Against the backdrop of an overall cooling market sentiment, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have experienced corrections, and discussions around mainstream altcoins have also declined. However, among the "blockbuster" projects still generating continuous buzz within the community, besides WLFI which launched yesterday, another major focus is Plasma, a new stablecoin-specific blockchain jointly invested in by stablecoin giant Tether and Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel. Its token, XPL, has already seen its contract trading listed on multiple major exchanges.

Why is Plasma in the Market Spotlight?

Plasma has become the market's new darling due to strong institutional backing on one hand, and its clear project positioning on the other.

On the capital front, Plasma is backed by stablecoin giant Tether and Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel, which in itself is a powerful endorsement. From late 2024 to early 2025, the project completed seed and Series A funding rounds, raising a total of $24 million; subsequently, in May 2025, Founders Fund invested again at a $500 million valuation. Bitfinex also separately invested $3.5 million to promote the application of USDT within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Such an intensive fundraising pace and capital lineup gave Plasma the aura of a "star project" from its debut.

In terms of technical design and product positioning, Plasma is not following the old path of general-purpose public chains but is targeting native stablecoin infrastructure. It uses the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the security of the UTXO model, while being compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for seamless smart contract migration. More attractively, all on-chain transactions can directly use USDT to pay for Gas fees, while ordinary USDT transfers are completely free, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for stablecoin payments.

Building on this, Plasma further strengthens its differentiated advantages: its privacy features allow users to selectively hide transaction information; through permissionless bridging technology, BTC is brought onto the chain, and combined with Tether's deep USD liquidity pools, users can achieve low-slippage swaps and BTC-based stablecoin lending. With "zero fees + high performance + secure architecture," Plasma attempts to build an on-chain version of a "Visa network," bringing stablecoin payments truly into everyday scenarios.

How are Plasma Tokens Allocated?

XPL Token Model

In mid-July, Plasma announced the token economic model for XPL. The total supply is 10 billion tokens, with the specific allocation as follows:

· Public Sale: 10% of the total supply, i.e., 1 billion tokens. Among these, XPL for non-US purchasers will be fully unlocked upon the launch of the Plasma public mainnet beta; XPL for US purchasers will be locked for 12 months, fully unlocking on July 28, 2026.

· Ecosystem & Project Growth: 40% of the total supply, i.e., 4 billion tokens. 8% is allocated for strategic partners to provide DeFi incentives, meet liquidity needs, support exchange integration, and implement early ecosystem growth activities, unlocking immediately at the mainnet beta launch; the remaining 32% is allocated for strategic growth initiatives aimed at expanding the utility, liquidity, and institutional adoption of the Plasma network, unlocking proportionally monthly over three years following the mainnet beta launch.

· Team: 25% of the total supply, i.e., 2.5 billion tokens. One-third will unlock one year after the public launch of the mainnet beta, with the remaining two-thirds unlocking proportionally monthly over the subsequent two years.

· Investors: 25% of the total supply, i.e., 2.5 billion tokens. The unlock schedule is the same as for the team.

The XPL token economic model is divided into 4 parts, making the overall allocation easy to understand. Furthermore, since team tokens only start unlocking one year after the mainnet beta launch, there is no short-term "dumping" risk from the project side.

Below, we focus on the 1 billion tokens from the public sale and the 800 million tokens allocated to strategic partners from the Ecosystem & Project Growth portion.

Public Sale Allocation

For the public sale's 10%, the sale price was $0.05. Based on the current XPL contract price (reportedly $0.62), the yield exceeds 12x.

Eligibility to participate in the Plasma public sale required users to deposit stablecoins from the Ethereum mainnet into the Plasma Vault. On the evening of June 9th, the deposit channel officially opened. Users could deposit USDT, USDC, USDS, or DAI into the Plasma Vault on the Ethereum mainnet. The final allocation was calculated based on a "time-weighted share" mechanism, meaning the earlier the deposit and the longer the holding period, the greater the allocation.

The deposit activity was exceptionally火爆 (fierce) after opening, reaching the target quota in just 2 minutes. Among them, a certain whale/institutional address (address: https:/intel.arkm.com/explorer/address/0x790c42D632502949e72Ab0981C2f0D2021141023) alone staked 50 million USDC, capturing 20% of the total share.

Furthermore, another whale spent 39.15 ETH (worth approximately $100,000) in Gas fees to become the first staking address by depositing 10.17 million USDC into Plasma.

Due to feedback from many users who failed to participate successfully in the deposit activity, Plasma raised the deposit cap to 1 billion USDT. Astonishingly, an additional 500 million USDT was "filled" within half an hour. An address linked to Amber Group deposited 16.3 million USDT, and an address linked to Spartan Group deposited 5 million USDT.

On July 17th, Plasma officially commenced the public sale. User eligibility for participation was determined based on the previously deposited "time-weighted share" in the Vault. The public sale was priced at $0.05 per token. The final total subscription amount exceeded $373 million, indicating extremely high demand with an oversubscription rate of over 7x.

Binance Earn Allocation

According to official news, Plasma partnered with Binance to allocate 1% of the total supply, i.e., 100 million XPL tokens, to users participating in the on-chain Earn program. Additionally, users depositing USDT could earn a 2% annualized yield in USDT. Initially, Binance set the subscription limit at 250 million USDT, with a cap of 100,000 USDT per account. The offering was sold out in less than an hour. Subsequently, the platform increased the total subscription limit to 1 billion USDT.

In the second round of opening, a new 250 million USDT quota was fully subscribed within just 5 minutes. Consequently, Binance reduced the per-account subscription limit to 10,000 USDT and opened the final 500 million USDT quota. As the subscription pace slowed after the limit reduction, Binance again raised the per-account上限 (upper limit) to 50,000 USDT, after which the remaining quota was fully subscribed within hours.

Based on Binance's final allocated total quota of 1 billion USDT, users could receive approximately 1000 XPL for every 10,000 USDT deposited. Price-wise, XPL reached a high of over $0.84 last week, with the current contract price at $0.62. This means that at the current price, the tokens obtained from depositing 10,000 USDT would be worth about $600, and at the peak price, up to $840. Besides the airdropped token gains, the USDT deposit itself yields 0.33% over 2 months, which is a certain return of about $33.

Therefore, overall, for every 10,000 USDT deposited, users ultimately received $33 in certain收益 (returns) + 1000 XPL tokens (worth about $600 at current prices, up to $800 at the peak). The 2-month yield is approximately 6.3%, nearly 40% annualized.

It is worth mentioning that aside from the 100 million tokens allocated to Binance, the distribution of the remaining 700 million XPL tokens from the Ecosystem & Project Growth portion has not yet been announced.

Summary

Following WLFI's listing, Plasma's launch has similarly become a market focus. Based on the XPL contract price fluctuation range of $0.5 to $0.8, XPL's total market capitalization could reach $5 to $8 billion. The maximum initial circulating supply on the listing day is about 18% (tokens for US KYC users are not immediately unlocked), corresponding to a circulating market cap of approximately $900 million to $1.44 billion.

Referring to CoinGecko data, the circulating market cap of INJ, ranked 100th, is about $1.24 billion. Backed by powerful institutions and positioned in the currently hot stablecoin track, if market追捧 (enthusiasm) continues, it's not impossible for Plasma's price to break $1 and its initial circulating market cap to reach $1.8 billion. This might just be the starting point for its upside potential.