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Where Plasma is at Five Months In: On-Chain Figures, Token Unlocks and What the Data Says
@Plasma $XPL #plasma
I got in with Plasma right around the mainnet launch back in Sept 25. The hype was enormous. Billions in liquidity coming in day one, Aave going live on the network in the first week and XPL going past $1.60. Five months later the token has declined to the neighborhood of $0.08. A 95% drawdown off the all-time high of $1.68 was observed on September 28. I want to deconstruct what happened what were, on-chain numbers like right now and what does the token unlock schedule means for anybody paying attention to this network.
First the basics for the new comers. Plasma is a Layer 1 blockchain platform and has been built from the top for stablecoin payments. Zero Fee transfers of USDT, EVM compatible, sub-second finality using PlasmaBFT consensus. The team have backgrounds at Apple, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Imperial College London and Los Alamos National Lab. Tether are backing the project directly, which is significant as the whole value proposition is making USDT the native currency of an entire blockchain. The public sale has raised $ 50Million, 1Billion tokens at $0.05/token. Total supply is 10 billion XPL with about 1.8 billion in circulation at the moment. So in effect there is around 18% of total supply out there at the moment. Keep that number in mind because things are about to change when it comes to that float.
This is where the on-chain story comes in interesting. At peak Plasma TVL passed $6.4 billion in a week of mainnet and was the 5th largest DFi chain overnight. Aave on Plasma alone brought $6.6 billion in deposits with $1.58 billion in active borrowing. The supply of stablecoins on the network reached a stable point of $2.1 billion. But here is the gap, the chain was designed for 1000 transactions per second and at its low points, it was going at 14.9 TPS. Daily fees peaked at $4,200. So you had billions that were sitting on the chain and mostly it was sitting in lending vaults getting yield and then thin activity outside of that. The network had liquidity but not use the way that a payments chain needs to show. Incentives drew capital. Organic transaction demand was slow to keep pace. Since then DeFi protocols have been going from strength to strength. Pendle is projected for launch on Plasma in October of 2025. Coinbase added XPL to its list on 2nd December. Kraken enabled USDT0 deposits and withdrawals on December 10th. And in January of 2026, Plasma became integrated with NEAR Intents that was connecting XPL and USDT0 to a cross-chain liquidity pool of 25+ assets across 25 blockchains. The Aave v3.6 upgrade proposal of Plasma went to on-chain voting on 17th January. These are actual integrations and not vapor. The question is whether they translate into the kind of sustained volume of transactions that result in organic demand of XPL.
Now the part that everybody need to understand, unlock schedule. Right now the rate of ecosystem allocations are currently unlocking at a rate of about 88.9 million XPL per month. That is about 2.22% of the whole supply that is dropped to the market every 30 days. The bigger event is July 28, 2026 when the 2.5 billion tokens that are allocated to the US public sale participants are unlocked all at once. These buyers paid $0.05 per token. Even at the current price, of about $0.08, they are sitting on a 60% gain. The question is simple, how many of those holders sell once they get access? That one unlock will more than double the amount of supply in circulation. Team and investor tokens have their own schedule which include one year cliff, and monthly vesting for 2 years after. Plasma has an EIP-1559 style burn mechanism as well as proof-of-stake inflation beginning at 5% annually, and reduce 0.5% annually to a floor of 3%. A staked delegation system is coming up in Q1 2026 to stimulate locking tokens and remove sell pressure from the system. If the staking were to come live prior to July, some that supply shock may be absorbed. If the staking is late in the launching, the July unlock comes to a market without any mechanism for absorption.
I continue to follow the Plasma, as the thesis behind the project makes a lot of sense. Stablecoins see $22 trillion+ in volume transactions in 2024 on the blockchain. Tron dominated that space for years with $6.1 billion in TVL at the time Plasma was launched. A special purpose chain for stablecoins payments with the direct backing of Tether, is not a small idea. The currently in the works Bitcoin bridge would bring the liquidity of BTC into the ecosystem in the form of collateral. Confidential payment features are ahead selective transaction private. The Plasma One neobank product is targeted at real world payments in regions in which there is high demand for remittances. All these are promising things on paper. But, it's the network that has to fill in the void between capital we park in the DeFi vaults, and people sending stablecoins for groceries, rent and cross-border transfers. The infrastructural is going under. Not there for the metrics on adoption. For the time being, I am tracking three things every week: How many active transactions are made on Plasmascan on a daily basis, What the unlock impact on circulating supply will be on a monthly basis and the stablecoin transfer volume outside of DeFi lending loops. Those 3 data-points will have more information on where Plasma is going than any chart pattern or sentiment post.
I got in with Plasma right around the mainnet launch back in Sept 25. The hype was enormous. Billions in liquidity coming in day one, Aave going live on the network in the first week and XPL going past $1.60. Five months later the token has declined to the neighborhood of $0.08. A 95% drawdown off the all-time high of $1.68 was observed on September 28. I want to deconstruct what happened what were, on-chain numbers like right now and what does the token unlock schedule means for anybody paying attention to this network.
First the basics for the new comers. Plasma is a Layer 1 blockchain platform and has been built from the top for stablecoin payments. Zero Fee transfers of USDT, EVM compatible, sub-second finality using PlasmaBFT consensus. The team have backgrounds at Apple, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Imperial College London and Los Alamos National Lab. Tether are backing the project directly, which is significant as the whole value proposition is making USDT the native currency of an entire blockchain. The public sale has raised $ 50Million, 1Billion tokens at $0.05/token. Total supply is 10 billion XPL with about 1.8 billion in circulation at the moment. So in effect there is around 18% of total supply out there at the moment. Keep that number in mind because things are about to change when it comes to that float.
This is where the on-chain story comes in interesting. At peak Plasma TVL passed $6.4 billion in a week of mainnet and was the 5th largest DFi chain overnight. Aave on Plasma alone brought $6.6 billion in deposits with $1.58 billion in active borrowing. The supply of stablecoins on the network reached a stable point of $2.1 billion. But here is the gap, the chain was designed for 1000 transactions per second and at its low points, it was going at 14.9 TPS. Daily fees peaked at $4,200. So you had billions that were sitting on the chain and mostly it was sitting in lending vaults getting yield and then thin activity outside of that. The network had liquidity but not use the way that a payments chain needs to show. Incentives drew capital. Organic transaction demand was slow to keep pace. Since then DeFi protocols have been going from strength to strength. Pendle is projected for launch on Plasma in October of 2025. Coinbase added XPL to its list on 2nd December. Kraken enabled USDT0 deposits and withdrawals on December 10th. And in January of 2026, Plasma became integrated with NEAR Intents that was connecting XPL and USDT0 to a cross-chain liquidity pool of 25+ assets across 25 blockchains. The Aave v3.6 upgrade proposal of Plasma went to on-chain voting on 17th January. These are actual integrations and not vapor. The question is whether they translate into the kind of sustained volume of transactions that result in organic demand of XPL.
Now the part that everybody need to understand, unlock schedule. Right now the rate of ecosystem allocations are currently unlocking at a rate of about 88.9 million XPL per month. That is about 2.22% of the whole supply that is dropped to the market every 30 days. The bigger event is July 28, 2026 when the 2.5 billion tokens that are allocated to the US public sale participants are unlocked all at once. These buyers paid $0.05 per token. Even at the current price, of about $0.08, they are sitting on a 60% gain. The question is simple, how many of those holders sell once they get access? That one unlock will more than double the amount of supply in circulation. Team and investor tokens have their own schedule which include one year cliff, and monthly vesting for 2 years after. Plasma has an EIP-1559 style burn mechanism as well as proof-of-stake inflation beginning at 5% annually, and reduce 0.5% annually to a floor of 3%. A staked delegation system is coming up in Q1 2026 to stimulate locking tokens and remove sell pressure from the system. If the staking were to come live prior to July, some that supply shock may be absorbed. If the staking is late in the launching, the July unlock comes to a market without any mechanism for absorption.
I continue to follow the Plasma, as the thesis behind the project makes a lot of sense. Stablecoins see $22 trillion+ in volume transactions in 2024 on the blockchain. Tron dominated that space for years with $6.1 billion in TVL at the time Plasma was launched. A special purpose chain for stablecoins payments with the direct backing of Tether, is not a small idea. The currently in the works Bitcoin bridge would bring the liquidity of BTC into the ecosystem in the form of collateral. Confidential payment features are ahead selective transaction private. The Plasma One neobank product is targeted at real world payments in regions in which there is high demand for remittances. All these are promising things on paper. But, it's the network that has to fill in the void between capital we park in the DeFi vaults, and people sending stablecoins for groceries, rent and cross-border transfers. The infrastructural is going under. Not there for the metrics on adoption. For the time being, I am tracking three things every week: How many active transactions are made on Plasmascan on a daily basis, What the unlock impact on circulating supply will be on a monthly basis and the stablecoin transfer volume outside of DeFi lending loops. Those 3 data-points will have more information on where Plasma is going than any chart pattern or sentiment post.
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