1. The "Achilles' heel" of general-purpose public chains
In the past two crypto cycles, the mainstream narrative of the market has been to find an "Ethereum killer." High-performance L1s like Solana, Avalanche, and Aptos have emerged, trying to prove that they can simultaneously support DeFi financial games, NFT cultural speculation, high-frequency interactions in chain games, and massive data from social networks on a single ledger.
However, by 2026, we must admit an awkward fact: The "General Purpose Chain" is a fallacy.
When a network tries to meet everyone's needs, it is destined to fail to meet the extreme demands of any specific field. Imagine when a hot NFT is released or a certain meme project (Memecoin) is extremely active, the entire network's Gas fees skyrocket, forcing a normal cross-border commercial payment to be delayed or to incur exorbitant fees.
For serious commercial payment scenarios, this kind of **"performance uncertainty"** is absolutely unacceptable. Visa will not let your card fail because someone next door is playing a game. For Web3 payments to become mainstream, it must bid farewell to this chaotic "market model" and transition to a professional "exchange model."
2. The overlooked underlying crisis: The physical limits of Geth
The vast majority of investors focus solely on TPS (transactions per second) as a surface-level data point, while overlooking the real bottleneck that constrains the performance of public chains—the execution client.
Currently, over 80% of EVM-compatible chains still run on forked versions of Geth (Go-Ethereum). As a product from ten years ago, Geth's architectural design has shown fatigue in addressing modern high-concurrency demands. It's like an old single-cylinder engine; no matter how much fuel (hardware stacking) you add, its physical limits are still there. Geth's serial processing mechanism means transactions must queue through a narrow passage, which is why many so-called high TPS public chains still lag under real pressure testing.
3. Reth architecture: @Plasma The industrial-grade heart of Plasma
The core value of Plasma (XPL) lies not in what new marketing concepts it proposes, but in its courage to perform a **"heart transplant"** on the underlying architecture.
Plasma is one of the first Layer 1s to adopt Reth (Rust Ethereum) as its core execution client. This is a qualitative leap:
The dimensionality reduction of the Rust language: Reth is written in Rust. Rust inherently provides memory safety and high performance, fundamentally eliminating many potential vulnerabilities that lead to node crashes, providing the much-needed stability for financial-grade payments.
Parallel processing capability: If Geth is a single lane, Reth is an eight-lane highway. It can fully utilize the multi-core CPUs of modern servers to process non-conflicting transactions in parallel. This means payment requests no longer have to wait for previous DeFi complex contracts to complete, achieving true instant confirmation.
Ultra-fast state synchronization: For payment nodes and exchanges, the speed of data synchronization is a lifeline. Reth's architecture allows for exponential improvement in the synchronization speed of Plasma nodes, completely solving the "block delay anxiety."
Plasma's choice of Reth means it abandoned the fantasy of being a "universal chain" from the beginning and is dedicated to building an industrial-grade engine specifically for value transfer.
4. The victory of dedicated chains: An ecosystem born for payments
When the underlying "foundation" is solid enough, Plasma has great freedom in the design of the upper structure, allowing for optimization specifically for payment scenarios:
Native stablecoin environment: Unlike other public chains where stablecoins are just ordinary ERC-20 tokens, Plasma's network environment is inherently friendly to stablecoins.
Protocol-level fee abstraction: Thanks to the flexibility of the underlying architecture, Plasma can enable users to pay Gas fees directly with USDT or allow merchants to cover Gas fees. This is not a simple UI optimization, but a release of capabilities at the protocol level.
5. Conclusion: Seeking certainty in the next cycle
The pendulum of the crypto market is swinging from "wild speculation" to "pragmatic adoption." In the next cycle, public chains that try to do everything, like a "Swiss Army knife," will gradually become mediocre. Real value will be concentrated in infrastructures that are extremely optimized for specific tracks.
In the trillion-dollar payment track, the market does not need another faster Ethereum imitator. What the market needs is a more stable foundation, a more advanced architecture, and a financial network designed specifically for the flow of funds. The Plasma (XPL) based on Reth architecture is the spokesperson for this trend. For capital seeking long-term certainty, understanding the inevitability of public chain architectural evolution is key to understanding Plasma's position.
