If you are really considering bringing two or three friends together to create a payment or wallet product for real users—such as payroll, cashback, helping Latin American sellers receive dollars, or assisting Southeast Asian workers in sending money home—you will quickly discover a harsh reality: choosing a chain is no longer as simple as 'finding an EVM chain and deploying the contract'.
In recent years, Azu has seen too many similar stories. Products initially seem wonderful: register an account, bind an email, and click a button to receive USDT airdrops; at first glance, the UX is not inferior to mainstream financial apps. However, when it truly reaches the hands of users, the first wave of complaints inevitably revolves around a few pain points: why can't I transfer USDT when I clearly have it in my wallet? Why do I have to buy a bunch of incomprehensible gas tokens? Why does cross-chain require back-and-forth bridging, often losing signatures and getting stuck? Not to mention that the developers of the payment app have to deal with a bunch of on/off ramps themselves, allowing users to move back and forth between 'on-chain balance', 'bank card balance', and 'e-commerce platform balance'. In the end, once the product is launched, the team is not debugging smart contracts every day, but rather acting as 'Gas customer service' and 'bridge customer service'.
What Plasma wants to do is to take this pile of headaches off the heads of developers and users. From day one, it has not been a general-purpose public chain that can do everything, but firmly nails down its positioning: this is a high-performance L1 specifically designed for stablecoin payments, EVM compatible, but only recognizes one main character—digital dollars. The chain's official description is straightforward: to create global settlement infrastructure for stablecoins like USD₮, providing high throughput, low latency, zero-fee USDT transfers, and support for custom gas tokens, combined with privacy payments and BTC bridges, to completely rework the 'money' aspect.
From a developer's perspective, the most immediate change you can experience is the freedom brought by 'stablecoins as gas, or even not having to worry about gas at all'. The Plasma documentation specifically outlines a complete set of Zero-Fee USD₮ Transfers mechanism: through protocol-level paymaster/relayer, Plasma directly sponsors gas for specific forms of USDT0 transfers, allowing users to complete gasless transfers without holding native XPL. Developers only need to call the standard API to integrate this path into their front end. For slightly more complex interactions, Plasma also provides the ability to use 'custom gas tokens'—you can allow users to pay fees directly using USDT or even BTC, without having to first buy XPL on some CEX or DEX. This point has been repeatedly emphasized as a selling point in integration introductions for Crypto APIs, Chainlink, and similar.
This sounds quite abstract, but when it comes down to the app you want to build, it results in two very practical outcomes: first, you do not need to design the whole 'buy gas tokens first' educational process, nor do you need to consider how much native coin to airdrop to new users, how long it will be drained, or how to prevent script draining; second, your product's onboarding page can skip an entire screen of explanations, concisely stating: 'You only need USDT, this is your USD account, and transfers and small payments do not require any additional fuel.' For the vast majority of non-crypto native users, this alone is enough to determine whether they are willing to give you an extra ten seconds of patience.
The second aspect is something that many teams tend to overlook at the beginning but realize its importance as they scale: how thick the on-chain stablecoin depth really is. Within just a few weeks of Plasma's launch, the stablecoin supply surged to the 2 billion USD level, and later the stablecoin market cap stabilized around 1.6 billion USD, with USDT accounting for over 80%, at one point squeezing into the top ten of public chain TVL with over 5 billion USD in TVL, directly ranking seventh or eighth in terms of 'stablecoin liquidity'. What does this mean for the payment app you want to build? It means you are naturally standing on the edge of a huge 'USD reservoir'. Whether for payroll, B2B settlements, or points redemption and cashback activities, the liquidity you need does not require you to pull the entire market, but can be structured on an already thick stablecoin pool.
The third aspect is the part of 'unpleasant but must face work' that Plasma has laid out for you off-chain. We have already discussed in previous articles that Plasma does not only operate on-chain; it is simultaneously acquiring VASP licenses in Europe, laying out CASP under MiCA and future EMI, and launching its own stablecoin neobank Plasma One: a card, an app, packaging saving, spending, transferring, and earning together, planning to cover 150+ countries, supporting card transactions at 150 million merchants, providing over 10% annualized returns and up to about 4% cashback in XPL. If you are a developer creating a C-end app, the most difficult part is the on/off ramp and card issuance—a multitude of local regulations, risk controls, and clearing rules that cannot be solved by engineers with just a few lines of code. Plasma's approach is to treat this as a unified off-chain 'payment and compliance stack', standing up to bear the regulations, connecting card organizations, banking systems, and inflow and outflow channels, and one day opening it to third-party products through API/SDK, allowing you to 'directly connect to a stablecoin account that can be swiped and have inflows and outflows', rather than negotiating with each one globally.
When viewed together, you will find that Plasma has done a thorough rewrite of the rules for developers: from 'developers first choose ecological heat and EVM compatibility, then grit their teeth to improve UX' to 'first look at payment paths and on-chain USD depth, then decide which chain to choose.' In the past, your first reaction might have been: does this chain have Etherscan, does it have major exchanges listing, does it have blue-chip DeFi protocols; now, if your product is designed around stablecoins from the very beginning, the real questions to ask are: how thick is the native stablecoin on this chain? Are there zero-fee or stablecoin gas paths? Is there an officially supported compliant on/off ramp? Can I complete the closed loop from 'on-chain account' to 'bank card swipe' in a week? On these questions, Plasma's advantages are clearly visible, and one could even say this is the reason for the existence of this chain.
Of course, as an entrepreneur, you won't just look at the shiny side of technology. Plasma, as a new chain, had a very exaggerated launch: on the first day of the mainnet beta, the stablecoin TVL broke 2 billion USD, and within a few weeks, the TVL reached around 8 billion USD, becoming one of the fastest-growing chains; but also in a short time, the XPL price experienced a roller coaster ride, retracting 85% from its peak, and there was heated debate in the market about the sustainability of its model. As a team that is investing real money to create products, you cannot pretend that these fluctuations do not exist; you can only honestly write them into your risk analysis: will the chain continue to be supported by major platforms as it is now? Will the stablecoin TVL remain here long-term, or will it flow away with the withdrawal of incentives? Will the price fluctuations of XPL affect the cash back and points system you designed? These must be thought through during the design phase.
So, if I let Azu stand from the perspective of 'I want to create a truly usable payment/wallet product' and look back at Plasma, I would give a relatively pragmatic judgment: treat it as a ready-made 'payment OS', but do not put all your fate on it at once. More specifically, use it to significantly reduce the costs of creating MVP and iterations—let the paymaster, zero-fee paths, influx and outflux, card issuance stack, and on-chain stablecoin depth take on 70% of the time that should have been spent on architecture and compliance, freeing your team to create truly differentiated things: user experience, branding, business processes, and localization.
If you are a developer yourself, or at least can bring in an engineer partner who is willing to tinker with you for a week, I would suggest treating this article as a starting point for a small assignment. Open the Plasma Docs, read through the quickstart and Zero-Fee USD₮ Transfers chapters, and think clearly about what minimum viable product you can create in a week—such as a small tool to help the team pay salaries in stablecoins, a small system for distributing stablecoin red envelopes and points to the community, or a 'one-click salary splitting' tool aimed at cross-border freelancers.
Next, spend a day or two to get the basic on-chain logic running: complete gasless transfers using USDT0; completely hide terms like 'Gas', 'XPL', 'Gwei' from the front-end interface; make users feel like they are just using a 'digital dollar account'; if you have the energy, try integrating the documentation of Plasma One or other on/off ramp partners, even if it's just to create a button for 'apply for withdrawal to bank card', it's better to fake the back-end process than to never consider this matter. Finally, write a note on your week's development experience: Are there any strange pitfalls in on-chain calls? Is the documentation clear? What's the transaction confirmation time and failure rate like? Are the on-chain monitoring tools useful? Compare these details with your experiences when doing similar prototypes on other chains.
If after a week you find that the experience of using Plasma to create a payment MVP is indeed smoother than what you have tried on other chains, with significantly reduced user confusion during their first use and fewer customer service issues, then you are likely receiving a very clear signal: in the stablecoin era, the priority of choosing a chain should indeed be reconsidered. First look at the path for money, then the narrative; first look at the depth and availability of USD on-chain, then see how lively the meme and airdrop stories are on this chain. By then, you will find that the phrase 'starting from Plasma' is not just a marketing slogan for a new chain, but a very simple engineering decision: building a car beside a highway specifically designed for stablecoins is definitely easier than squeezing through congested alleys in an old urban area.
