A Long Letter to Compliance and Auditing: Treating "Verifiability" as the First Function
Many people think of compliance as a brake, but in fact, compliance is the steering wheel. The most challenging aspect for stablecoins to enter real commerce is not speed, but evidence and boundaries. Plasma's attitude is clear: treat "verifiability" as the first function and "accountability" as the first principle. It insists on compatibility with L1 EVM, allowing collateral, whitelists, limits, liquidations, and other primitives to follow a mature system; it requires all key actions to leave uniformly structured events on-chain, detailing who, when, how much, what summary, and what version—no more, no less; it publicly discloses batch and net amount windows, allowing contract terms to be written into a timeline.
When anomalies occur, the system does not combat anxiety with silence. The receipt number is the only entry point, and the closure path is written in the code, with conditions for compensation or rollback being public and traceable. Sampling is not "randomly flipping chat records," but rather "re-calculating states based on fixed fields." This allows compliance to return from "confessions" to "samples," and auditing to return from "memory" to "evidence."
Regulators are more concerned with accountability boundaries. Plasma places "who can change parameters," "how parameters take effect," and "how to roll back" in the sunlight, with delayed effectiveness and gray pilot projects being hard rules. We can discuss multi-chain collaboration and experiment with cross-domain paths, but in any case, the complexities off-chain must be returned to the process, and the responsibilities on-chain must be written into events. Compliance is not the enemy; compliance is the armor of business. Only those who can wear the armor well are qualified to talk about speed.
