When money runs back and forth on the chain, the quality of experience directly translates into cost. Cost isn’t just transaction fees; it also includes whether to prepare fuel for transfers beforehand, whether to compete for priority fees during congestion, whether to worry about black swan events with bridges in cross-chain transactions, and whether to take extra steps for withdrawals and deposits. I used to think these were trivial matters, but later realized that small matters add up to significant issues, especially for small capital, where friction holds a higher proportion, and making a mistake could wipe out a week's earnings.
Plasma positions itself on the stablecoin payment line, equating friction as the number one enemy. It doesn’t resemble those chains that aim to swallow all scenarios; rather, it focuses first on one thing, treating stablecoins as primary assets and striving to make the transfer experience akin to everyday payments. For retail investors, this isn’t a grand narrative but rather a concrete issue encountered daily. Can stablecoins be moved to desired locations at low cost? Can settlements be completed without hassle? Can the flow of funds become predictable? This determines whether I will actually use it, rather than just shouting slogans when the price rises.
When I look at Plasma, I first examine three aspects: the stock of funds on-chain, the degree of capital flowing on-chain, and which layer the costs and benefits of this system actually fall on. Recently, the scale of stablecoins on Plasma has been about 1.94 billion USD, showing a decline of about 5.78% over the past seven days, with USDT accounting for about 82.53%. The layer's twenty-four-hour fee is about 256 USD, with layer revenue also at a similar level. More noticeably, the application layer has a twenty-four-hour fee of about 284,481 USD, with application layer revenue around 34,100 USD. The trading volume for decentralized exchanges over the past twenty-four hours is about 31.33 million USD, with a seven-day transaction volume of about 291.48 million USD, and a week-on-week growth of about 41.7%. The asset scale at bridge interfaces is about 71.55 billion USD, with native assets around 47.25 billion USD and third-party assets about 24.3 billion USD. The token XPL price is around 0.12 USD, with a circulating market value of about 253 million USD and a fully diluted valuation of about 1.228 billion USD.
The biggest insight these numbers provide for retail investors is that Plasma does not rely on layer fees to make money, and it even appears to actively lower layer fees, but it hasn't given up on value capture; instead, it pushes value capture to higher-level applications and services. Low layer fees mean less friction for transfers, making it suitable for payments and frequent rebalancing. High application layer fees mean that when you start trading, borrowing, or implementing yield strategies, you'll pay in other areas. Many people only focus on layer fees and think that low fees equal no profits, but in reality, this resembles a business choice, treating the basic channel as a free entry point and then charging costs in higher-value services. Whether retail investors can benefit from this depends not on whether it charges fees but whether the layer it charges can continuously generate real demand rather than relying on short-term incentives that create bubbles.
I use a more intuitive comparison to remind myself not to be misled by a single metric. The layer's twenty-four-hour fee of over 200 USD is almost negligible. However, the application layer has fees of over 280,000 USD in the same time frame, and this gap is not coincidental but a result of design. It indicates that Plasma is positioning itself more as a base for stablecoin settlement and financial services, keeping basic channels as cheap as possible, passing efficiencies to users, and then forming income through activities within the ecosystem. For retail investors, the benefit of this structure is that the daily transfer costs are more controllable, especially when you are just moving stablecoins around like cash; the experience will be significantly lighter. The downside is that if the token's value wants to rely on fee burning for support, it will be very challenging due to the low layer fees. In other words, XPL's long-term demand is more likely to come from security, staking, ecosystem participation, and the service network surrounding stablecoins rather than from the burning of each regular transaction.
Next, let's see if the funds are really flowing. In the past seven days, decentralized trading has achieved a transaction volume of 291 million, and over the past twenty-four hours, the transaction volume exceeded 31 million. This indicates that there is not just stagnant liquidity on-chain. Many new chains are in the awkward position of having a large TVL but thin trading, like a temporary parking lot where people stop to claim incentives and then leave. The current trading and fee performance of Plasma at least indicates that there is indeed a portion of trading and strategies running in the ecosystem. For retail investors, trading and turnover mean two things: first, better liquidity, so buying and selling won't leave you empty-handed; second, smoother exit channels, so when faced with volatility, you won't necessarily get stuck. Of course, trading may also be amplified by arbitrage, market making, and incentives, so I don't just look at the size of transactions; I pay more attention to whether trading can maintain a gradually rising bottom over multiple cycles rather than relying on a few days of high volume.
I will also take a look at the basic operational state of the chain because payment networks are most afraid of unstable experiences. Recently, browser metrics show that the cumulative transactions are about 143,390,000, with real-time throughput around 6.4 TPS, and the latest block interval is about one second. This throughput is not exaggerated compared to some sky-high promotions, but for real payment scenarios, stability and certainty often matter more than peak values. Retail investors often do not need theoretical capabilities of tens of thousands of transactions per second; what we need is for each transfer to arrive as expected, without suddenly becoming exorbitant due to congestion, and without rules changing temporarily due to on-chain volatility. A block interval close to one second and cumulative transactions reaching the hundreds of millions at least indicate that it has stepped out of the paper stage and entered a state of sustainable operation and verifiability.
When it comes to retail investors, the most unavoidable part is XPL. Because no matter how much you like the concept of a chain, in the end, you may have to use tokens to bear the volatility, handle unlocks, and manage the emotional back-and-forth. I have three points of focus regarding XPL: the rhythm of unlocking, trading turnover, and the real sources of token demand.
First, let's talk about unlocking. In the recent unlocking schedule, the next clear unlocking node falls on January 25, 2026, which belongs to the ecology and growth part. The current unlocked amount is about 2.066 billion tokens. Another larger time point is on July 28, 2026, which is related to the end of the twelve-month lock-up period for purchasers in the public sale in the United States, and there will be a concentrated unlocking event at that time. For retail investors, I do not view such dates as bearish or bullish; rather, I see them as windows where volatility probability increases. The market may trade expectations in advance, or it may only react on the day itself, but regardless of which, position management is more important than directional judgment. The real danger is not the unlocking itself, but rather retail investors being forced to make decisions by emotions before and after the unlocking—fearing to miss out when prices rise or fearing to lose everything when they drop, ultimately becoming the counterparty to the supply release.
Now let's talk about turnover. XPL's twenty-four-hour trading volume in the market has recently been around 90 million USD, with a price hovering around 0.12 USD. This kind of trading is a double-edged signal for retail investors. On one hand, liquidity is quite good, making entry and exit relatively convenient without being trapped by extreme slippage. On the other hand, rapid turnover may also indicate a high proportion of short-term capital, making prices more susceptible to emotional and leveraged pull. Retail investors, if they treat it as a long-term belief token while watching the market every day, may easily get thrown off during a high turnover environment. Therefore, I prefer to view it as an asset that requires rhythm, reducing subjective operations during volatility, and only executing planned actions at key points to avoid impulsive trades when liquidity is best but sentiment is worst.
The truly difficult part is where the token demand comes from. With low layer fees on Plasma, the value capture formed by burning may be relatively weak, so for XPL to generate long-term demand, it must play a more core role within the system. The paths I can think of mainly include three.
The first path is security and staking. As external validators and delegated staking mechanisms gradually improve, XPL may generate stagnant demand due to participation in the security budget. Retail investors should not only focus on annualized numbers but also on whether the actual locked amount brought by staking continues to grow and whether staking rewards come from healthy system revenues rather than pure inflationary subsidies. Because pure inflationary subsidies will shift value from holders to participants, those who do not participate will be diluted, forcing retail investors to make choices.
The second path is the cost of ecosystem participation. Many chains require users to hold a certain amount of tokens to participate in specific activities, governance, or resource distribution. If Plasma can make stablecoin payments into a scaled network, mechanisms may emerge in the ecosystem around settlement, credit, routing, and service authorization, making XPL one of the participation thresholds. For retail investors, this kind of demand is more reliable than burning because it is related to usage, but it also tests whether the design is fair and transparent, ensuring that a few cannot use the rules to push retail investors out.
The third path is the profit pool of the service network. Plasma pushes value capture to the application layer, meaning it is more like an operating system for stablecoin financial services. As long as application layer fees and revenues can continue to rise, the ecosystem may form a more real cash flow curve. Retail investors may not necessarily receive dividends, but cash flow can make the market more willing to price long-term stories. Here I will focus on two ratios. One is the ratio of application layer revenue to application layer fees, reflecting the purification rate and business structure. The other is the ratio of application layer revenue to the stablecoin scale, reflecting whether the stock assets can be effectively converted into service revenue. Currently, the application layer fees are over 280,000 USD, and the application layer revenue is 34,000 USD, with a purification rate of about just over 10%, indicating that the ecosystem is still making substantial efforts for subsidies or returns, which aligns with the logic of early user acquisition, but it also reminds me not to treat short-term high fees as completely sustainable profits. More importantly, I need to observe whether this purification rate curve can gradually improve over multiple cycles rather than remain stagnant for a long time.
Putting this all together, my conclusion about retail investors in Plasma is actually quite simple. It is following a more realistic but harder path, first using low-friction stablecoin channels to gain usage, and then using application layers and service networks to balance the economic accounts. If this path is successful, Plasma may form a significant path dependence in the stablecoin payment field, because once users become accustomed to a chain's low-friction experience, it is difficult to return to a high-friction environment. For retail investors, this means that if you are not purely speculating but treating stablecoins as everyday tools, you will naturally become a user of the ecosystem; the more users there are, the easier it is for the network to self-reinforce.
However, the risks of this path are also very clear. First, the scale of stablecoins has been declining over the past seven days, indicating that the capital stock will fluctuate; no single time snapshot can be regarded as eternal. Second, the high proportion of USDT brings both efficiency and single-point risk, so retail investors need to pay attention to whether the structure will gradually diversify. Third, while application layer fees are high, the purification rate is still not high; when subsidies fade, the data may become ugly, and the market may reprice with a harsher perspective. Fourth, the unlocking nodes objectively exist, especially clear dates like January 25 and July 28, when emotions are most likely to get out of control, and retail investors are most likely to make mistakes.
The observation framework I set for myself is also very simple; there's no need to chase news every day or participate in every candlestick. First, can the scale of stablecoins stop declining and form a new upward trend in the first quarter of 2026? Second, can the seven-day transaction volume maintain an unbroken bottom during fluctuations and gradually increase normal trading rather than relying on a few days of high volume? Third, can application layer revenue continue to grow amidst changes in subsidies, and can the purification rate improve slowly? Fourth, how well can XPL absorb the market before and after unlocking, with trading volume, price fluctuations, and on-chain activity showing clear divergences? Fifth, is the basic experience of the chain stable, with block intervals, transfer confirmations, and the availability of ecosystem products maintaining consistency even during congestion?
Many retail investors like to ask a question: Is Plasma worth a heavy investment? My answer is that this question itself is not suitable for retail investors. A more suitable question for retail investors is whether I can participate in a network that is forming a real capital path within an acceptable risk and use discipline to navigate unlocks and emotional fluctuations. Plasma is not the kind of project that becomes famous overnight and ends; it is more like one that takes a long time to polish a stablecoin channel. For retail investors, the more such projects exist, the more they should place their chances of success on continuous observation and position control rather than relying on a single bet.
I am willing to continue paying attention to Plasma because its indicator structure is quite different from other chains; it presents costs and revenues in layers and also puts the stablecoin supply and ecosystem turnover on the table. It also makes me reevaluate a very realistic logic: the infrastructure that can truly remain in the future may not be the chain that collects the highest fees but rather the one that minimizes friction, allows capital to flow most smoothly, and can clearly calculate the economic accounts at the service level. Retail investors do not need to regard this statement as faith; they just need to treat it as a continuously verified hypothesis, then use data to validate it, discipline to respond, and time to wait for results.
