As an 'old farmer' who has been building Lego blocks in the DeFi world for five years, I have long been accustomed to being frugal on a congested and expensive mainnet. Every contract interaction feels like an expensive expedition, with gas fees being the eternal cloud above us.
So, when I deployed my first derivatives protocol on the Plasma testnet, that feeling could not be simply summarized as 'faster and cheaper.' It was a long-lost sense of relaxation. I could finally stop making 'optimizing gas' the core KPI of product design and instead focus on whether the logic itself was elegant and innovative enough. It was like a person who has been writing in a narrow study suddenly being granted an entire prairie to run freely.
What truly excites me is the design of 'USDT as Gas'. At first, I thought this was just a marketing gimmick, until I witnessed users on our dApp complete a series of complex on-chain operations using only the USDT they held—staking, trading, claiming rewards—all in one go, without any sense of awkwardness from token exchanges in between. The smoothness of user experience is an advertisement that no fancy white paper can replace. At that moment, I realized that Plasma is not mending the old world; it is using USDT, the sturdiest brick, to build a skyscraper of new finance that is seamless from foundation to rooftop.
Our team has had heated debates over the design of governance mechanisms. However, on Plasma, its native XPL governance model provides us with an excellent template. It is not simply a 'token voting' system, but rather an intricately designed incentive structure that stitches together the interests of voters, builders, and users. Last week, we participated in a community vote regarding fee parameter adjustments, and voters received tangible returns due to the prosperity of the network. This is no longer 'powering with love', but a self-sustaining, rational economic game. This is what DeFi governance should look like.
Some say Tether's blockchain creation is 'self-isolation'. However, from my perspective as a builder, this is precisely a 'return to sovereignty'. We no longer need to worry about sudden forks in the underlying public chain, unpredictable upgrades, or internal ecosystem conflicts. In this tranquil harbor backed by the value of USDT, we can finally build those complex structures that require long-termism to complete—like the 'real-time cross-border trade settlement' plan that was once aborted due to mainnet costs, which has now been revitalized on Plasma.
Now, as I watch the data flow of our protocol running steadily on Plasma, I feel I am no longer just a coder. I feel more like an early pioneer of a new continent. The rules here are clearer, and the land is more fertile. USDT is the blood circulating here, while XPL is the beating heart.
The future of finance will not be confined to a single chain. It will be a multi-chain galaxy. And Plasma, with its unique stablecoin foundation and builder-first experience, is becoming the brightest and most habitable star in this galaxy. I am grateful that our spaceship arrived here first.
