Recently, in order to stake those highly popular re-staking points, I was forced to cross chains back and forth between four or five Layer 2s, which was simply a disastrous user experience. As I watched the funds stuck in the optimistic validation period in MetaMask, along with the various wear and tear fees I had to pay for cross-chain transactions, I suddenly realized that we might all have been misled by the grand narrative of 'modular blockchain.' The current public chain market resembles an overly decorated maze, artificially fragmenting liquidity in the name of so-called interoperability. While the entire network is busy rolling out Rollup SDK and modular stacks, I have gone against the trend and refocused on Plasma. This may sound a bit counter-cultural, as it seems out of place to not talk about L2s these days, but after deep diving and practical testing of the Plasma architecture during this time, I found that this seemingly cumbersome independent L1 is precisely addressing the most core pain point of 'atomicity.'
The current market has a strange kind of political correctness, as if not doing L2 is a dead end, and not being EVM compatible means no future. However, in practice, you will find that the so-called shared security of L2 is a false proposition in extreme market conditions. I have some money on Base and want to grab a chart on Optimism, but the path is as complicated as solving a calculus problem, and I have to endure that damn slippage. The design of Plasma as an independent L1 may not look sexy, but it actually returns to the original intention of blockchain. I also ran a Plasma node on the testnet, and the most intuitive feeling is that long-lost sense of completeness. There’s no need to wait for the sequencer to package the data and send it back to the Ethereum mainnet; the moment the transaction is confirmed on-chain is the true final confirmation. This kind of thrill is a fatal temptation in payment scenarios, after all, no one wants to wait for the mainnet's finality just to buy a cup of coffee, and even less wants to pay a high premium due to mainnet congestion.
Taking Solana as a comparison, although I don't want to admit it, Solana is indeed fast. However, the recent downtime has revealed that it sacrificed too much stability for high throughput. Plasma's architectural design is clearly much more restrained, as it does not blindly pursue hundreds of thousands of TPS, but instead maximizes stability within the range of thousands of TPS. When I was looking at on-chain data, I found that even during stress testing, Plasma's block time variance was extremely small, indicating that the underlying consensus algorithm has made many optimizations against jitter. This is what a chain for financial settlement should look like, rather than some public chains that, despite having sky-high TPS, crash directly in high-concurrency scenarios like inscriptions.
However, I also discovered many pain points during the usage process, and I even wanted to curse. The wallet ecosystem of Plasma is currently really too sparse. After getting used to plugins like MetaMask and Rabby, using their native wallet feels as stiff as online banking from a decade ago, and the UI design is simply a product of the last century. Moreover, the number of DApps on-chain is indeed pitifully small; apart from transfers and a few basic swaps, there is almost nothing interesting to play with. This falls into a classic death loop, where no one plays because there are no applications, and there are no applications because no one plays. In contrast, even if EVM-based L2s are terrible, you can just copy and paste a set of code to run a bunch of meme coins. Plasma's non-EVM compatible or unique architecture as an L1 poses a major migration cost for developers. If the development threshold is not resolved, it could very likely become a high-performance ghost chain.
Upon further examination of its economic model, I believe the empowerment logic of XPL is much stronger than that of those L2 tokens. The current L2 tokens, to put it bluntly, are just governance voting rights, and gas fees still have to be paid in ETH. This results in the project team working harder, ETH becoming more expensive, while their own token has little buying interest. Plasma returns to the most fundamental logic of public chains, where gas fees are in XPL. This means that as long as there are activities on-chain, even simple transfers, they are directly consuming tokens. I executed a complex contract call on-chain, and the gas fee was so low it was almost negligible, but this low fee rate is based on an efficient network, not on subsidies. This is the only choice for merchants looking to do micropayments. You can't ask users to transfer 10 dollars and pay 2 dollars in gas, which is common on Ethereum, but is not allowed on Plasma.
Another interesting technical detail is Plasma's handling of state bloat. Many old public chains, after running for a long time, have node data that is so large that ordinary computers can't store it. I looked at their technical documentation, and it seems they have adopted a snapshot-based pruning mechanism that ensures light nodes can validate transactions without downloading the full historical data. This is crucial for decentralization. Currently, many L2 sequencers are centralized, and the project team can just pull the plug whenever they want. The design of Plasma, which allows retail investors to run nodes at low cost, is the last line of defense against censorship in blockchain.
The current market sentiment is completely dominated by memes and AI, with everyone betting on who will rise faster. However, I prefer to allocate a portion of my position to infrastructure like Plasma, which may not seem sexy. Because it addresses real problems rather than creating new concepts. When the tide goes out and everyone gets tired of moving bricks between dozens of L2s, a stable performance, extremely low-cost, independently sovereign L1 may become the ultimate safe haven for funds. Of course, the premise is that the project team needs to quickly improve that difficult-to-use wallet UI and bring in a few decent DeFi protocols, otherwise, no matter how good the technology is, it will only be a toy in the hands of geeks.
