Plasma’s XPL token is still very new, but it is already getting a lot of attention from traders and long-term investors. As of mid-November 2025, XPL trades around the mid-$0.20 range, with a market cap of roughly $440 million and a circulating supply close to 1.8 billion tokens out of an initial 10 billion. That puts it in the middle tier of large-cap altcoins: big enough to be liquid and listed on major exchanges, but still small enough that its design choices can have an outsized impact on future price.
To understand whether inflationary rewards and EIP-1559-style burns can make XPL “more stable,” you first need to understand what Plasma is trying to do. Plasma is a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for stablecoins and payments, not trading memes or general-purpose smart contracts. Its mainnet beta and XPL token launched on 25 September 2025, with about $2 billion in stablecoins seeded across more than 100 DeFi partners from day one. The chain’s pitch is simple: move digital dollars at internet speed, with very low or even zero fees for basic USDT transfers.
In that system, XPL is the “oil” that keeps everything running. It acts as the gas token for non-sponsored transactions, the staking asset for Plasma’s proof-of-stake consensus, and a future governance token once on-chain voting is switched on. Developers pay fees in XPL (or in some cases in custom fee tokens), validators stake it to secure the network, and holders will eventually be able to vote on upgrades and economic parameters. So while end-users might mostly see Plasma as a stablecoin chain, XPL is the asset that absorbs most of the economic risk and reward.
The basic tokenomics start with a 10 billion genesis supply. According to Plasma’s docs and recent analyses, around 40% of that supply is earmarked for ecosystem growth and incentives, while 25% goes to the team and 25% to investors, both groups vesting their tokens over about three years. The remaining 10% was sold in the public sale in July 2025 at a fully diluted valuation of around $500 million, with thousands of wallets participating. That means only a minority of tokens are currently liquid, and a large share remains locked but scheduled to unlock over time.
On top of this fixed genesis allocation, XPL uses an inflation model to pay validators. Inflation starts at 5% per year and steps down by 0.5 percentage points annually until it reaches a long-term floor of 3%. New tokens from this inflation are used as staking rewards once the external validator set and delegation are fully live, a phase that Plasma expects to roll out through 2026. Importantly for dilution, locked team and investor allocations are not counted for these emissions, so rewards are targeted at active stakers rather than all token holders.
If that was the whole story, XPL would simply be an inflationary staking token. The interesting part is that Plasma also integrates an EIP-1559-style burn for base transaction fees. In practice, when users pay base gas fees on Plasma (for transactions that are not fully subsidized), those fees are permanently destroyed instead of going to validators. The idea, borrowed from Ethereum’s fee upgrade in 2021, is that as network usage grows, more tokens are burned, which can reduce or even fully offset the new supply created by inflation.
For traders and investors, the key question is how those two forces interact. Inflation makes XPL structurally dilutive for people who do not stake: each year, the total supply goes up, and your share of the network shrinks unless you are earning rewards. At the same time, higher on-chain activity increases fee burns, reducing net issuance. In a low-usage environment, burns are small and inflation dominates, which is bearish for passive holders and slightly supportive for stakers. In a high-usage environment, burns can eat into that inflation, making the effective supply growth lower and, in extreme cases, potentially turning net issuance negative for certain periods.
This does not mean XPL will be price-stable like a stablecoin. Even Ethereum, which has often been at or near net-zero issuance since EIP-1559, still trades with huge volatility because demand for the asset itself varies with market cycles, risk appetite, and macro conditions. What the inflation-plus-burn model can do is soften some of the extremes on the supply side. When hype drives up activity, more XPL is burned, which leans against runaway dilution. When activity falls, inflation ensures validators still have an incentive to secure the chain.
Another big piece of the puzzle is the unlock schedule. The public sale’s 1 billion tokens for non-US buyers were largely unlocked at launch, while 1 billion XPL held by US participants is due to become tradable on 28 July 2026. On top of that, team and investor allocations begin unlocking from late 2026 and continue for about two years, and ecosystem tokens are vesting steadily across a three-year window. These events can create significant additional supply on the market, which may outweigh any burn effect if demand does not grow at the same pace.
Market behaviour so far reflects all of these cross-currents. XPL launched in late September 2025 with a fully diluted valuation in the multibillion-dollar range, briefly trading above $1.50 before sliding into the $0.20–$0.30 band where it sits today. Liquidity is strong, with nine-figure daily trading volumes, and the chain did manage to attract billions of dollars in stablecoin liquidity and over a hundred DeFi integrations in its first weeks. At the same time, analysts are already debating how much of that activity is incentive-driven and how much reflects real payments and savings use.
So, can inflationary rewards and EIP-1559 burns make XPL “stable”? The honest answer is that they can make the token’s supply more responsive and better aligned with real usage, but they cannot remove price risk. For traders, this setup means XPL is not just a bet on “number go up,” but on whether Plasma can sustain meaningful on-chain volume over several years, especially in stablecoin transfers. For long-term investors, the details matter: how quickly staking ramps up, how much is actually being burned each month, how unlocks are absorbed, and whether merchants, remittance users, and DeFi platforms really choose Plasma over alternatives like Tron and Ethereum.
If you are considering a position, it helps to think in simple terms. Inflation pays people who secure the network. Burns reward periods of genuine usage. Unlocks introduce new supply. Stability, if it ever emerges, will come not from the math alone, but from whether real economic activity on Plasma is strong enough to keep those three forces in balance.
