I decided to use Plasma (XPL) not because I needed to do it fast, but because I was also sick and tired of having to hold my breath.
There was a period of two years during which I created a cross-border payroll dApp on a well-known roll-up. On paper it worked. Practically it was like walking on ice- any user access could easily be slippery, slow or it just did not work at all. Payday turned into panic. A spike in Europe with a gas fee would have made payouts on gig workers in Nigeria frozen. I used to wake up to transaction stuck notices at 3 am, resubmit it, refund it and apologize. A tool was a threat monitor and not my dashboard.
So, I tried Plasma, I tried it, reluctantly.
The version of 2017, but the lean, $XPL-powered one: small state channels, small attestation windows, and economic security carried on board through the use of the $XPL token. I did not wish magic; I only wished that I would have less nightmares.
Its initial actual test was a shaky ETH merge anniversary--network traffic jams all around. On my previous stack, it would have become a catastrophe. Plasma allowed employees to receive a salary on time, charges remained under $0.01 and finality remained at 1.4 seconds.
No alerts. No Slack storms. Just work happening.
This is what struck me as understanding Plasma is not about bare speed, but predictability as a service. It does not pursue peak throughput; it ensures that it is sane at the bottom. Sanity is in short supply in the decentralized systems.
The specialness of $XPL isn’t technology but rather design of incentives. All sequencers, provers, and validators put money on XPL. Being bad or being behind is worse off than doing good. In paying a fee in XPL, I am not only engaging in transaction, I am strengthening an agreement: “Hush this up. Keep this honest.”
I began to own XPL, not to invest, but to fit in. To fit in a system that prizes order, not disorder.
Now payday is just Tuesday. My team ships instead of patching edge cases. New developers need not use a war manual to deploy. And I sleep through the night.
Plasma did not increase the speed of my application. It made my life lighter.
Plasma is the antidote to all the obsessions of going viral and being seen as breaking chains: it is the boring reliability. No fireworks. No drama. Green lights where they are supposed to be green, payments that are all paid off and a muffled hum of a system that does its job so effectively that it can almost be overlooked.
And frankly that is the only sort of acting I believe in now.
