One of the hottest topics in the community recently is XPL, the native token of the Plasma ecosystem. This project officially launched its mainnet in September 2025, and it sparked widespread discussion upon launch. On the first day, its market cap exceeded $2 billion, creating a very lively scene. However, by early 2026, it has retraced quite a bit, with the price stabilizing around $0.14-$0.17. The circulating supply is about 1.8 billion tokens, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. It ranks approximately 100-200 on CoinMarketCap, with an average daily trading volume reaching tens of millions to over a hundred million dollars, and liquidity is quite good.

So, what is the real innovation of XPL? Simply put, it is a Layer 1 public chain designed specifically for stablecoins—especially USDT. Everyone knows the pain points of traditional blockchain transfers of USDT: paying gas fees, holding native tokens in the wallet, slow speeds, and high costs. Plasma uses a mechanism called Paymaster, which allows USDT transfers to be fee-free. In other words, as long as you have USDT in your wallet, you don’t need to buy XPL to pay for gas. This is a real advantage for cross-border transfers, merchant payments, and daily payment scenarios. The official vision is to make stablecoins as simple as "sending an email" for global payments.

The technical architecture adopts a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, where validator nodes need to stake XPL to participate in transaction validation and earn rewards. From a product design perspective, this project targets practical payments rather than speculative trading, making it a differentiated approach in the current Web3 infrastructure competition.