starter for most financial applications, especially in retail, fintech, or remittance contexts where end users neither want nor understand the need to hold a separate crypto asset. Plasma eliminates this friction through native gas abstraction. Protocol-level paymasters handle the transaction costs in the background, so a user sending $50 in USDT0 sees exactly that amount leave their wallet and arrive on the other side without ever needing to manage XPL, Plasma’s native token. Developers can choose to subsidize these costs or apply rules such as identity-based rate ceilings. This frictionless experience is critical to shifting from ‘web3-first’ to ‘finance-first’ UI/UX, where stablecoin transfers start to feel as direct and intuitive as using Venmo or Revolut.
The team also acknowledges that legal and reputational trust must often be grounded in external systems. To this end, the chain checkpoints its Merkle root to the Bitcoin blockchain via time-locked OP_RETURN inscriptions, creating an independently verifiable state audit trail anchored to Bitcoin, the most secure and politically neutral ledger in the ecosystem. OP_RETURN inscriptions embed small pieces of data directly into Bitcoin transactions, ensuring they are immutable and timestamped for external verification. This mechanism allows regulators, auditors, and sovereign actors to validate Plasma’s state integrity without relying on internal governance assumptions, creating a non-circular trust model that reflects the needs of monetary flows at scale.
Plasma then extends this model through its forthcoming Bitcoin bridge. The bridge introduces pBTC, a token issued 1:1 against real Bitcoin deposits, allowing BTC to be used in smart contracts without custodians, synthetic assets, or fragmented wrapped tokens. Deposits are observed by a verifier network running independent Bitcoin nodes, which attest to transactions before minting pBTC on Plasma under the LayerZero OFT standard. Withdrawals work in reverse: pBTC is burned and a quorum of verifiers uses MPC signing to release BTC back on the base chain, ensuring no single entity controls keys. Unlike custodial models such as wBTC or cbBTC, Plasma’s pBTC maintains a unified supply directly anchored to Bitcoin.
Privacy is another axis often neglected in stablecoin infrastructure. Most blockchains expose transaction metadata publicly: recipient, amount, and flow type are all visible on-chain. Plasma introduces shielded stablecoin transfers through confidential payment modules that hide metadata while preserving verifiability. This enables routing cross-border payroll, treasury settlements, or enterprise FX transactions in a compliant but private manner, balancing auditability with regulatory necessity.
It is important to outline the role of Plasma’s native token, XPL, as it plays a distinct role from USDT0. While USDT0 functions as the stablecoin used for payments and settlement, XPL secures the network itself. Validators stake XPL to secure consensus, and it governs protocol decisions by enabling votes on upgrades and economic parameters. And as discussed, paymasters abstract XPL away from end users so that everyday activity can occur entirely in stablecoins.
The protocol’s liquidity base is expanding through three flagship programs: EtherFi’s ~$500 million ETH staking-vault commitment, supplying collateral and yield-bearing flows; Binance’s USDT Locked Product, which allows users to stake USDT for daily yield and future XPL allocations, directly linking stablecoin demand to network security; and the new Aave–Plasma USDT Locked Product on Binance, an upgraded program that routes locked USDT into Aave on Plasma to generate on-chain yields. Together, these create a complementary foundation: stablecoins for compliant settlement and diversified yield sources for on-chain markets.
The chain’s launch confirmed that its mainnet beta went live with $2 billion in liquidity, making them the 8th largest by stablecoin supply. This ensures that developers building applications can assume reliable settlement capacity from day one. Combined with user-friendly onboarding infrastructure (wallets via WhatsApp, Google, AppleID, etc.), developer tools (APIs, SDKs, POS modules, webhooks), and merchant-facing integration rails, the chain aims to provide businesses with an immediate path to embed stablecoins into existing financial workflows.
While the architecture introduces clear innovations, some cross-chain routing mechanics, governance structures, and economic parameters are still in development and not yet fully disclosed. These elements will determine how the protocol’s design translates into production and institutional adoption as it moves beyond launch.
The chain’s ecosystem design reflects a focus on flows that are already institutional in size but technically constrained on general-purpose chains. Payroll is one such category. Today, the global payroll services market (i.e. processing, software, outsourcing) is estimated to exceed US $30 billion annually, yet crypto-based payroll has struggled to scale because every interaction requires a gas token or third-party sponsor to cover fees³. Through Plasma, employees could receive net-stablecoin transfers in USDT without touching the native token, while employers can automate streams with compliance attestations attached. This lowers UX friction while making payroll programmable at the base layer.
Remittances are another early target. The World Bank reports an average global remittance fee of 6.5%, equating to more than $30 billion annually lost to intermediaries. Plasma’s zero-fee stablecoin transfers paired with direct fiat on/offramps across 100+ currencies offer a pathway to reduce this burden to sub-1% levels. For migrant workers sending $300 home each month, this translates to an additional $15–20 reaching families per transfer. At global scale, the efficiency gains would likely be measured in billions.
Treasury management and B2B flows also stand to benefit. Plasma’s precompiles enable treasury batching, allowing enterprises to stream payments to multiple vendors or subsidiaries in a single compliant transaction. For a multinational corporation operating across ten or more jurisdictions, this reduces operational overhead while embedding audit trails directly into settlement. With nearly $120 trillion in annual B2B cross-border payments, a 1–3 percentage-point fee differential (e.g., ~0.3% on-chain vs ~2.9% card-like fees; ~6.5% for traditional cross-border payments) means that even 10% adoption would imply roughly $120–$360 billion in annual savings⁴.
Foreign exchange corridors provide a fourth application. Today, corridors like Brazil ↔ U.S. or Nigeria ↔ Europe remain dominated by correspondent banks and remittance networks that extract spreads typically ranging from 4% to 8%⁵. Plasma’s FX hooks allow intra-contract settlement between currency-stablecoins, embedding both conversion and compliance logic natively. If spreads in just one such corridor fell by 100 basis points on $20 billion in annual flow, the savings would approach $200 million, capital that could remain in households and firms rather than intermediaries.
Official partners such as Actual (API-driven invoicing and bill-pay), Blindpay (non-custodial stablecoin payouts), CopperX (crypto-fiat payment gateway), El Dorado (LatAm P2P on/off-ramping super-app), Holyheld (wallet + card payments), Indodax (Indonesia’s largest regulated exchange), Yellow Card (African retail on/off-ramp), and Levl (cross-border payments APIs) are extending Plasma’s rails into real-world contexts. Others like ARST and BiLira are local stablecoin issuers in Argentina and Turkey, embedding national currencies directly into the chain’s framework. Collectively, these integrations mean that developers are already experimenting building a wide variety of use-cases and flows on the L1 chain.
Partners such as Loop Crypto are adapting their recurring payments APIs to Plasma’s model, allowing DAOs, gig platforms, and fintechs to implement subscription flows, stipends, or treasury streaming with compliance attestation built directly into the chain. CopperX is expanding its developer-first payout rails to route both crypto and fiat transactions through Plasma, ensuring that merchants and fintechs can build compliant, gasless payment flows without additional middleware.
Beyond the discussed flows, Plasma’s compliance-first architecture offers developers a foundation to build solutions for other industries where regulation and auditability are critical. Examples of such sectors could be construction escrow and lien-release workflows, healthcare claims settlement, freight and trade finance, government vendor disbursements, or even tightly licensed verticals like alcohol and tobacco distribution which all face slow, fragmented settlement rails and/or heavy compliance burdens.
Plasma itself does not deliver these sectoral solutions, but it could provide the programmable, policy-aware infrastructure upon which developers can build such specialized applications. These examples mentioned in the previous paragraph are not certainties, but rather forward-looking explorations of where else a compliance-first architecture could realistically add value. The true scope of other valuable use cases will become clearer once the chain begins to mature, as data accumulates and developers test what’s truly possible, with significant potential ahead.
Finally, Plasma’s core differentiation should be evaluated against today’s modular stacks where execution, data availability (DA), and settlement are separable markets. On Ethereum-aligned rollups, post-Dencun/EIP-4844 blobs have reduced the marginal cost of posting L2 data to Ethereum and catalyzed a sharp increase in activity on OP Stack and Arbitrum-derived chains. Base, for example, recorded a peak day of 14,481,743 transactions on September 21, 2025⁶.
DA supply has matured into a competitive layer. L2BEAT’s DA throughput panel shows Celestia handling sustained blob bandwidth with identifiable consumer rollups, while Blockworks Research and Everstake analyses quantify rising total data stored as it becomes a common DA back-end for app-specific L2s. EigenDA, by contrast, optimizes for tight Ethereum integration via restaking; Avail publishes live mainnet throughput at 4 MB per block with credible lab-bench expansion to larger blocks⁷. In short, rollups can now choose among Ethereum blobs, Celestia, EigenDA, and others like Avail as DA substrates while still settling to Ethereum.
Plasma’s Bitcoin-anchored checkpointing aims at a different assurance: an audit trail against the most politically neutral base chain. Comparable designs exist in production, like Stacks’ PoX anchoring and Babylon’s checkpointing/timestamping to Bitcoin, suggesting that Bitcoin-rooted verification is a pragmatic complement to modular DA for institutions that demand non-circular attestations.
In the payments-first category, Tron remains the largest incumbent benchmark. As of 2025, Tron processes more than $20 billion in stablecoin transfers daily (adjusted volume), representing over 60% of the global USDT supply in circulation⁸. Its low fees and global reach have made it the backbone of retail remittance and P2P stablecoin flows across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet Tron’s developer ecosystem is relatively limited compared to Ethereum or Solana, with most of its activity concentrated on USDT settlement rather than broad financial infrastructure.
BNB Chain plays a similar role as a retail-heavy settlement hub, especially across Southeast Asia, but with its developer activity concentrated around exchange-linked ecosystems rather than independent protocol development. Solana’s monolithic path continues to emphasize high-throughput state with a 2025 roadmap that includes a second, independently engineered validator client (Firedancer/Frankendancer) and the Alpenglow consensus initiative, both aimed at slashing latency and hardening client diversity. However, these protocols also does not embed compliance metadata, programmable attestations, or identity-aware execution at the protocol layer. Plasma’s positioning is therefore not to compete directly with their raw scale of settlement, but to extend the design space by embedding compliance-grade primitives and stablecoin-native gas abstraction that they lack.
On user experience and fee abstraction, the modular Ethereum stack relies heavily on ERC-4337 smart-account rails and paymasters operated at the application layer. Plasma’s proposed identity-aware, gas-exempt stablecoin calls could collapse today’s fragmented “sponsor-gas-via-paymaster” model into a chain-native UX. This is a substantive difference for retail and fintech flows where requiring users to pre-acquire native gas remains the chief source of failed conversions on L2s despite cheaper blobs.
Taken together, the comparative frame is practical: where OP Stack/Arbitrum and alternative DA layers optimize cost and flexibility, where Solana optimizes single-shard latency and client diversity, where Tron and BNB Chain dominate raw stablecoin settlement, and where privacy-first chains optimize confidentiality, Plasma optimizes compliance-grade attestations, stablecoin-first UX, and Bitcoin-anchored auditability inside an EVM that developers already use. That is the axis on which it should be judged as it evolves.
As Plasma moves from technical promise to infrastructure adoption, new questions surface about the scalability and governance of programmable monetary systems. While attestor-based compliance offers flexibility, it introduces complexity in validator responsibilities, raising the possibility of bottlenecks or disputes over attestation schemas. The risk of over-regulation is another challenge, especially as nation-states adapt at uneven speeds. While early regulatory efforts have been made across all continents, further overregulation could lead to compliance logic that is even more fragmented across jurisdictions, ultimately slowing innovation.
There is also a deeper architectural question: should stablecoin infrastructure live on monolithic L1s, modular execution environments, or integrated L2 systems optimized for specific use cases? Plasma’s approach of embedding compliance primitives directly into Layer 1 offers a powerful foundation, but it leaves open the long-term debate over the modular future of programmable money. Composable compliance itself introduces tensions as well. While programmable attestations allow local enforcement without global fragmentation, maintaining interoperability may eventually require shared compliance schemas or standards bodies. The alternative is regulatory divergence at the attestor level that, while technically valid, risks creating friction in global liquidity flow.
Payment-focused chains like Tron have proven the demand for stablecoin settlement at scale, yet their functionality remains narrow and compliance-light. Plasma also enters this landscape not as a general-purpose competitor to a chain such as Ethereum, but as a purpose-built settlement layer that retains EVM compatibility while embedding compliance and monetary logic directly into its core. With this positioning, Plasma can extend beyond today’s payment rails while still operating within an ecosystem already moving trillions in stablecoin volume.
Its mainnet performance metrics such as speed and retention will need to be observed over time and, while important, are not the focus of this analysis, and this paper intentionally refrains from projecting them. Real-world developer adoption is also yet to be tested, and institutional viability will ultimately depend on how effectively its compliance framework integrates with existing regulatory and financial infrastructure. Much about the economics, governance, and cross-chain routing design is still uncertain, so readers should monitor how these details evolve as the network matures.
Despite these open questions, the architecture represents one of the most promising attempts to build a purpose-built settlement layer that could enable global financial flows with legal and computational certainty.
At its core, the Plasma blockchain is here to make stablecoins work the way people already expect money to work: fast, cheap, compliant, and invisible in the background. Billions of dollars move every day over rails like Tron or Ethereum, but users still hit walls ranging from gas fees and failed transactions to rules that don’t match the legal frameworks governments are now implementing.
It promises to combine the predictability of traditional payments with the openness of crypto, giving developers a chain purpose-built for payroll, remittances, and everyday money applications. Instead of fragmenting the stack into siloed rollups or region-specific forks, it introduces a singular chain where financial logic is structured and enforceable, whether the transaction is a dollar-based payroll, a cross-border FX flow, or a shielded treasury disbursement.
This is a new thesis for how digital finance should operate: chains should execute law, capital, and trust in programmable and jursidiction-aware form. If successful, Plasma could set a new standard for modern monetary flows, unlocking mainstream use in markets from Latin America to Southeast Asia and creating the first truly global settlement network that feels as simple as sending a message on WhatsApp.
Footnotes:
(1): Stablecoins Dashboard — Stablecoins Tab. Artemis Analytics,
https://app.artemisanalytics.com/stablecoins?tab=stablecoins
(2): “Can stablecoins play a role in the FX world?” CLS Group,
https://www.cls-group.com/media/14felgnw/cls_shaping-fx_opinion-piece_stablecoin_sept2025.pdf
(3): Payroll Services Market Size & Share Analysis. Mordor Intelligence,
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-payroll-services-market
(4): “A Substrate for Money Moves.” Decentralised.co,
https://www.decentralised.co/p/a-substrate-for-money-moves
(5): Remittance Prices Worldwide. World Bank,
https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/
(6): Daily Transactions Chart (Base). BaseScan,
(7): “A Guide to Selecting the Right Data Availability Layer.” Avail,
https://blog.availproject.org/a-guide-to-selecting-the-right-data-availability-%20layer/
(8): “Stablecoins Dashboard — Chains Tab.” Artemis Analytics,
https://app.artemisanalytics.com/stablecoins?tab=chains
Additional References & Further Reading:
Plasma Official Documentation
“Start Here — Introduction.” Plasma Docs,
https://docs.plasma.to/docs/get-started/introduction/start-here
L2BEAT Throughput (DA)
“Throughput — Data Availability.” L2BEAT,
https://l2beat.com/data-availability/throughput
Everstake / Blockworks / analyses on networking / data propagation
“Cracking Ethereum’s networking bottleneck.” Blockworks,
https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-networking-bottleneck
Stablecoin Payments Outpacing Visa/Mastercard
“The Financial Shakeup Surpassing Visa and Mastercard Combined.” InvestorPlace,
Argentina Inflation 2024
“Argentina inflation dips, locals dare hope worst is over.” Reuters,
Citi Group Stablecoin Report
“Stablecoins 2030.” Citi Group,
Stablecoins are entering their supercycle, and they require chains purpose-built to operate at financial scale. Plasma is a Layer 1 chain that takes on that role.
In 2009, WhatsApp proved a simple idea: messaging should be instant, global, and free. Sixteen years later, money is set to have its WhatsApp moment. Stablecoins are exploding in scale and relevance, outpacing Visa and Mastercard in yearly transaction volume and establishing themselves as the rails of a new monetary OS. But unlike WhatsApp, the infrastructure of this new money movement is not yet unified or purpose-built. Stablecoins today are routed through smart contract platforms which are not specifically designed for financial-grade execution.
Plasma represents the first Layer 1 blockchain architected to fill this gap, built from first principles for stablecoin-native finance. Its architecture is anchored to Bitcoin for root-of-trust validation, equipped with dual-layer consensus, and engineered for fee-exempt, jurisdiction-aware stablecoin transfers. In doing so, it aims to provide a path toward infrastructure that is jurisdiction-aware, programmable, and financially modular.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Plasma’s architecture addresses the structural shortcomings of existing blockchains in supporting stablecoin flows at scale. Specifically, it asks whether it can provide superior infrastructure for global stablecoin settlement compared to modular rollups, monolithic high-throughput chains, payments-first networks, and privacy-focused alternatives. To do so, the analysis follows three dimensions: the regulatory context shaping adoption, the architectural choices that differentiate the chain, and its potential to function as dedicated infrastructure for global monetary flows across both core and emerging use cases.
The intended primary audience are blockchain developers, enterprises, and policymakers who need to understand how stablecoin infrastructure is evolving. For developers, it details how Plasma’s EVM-compatible design introduces primitives built specifically for monetary logic; for regulators, it explains how programmable compliance can align blockchains with legal frameworks; and for enterprises, it highlights the new rails available for payroll, remittances, and cross-border settlement.
For all other readers, it is a timely analysis of a promising chain that, if successful, could make global stablecoin payments instant, free, and settlement-grade, while saving households and businesses billions otherwise lost to intermediaries.
Between September 2024 and September 2025, stablecoin throughput scaled to institutional size, with USDT processing over $1 trillion per month and peaking at $1.2 trillion in July 2025, while USDC monthly volumes ranged between $480 billion and $1.7 trillion¹. These figures reflect adjusted transfer volumes, which filter out internal flows to better capture real economic activity. However, jurisdictional fragmentation continues to limit infrastructure capabilities on existing general-purpose chains, leading to duplicated liquidity, transfer fees burdened by gas or intermediaries, and settlement risks that constrain adoption at full scale.
It’s important to consider this jurisdictional fragmentation in order to contextualize Plasma’s design choices. The GENIUS Act, passed in the United States in July 2025, established a dual-track framework that gave federal legitimacy to fiat-backed stablecoins, ones directly redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars, while explicitly excluding algorithmic and yield-bearing models from that regulatory umbrella. This structure introduced legal clarity for regulated entities but formalized the divide between compliance-grade and yield-embedded stablecoins. An additional CLARITY Act is expected to pass by late 2025 or early 2026. When it does, platforms issuing stablecoins will finally fully know which rules apply, who regulates them, and how to comply.
In Europe, the MiCA framework limits stablecoin issuance to regulated e-money institutions, with foreign-currency stablecoins facing restrictions on use in payments. This makes it difficult for developers to build global applications in Europe without encountering frictions that fundamentally limit user and volume growth. As a result, such rigidity may push developers to chains and jurisdictions that allow programmable compliance rather than fixed regulation.
Hong Kong has moved from exploratory working groups into a formal regime. Its Stablecoins Ordinance, effective August 1, 2025, requires fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers to be licensed by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, with strict rules on 100% reserves, redemption guarantees, and risk management. The government authority has stated that the first licenses are expected to be issued in early 2026.
Singapore and Japan are tilting toward optionality. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has finalized a framework that focuses on SGD- and G10-pegged stablecoins, with operational details and transition timelines still rolling out. Japan’s digital payment token categories, established under its Payment Services Act, acknowledge that stablecoins can function as both monetary instruments and programmable financial assets, depending on context.
Stablecoins are also experiencing rapid adoption in high-volatility jurisdictions. In countries like Argentina and Nigeria, where inflation can erode local currency value overnight, consumers increasingly turn to stablecoins like USDT as digital cash. In Argentina alone, over 60% of crypto users regularly convert pesos into stablecoins to hedge against inflation, which peaked near 300% in mid-2024, per Reuters. Other key markets such as Indonesia are also seeing rising stablecoin flows, but regulatory approaches vary widely, from Argentina’s strict VASP registration to Nigeria’s tightened oversight, Turkey’s new transfer limits, and Indonesia’s regulatory sandbox framework.
A challenge that remains central for stablecoin infrastructure today is that all of these compliance rules are often hard-coded or applied off-chain, creating fragmentation and regulatory friction for cross-border use. This makes rules inconsistent and difficult to adapt across jurisdictions, slowing adoption and limiting the role of stablecoins in global payments. As Citi Bank highlights in their “Stablecoins 2030” Report, “high TPS demonstrates the capacity for stablecoins to move at speed, but delays [in traditional systems] often come from layers of compliance, checks, and settlement processes.” Overcoming this requires infrastructure that can integrate compliance directly into its design rather than layering it on afterward.
General-purpose blockchains tend to optimize for flexibility, leaving payments and compliance as afterthoughts. Plasma takes the opposite approach: it is a purpose-built Layer 1 designed from the ground up for stablecoin-centric financial workflows. At launch, Plasma will integrate directly with Tether through USDT0, a zero-fee, native variant of USDT, ensuring that dollar liquidity is embedded at the protocol level from day one.
The blockchain’s consensus layer, PlasmaBFT, is a customized Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism derived from Fast HotStuff. It separates block production from attestation, allowing validators to attach modular compliance metadata to transactions without interfering with ordering or state progression. These attestations can represent whitelists, rate limits, jurisdictional approvals, or blacklists. Because block production and attestation are structurally independent, the protocol supports pipelined consensus, enabling blocks to be produced continuously while attestations operate on slightly lagged state. This ensures that economic incentives and compliance incentives remain decoupled: block producers optimize for throughput, while attestors optimize for jurisdictional or institutional rulesets.
A key architectural distinction is Plasma’s dual-validator model. Rather than relying on a single unified validator set, Plasma separates consensus validators from those executing high-frequency USDT transfers. This division ensures that monetary transactions do not compete for blockspace with broader smart contract activity. In practice, this allows stablecoin transfers to scale predictably without being crowded out by other workloads, a necessity for monetary flows and global payments where throughput and certainty cannot fluctuate with network congestion.
The execution layer is similarly purpose-built. Powered by Reth, a modular Rust-based Ethereum client, Plasma retains full EVM compatibility while introducing monetary primitives directly at the precompile and opcode level. These include identity-aware, gas-exempt transfer calls for protocol-registered stablecoins like USDT0; FX hooks for intra-contract cross-currency settlement; and treasury batching functions for multi-party flows such as payroll, vendor disbursement, or recurring invoices. In other words, developers can interact with Plasma using standard Ethereum tooling, and smart contracts can execute complex financial logic with jurisdiction-specific rulesets. For example, in a cross-border payment flow between Brazil and the United States, a wallet app could convert BRL-denominated stablecoins into USDT0 through Plasma’s FX modules while enforcing identity limits and compliance attestations.
On most L1s and rollups, users are forced to acquire the native token to initiate any interaction. This is a non-starter for most financial applications, especially in retail, fintech, or remittance contexts where end users neither want nor understand the need to hold a separate crypto asset. Plasma eliminates this friction through native gas abstraction. Protocol-level paymasters handle the transaction costs in the background, so a user sending $50 in USDT0 sees exactly that amount leave their wallet and arrive on the other side without ever needing to manage XPL, Plasma’s native token. Developers can choose to subsidize these costs or apply rules such as identity-based rate ceilings. This frictionless experience is critical to shifting from ‘web3-first’ to ‘finance-first’ UI/UX, where stablecoin transfers start to feel as direct and intuitive as using Venmo or Revolut.
The team also acknowledges that legal and reputational trust must often be grounded in external systems. To this end, the chain checkpoints its Merkle root to the Bitcoin blockchain via time-locked OP_RETURN inscriptions, creating an independently verifiable state audit trail anchored to Bitcoin, the most secure and politically neutral ledger in the ecosystem. OP_RETURN inscriptions embed small pieces of data directly into Bitcoin transactions, ensuring they are immutable and timestamped for external verification. This mechanism allows regulators, auditors, and sovereign actors to validate Plasma’s state integrity without relying on internal governance assumptions, creating a non-circular trust model that reflects the needs of monetary flows at scale.
Plasma then extends this model through its forthcoming Bitcoin bridge. The bridge introduces pBTC, a token issued 1:1 against real Bitcoin deposits, allowing BTC to be used in smart contracts without custodians, synthetic assets, or fragmented wrapped tokens. Deposits are observed by a verifier network running independent Bitcoin nodes, which attest to transactions before minting pBTC on Plasma under the LayerZero OFT standard. Withdrawals work in reverse: pBTC is burned and a quorum of verifiers uses MPC signing to release BTC back on the base chain, ensuring no single entity controls keys. Unlike custodial models such as wBTC or cbBTC, Plasma’s pBTC maintains a unified supply directly anchored to Bitcoin.
Privacy is another axis often neglected in stablecoin infrastructure. Most blockchains expose transaction metadata publicly: recipient, amount, and flow type are all visible on-chain. Plasma introduces shielded stablecoin transfers through confidential payment modules that hide metadata while preserving verifiability. This enables routing cross-border payroll, treasury settlements, or enterprise FX transactions in a compliant but private manner, balancing auditability with regulatory necessity.
It is important to outline the role of Plasma’s native token, XPL, as it plays a distinct role from USDT0. While USDT0 functions as the stablecoin used for payments and settlement, XPL secures the network itself. Validators stake XPL to secure consensus, and it governs protocol decisions by enabling votes on upgrades and economic parameters. And as discussed, paymasters abstract XPL away from end users so that everyday activity can occur entirely in stablecoins.
The protocol’s liquidity base is expanding through three flagship programs: EtherFi’s ~$500 million ETH staking-vault commitment, supplying collateral and yield-bearing flows; Binance’s USDT Locked Product, which allows users to stake USDT for daily yield and future XPL allocations, directly linking stablecoin demand to network security; and the new Aave–Plasma USDT Locked Product on Binance, an upgraded program that routes locked USDT into Aave on Plasma to generate on-chain yields. Together, these create a complementary foundation: stablecoins for compliant settlement and diversified yield sources for on-chain markets.
The chain’s launch confirmed that its mainnet beta went live with $2 billion in liquidity, making them the 8th largest by stablecoin supply. This ensures that developers building applications can assume reliable settlement capacity from day one. Combined with user-friendly onboarding infrastructure (wallets via WhatsApp, Google, AppleID, etc.), developer tools (APIs, SDKs, POS modules, webhooks), and merchant-facing integration rails, the chain aims to provide businesses with an immediate path to embed stablecoins into existing financial workflows.
While the architecture introduces clear innovations, some cross-chain routing mechanics, governance structures, and economic parameters are still in development and not yet fully disclosed. These elements will determine how the protocol’s design translates into production and institutional adoption as it moves beyond launch.
The chain’s ecosystem design reflects a focus on flows that are already institutional in size but technically constrained on general-purpose chains. Payroll is one such category. Today, the global payroll services market (i.e. processing, software, outsourcing) is estimated to exceed US $30 billion annually, yet crypto-based payroll has struggled to scale because every interaction requires a gas token or third-party sponsor to cover fees³. Through Plasma, employees could receive net-stablecoin transfers in USDT without touching the native token, while employers can automate streams with compliance attestations attached. This lowers UX friction while making payroll programmable at the base layer.
Remittances are another early target. The World Bank reports an average global remittance fee of 6.5%, equating to more than $30 billion annually lost to intermediaries. Plasma’s zero-fee stablecoin transfers paired with direct fiat on/offramps across 100+ currencies offer a pathway to reduce this burden to sub-1% levels. For migrant workers sending $300 home each month, this translates to an additional $15–20 reaching families per transfer. At global scale, the efficiency gains would likely be measured in billions.
Treasury management and B2B flows also stand to benefit. Plasma’s precompiles enable treasury batching, allowing enterprises to stream payments to multiple vendors or subsidiaries in a single compliant transaction. For a multinational corporation operating across ten or more jurisdictions, this reduces operational overhead while embedding audit trails directly into settlement. With nearly $120 trillion in annual B2B cross-border payments, a 1–3 percentage-point fee differential (e.g., ~0.3% on-chain vs ~2.9% card-like fees; ~6.5% for traditional cross-border payments) means that even 10% adoption would imply roughly $120–$360 billion in annual savings⁴.
Foreign exchange corridors provide a fourth application. Today, corridors like Brazil ↔ U.S. or Nigeria ↔ Europe remain dominated by correspondent banks and remittance networks that extract spreads typically ranging from 4% to 8%⁵. Plasma’s FX hooks allow intra-contract settlement between currency-stablecoins, embedding both conversion and compliance logic natively. If spreads in just one such corridor fell by 100 basis points on $20 billion in annual flow, the savings would approach $200 million, capital that could remain in households and firms rather than intermediaries.
Official partners such as Actual (API-driven invoicing and bill-pay), Blindpay (non-custodial stablecoin payouts), CopperX (crypto-fiat payment gateway), El Dorado (LatAm P2P on/off-ramping super-app), Holyheld (wallet + card payments), Indodax (Indonesia’s largest regulated exchange), Yellow Card (African retail on/off-ramp), and Levl (cross-border payments APIs) are extending Plasma’s rails into real-world contexts. Others like ARST and BiLira are local stablecoin issuers in Argentina and Turkey, embedding national currencies directly into the chain’s framework. Collectively, these integrations mean that developers are already experimenting building a wide variety of use-cases and flows on the L1 chain.
Partners such as Loop Crypto are adapting their recurring payments APIs to Plasma’s model, allowing DAOs, gig platforms, and fintechs to implement subscription flows, stipends, or treasury streaming with compliance attestation built directly into the chain. CopperX is expanding its developer-first payout rails to route both crypto and fiat transactions through Plasma, ensuring that merchants and fintechs can build compliant, gasless payment flows without additional middleware.
Beyond the discussed flows, Plasma’s compliance-first architecture offers developers a foundation to build solutions for other industries where regulation and auditability are critical. Examples of such sectors could be construction escrow and lien-release workflows, healthcare claims settlement, freight and trade finance, government vendor disbursements, or even tightly licensed verticals like alcohol and tobacco distribution which all face slow, fragmented settlement rails and/or heavy compliance burdens.
Plasma itself does not deliver these sectoral solutions, but it could provide the programmable, policy-aware infrastructure upon which developers can build such specialized applications. These examples mentioned in the previous paragraph are not certainties, but rather forward-looking explorations of where else a compliance-first architecture could realistically add value. The true scope of other valuable use cases will become clearer once the chain begins to mature, as data accumulates and developers test what’s truly possible, with significant potential ahead.
Finally, Plasma’s core differentiation should be evaluated against today’s modular stacks where execution, data availability (DA), and settlement are separable markets. On Ethereum-aligned rollups, post-Dencun/EIP-4844 blobs have reduced the marginal cost of posting L2 data to Ethereum and catalyzed a sharp increase in activity on OP Stack and Arbitrum-derived chains. Base, for example, recorded a peak day of 14,481,743 transactions on September 21, 2025⁶.
DA supply has matured into a competitive layer. L2BEAT’s DA throughput panel shows Celestia handling sustained blob bandwidth with identifiable consumer rollups, while Blockworks Research and Everstake analyses quantify rising total data stored as it becomes a common DA back-end for app-specific L2s. EigenDA, by contrast, optimizes for tight Ethereum integration via restaking; Avail publishes live mainnet throughput at 4 MB per block with credible lab-bench expansion to larger blocks⁷. In short, rollups can now choose among Ethereum blobs, Celestia, EigenDA, and others like Avail as DA substrates while still settling to Ethereum.
Plasma’s Bitcoin-anchored checkpointing aims at a different assurance: an audit trail against the most politically neutral base chain. Comparable designs exist in production, like Stacks’ PoX anchoring and Babylon’s checkpointing/timestamping to Bitcoin, suggesting that Bitcoin-rooted verification is a pragmatic complement to modular DA for institutions that demand non-circular attestations.
In the payments-first category, Tron remains the largest incumbent benchmark. As of 2025, Tron processes more than $20 billion in stablecoin transfers daily (adjusted volume), representing over 60% of the global USDT supply in circulation⁸. Its low fees and global reach have made it the backbone of retail remittance and P2P stablecoin flows across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet Tron’s developer ecosystem is relatively limited compared to Ethereum or Solana, with most of its activity concentrated on USDT settlement rather than broad financial infrastructure.
BNB Chain plays a similar role as a retail-heavy settlement hub, especially across Southeast Asia, but with its developer activity concentrated around exchange-linked ecosystems rather than independent protocol development. Solana’s monolithic path continues to emphasize high-throughput state with a 2025 roadmap that includes a second, independently engineered validator client (Firedancer/Frankendancer) and the Alpenglow consensus initiative, both aimed at slashing latency and hardening client diversity. However, these protocols also does not embed compliance metadata, programmable attestations, or identity-aware execution at the protocol layer. Plasma’s positioning is therefore not to compete directly with their raw scale of settlement, but to extend the design space by embedding compliance-grade primitives and stablecoin-native gas abstraction that they lack.
On user experience and fee abstraction, the modular Ethereum stack relies heavily on ERC-4337 smart-account rails and paymasters operated at the application layer. Plasma’s proposed identity-aware, gas-exempt stablecoin calls could collapse today’s fragmented “sponsor-gas-via-paymaster” model into a chain-native UX. This is a substantive difference for retail and fintech flows where requiring users to pre-acquire native gas remains the chief source of failed conversions on L2s despite cheaper blobs.
Taken together, the comparative frame is practical: where OP Stack/Arbitrum and alternative DA layers optimize cost and flexibility, where Solana optimizes single-shard latency and client diversity, where Tron and BNB Chain dominate raw stablecoin settlement, and where privacy-first chains optimize confidentiality, Plasma optimizes compliance-grade attestations, stablecoin-first UX, and Bitcoin-anchored auditability inside an EVM that developers already use. That is the axis on which it should be judged as it evolves.
As Plasma moves from technical promise to infrastructure adoption, new questions surface about the scalability and governance of programmable monetary systems. While attestor-based compliance offers flexibility, it introduces complexity in validator responsibilities, raising the possibility of bottlenecks or disputes over attestation schemas. The risk of over-regulation is another challenge, especially as nation-states adapt at uneven speeds. While early regulatory efforts have been made across all continents, further overregulation could lead to compliance logic that is even more fragmented across jurisdictions, ultimately slowing innovation.
There is also a deeper architectural question: should stablecoin infrastructure live on monolithic L1s, modular execution environments, or integrated L2 systems optimized for specific use cases? Plasma’s approach of embedding compliance primitives directly into Layer 1 offers a powerful foundation, but it leaves open the long-term debate over the modular future of programmable money. Composable compliance itself introduces tensions as well. While programmable attestations allow local enforcement without global fragmentation, maintaining interoperability may eventually require shared compliance schemas or standards bodies. The alternative is regulatory divergence at the attestor level that, while technically valid, risks creating friction in global liquidity flow.
Payment-focused chains like Tron have proven the demand for stablecoin settlement at scale, yet their functionality remains narrow and compliance-light. Plasma also enters this landscape not as a general-purpose competitor to a chain such as Ethereum, but as a purpose-built settlement layer that retains EVM compatibility while embedding compliance and monetary logic directly into its core. With this positioning, Plasma can extend beyond today’s payment rails while still operating within an ecosystem already moving trillions in stablecoin volume.
Its mainnet performance metrics such as speed and retention will need to be observed over time and, while important, are not the focus of this analysis, and this paper intentionally refrains from projecting them. Real-world developer adoption is also yet to be tested, and institutional viability will ultimately depend on how effectively its compliance framework integrates with existing regulatory and financial infrastructure. Much about the economics, governance, and cross-chain routing design is still uncertain, so readers should monitor how these details evolve as the network matures.
Despite these open questions, the architecture represents one of the most promising attempts to build a purpose-built settlement layer that could enable global financial flows with legal and computational certainty.
At its core, the Plasma blockchain is here to make stablecoins work the way people already expect money to work: fast, cheap, compliant, and invisible in the background. Billions of dollars move every day over rails like Tron or Ethereum, but users still hit walls ranging from gas fees and failed transactions to rules that don’t match the legal frameworks governments are now implementing.
It promises to combine the predictability of traditional payments with the openness of crypto, giving developers a chain purpose-built for payroll, remittances, and everyday money applications. Instead of fragmenting the stack into siloed rollups or region-specific forks, it introduces a singular chain where financial logic is structured and enforceable, whether the transaction is a dollar-based payroll, a cross-border FX flow, or a shielded treasury disbursement.
This is a new thesis for how digital finance should operate: chains should execute law, capital, and trust in programmable and jursidiction-aware form. If successful, Plasma could set a new standard for modern monetary flows, unlocking mainstream use in markets from Latin America to Southeast Asia and creating the first truly global settlement network that feels as simple as sending a message on WhatsApp.
Footnotes:
(1): Stablecoins Dashboard — Stablecoins Tab. Artemis Analytics,
https://app.artemisanalytics.com/stablecoins?tab=stablecoins
(2): “Can stablecoins play a role in the FX world?” CLS Group,
https://www.cls-group.com/media/14felgnw/cls_shaping-fx_opinion-piece_stablecoin_sept2025.pdf
(3): Payroll Services Market Size & Share Analysis. Mordor Intelligence,
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-payroll-services-market
(4): “A Substrate for Money Moves.” Decentralised.co,
https://www.decentralised.co/p/a-substrate-for-money-moves
(5): Remittance Prices Worldwide. World Bank,
https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/
(6): Daily Transactions Chart (Base). BaseScan,
(7): “A Guide to Selecting the Right Data Availability Layer.” Avail,
https://blog.availproject.org/a-guide-to-selecting-the-right-data-availability-%20layer/
(8): “Stablecoins Dashboard — Chains Tab.” Artemis Analytics,
https://app.artemisanalytics.com/stablecoins?tab=chains
Additional References & Further Reading:
Plasma Official Documentation
“Start Here — Introduction.” Plasma Docs,
https://docs.plasma.to/docs/get-started/introduction/start-here
L2BEAT Throughput (DA)
“Throughput — Data Availability.” L2BEAT,
https://l2beat.com/data-availability/throughput
Everstake / Blockworks / analyses on networking / data propagation
“Cracking Ethereum’s networking bottleneck.” Blockworks,
https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-networking-bottleneck
Stablecoin Payments Outpacing Visa/Mastercard
“The Financial Shakeup Surpassing Visa and Mastercard Combined.” InvestorPlace,
Argentina Inflation 2024
“Argentina inflation dips, locals dare hope worst is over.” Reuters,
Citi Group Stablecoin Report
“Stablecoins 2030.” Citi Group,
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