Why are PayPal's trembling? Plasma is rewriting the settlement protocol
Many people are still discussing whether stablecoins are the next big opportunity, but I am more concerned about another issue: when settlement is redefined, how much of a moat do traditional payment networks still have?
#SWIFT Slow, expensive, and complex hierarchy, this is an open fact; Visa and #PayPal seem smooth, but behind it is multi-layered clearing, reconciliation, pre-funding, and high system maintenance costs. Every transaction is prolonging the life of that old system.
#Plasma When it appeared, the logic completely changed. It is not about 'doing payment applications,' but about turning the settlement itself into a low-friction infrastructure. On-chain settlement is near real-time, costs are close to zero, and the state is periodically anchored to Bitcoin, with security not relying on centralized institutions for endorsement.
More critically, it is the cost structure. The unit cost of traditional payment networks comes from large compliance teams, clearing networks, and multinational infrastructure, while Plasma's operating costs mainly come from node staking and network maintenance. Now, there are already hundreds of nodes participating in settlement on the mainnet, with tens of millions in staking providing security for the network, but the marginal settlement cost hardly increases with transaction volume.
What does this mean? It means that as transaction scale expands, the advantage of @Plasma is not linear but exponential. For PayPal, the question is no longer 'whether to access blockchain,' but when settlement is commoditized, what else can they charge for?
I increasingly feel that the real threat of Plasma is not a specific payment company but the entire 'high-cost settlement protocol' itself. When settlement becomes as cheap as bandwidth, the old system will naturally begin to tremble.
