Stablecoin Exclusive Blockchain Plasma Raises $24 Million in Funding Aiming to Build High-Performance Bitcoin Sidechains

Stablecoins have become an important vehicle for on-chain payments, asset settlement, and financial services. However, the existing blockchain infrastructure has not yet been optimized for their characteristics, and issues such as high transaction costs, performance bottlenecks, and centralization risks remain widespread.

To address these challenges, Plasma has proposed an innovative solution: to build a high-performance Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoins. This sidechain offers zero-fee transactions, enhanced security, and scalability while being compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

This concept has attracted widespread attention in the market. In February 2025, Plasma announced the completion of a $24 million financing round, with investors including several well-known institutions and individual investors. In addition, the first ICO product Sonar from the Echo platform, founded by a renowned trader, also chose Plasma's initial token issuance for its debut.

Dedicated Blockchain Meets Stablecoin Demand

According to a report from a research institution, the annual trading volume of stablecoins is expected to reach 15.6 trillion USD in 2024, surpassing the trading scale of mainstream payment networks. As a key application in the crypto space, stablecoins play an important role in multiple scenarios, attracting numerous projects and companies to accelerate their layout and build new product ecosystems around them.

The Plasma team believes that the mainstream public chains currently relied upon by stablecoins have shortcomings: Ethereum performs poorly in payment scenarios due to high Gas fees; some public chains have gained market share with low fees and fast speeds, but their networks are overly centralized.

To address these challenges, Plasma has proposed a new type of blockchain designed specifically for stablecoins. Its plan is to create a sidechain on the Bitcoin blockchain that is fully compatible with EVM. This design aims to meet the foundational needs of decentralized financial activities while leveraging the security of Bitcoin and providing zero-fee stablecoin transactions, in order to unlock the potential of the trillion-dollar stablecoin market.

Inheriting the security of the Bitcoin network, launching a zero-fee transfer mechanism

The reason the Plasma team chose Bitcoin sidechains is that the security and decentralization of the Bitcoin network provide an ideal foundation for global stablecoin settlements. In terms of the core consensus mechanism, the team independently developed PlasmaBFT, which evolved from Fast HotStuff, supporting thousands of transactions per second to meet global stablecoin payment needs.

Plasma achieves trust-minimized security inheritance by anchoring the state root to the Bitcoin network. This design allows Plasma to reach a security level comparable to Bitcoin without relying on a single validating node or intermediary, thus reducing the risk of single points of failure or attacks.

The deployment of the Plasma consensus mechanism will be carried out in three stages, transitioning from trusted validators to complete decentralization. To address the issue of high transaction fees, Plasma has introduced a "zero-fee" transfer mechanism for stablecoins, enhancing the universality and convenience of stablecoin payments. The network adopts a sharding architecture, designed with two parallel processing layers, one layer responsible for regular fee transactions, and the other layer specifically handling free transactions.

XPL Token Sale and Lock-up Rules

XPL is the native token of the Plasma network, used to maintain consensus and security, and serves as fuel for the execution layer. The public sale will take place on the Plasma official website, and participants must complete compliance processes such as identity verification. Pre-storage will open on June 9th, and the actual sale will begin a few weeks later. This round of public fundraising plans to sell 10% of the total XPL supply, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of $500 million.

The sale is divided into two phases: deposit and lock-in. During the deposit phase, participants deposit stablecoins into the Plasma Vault on Ethereum, and the accumulated "units" determine the guaranteed allocation of XPL. After the deposit period ends, the Vault enters a lock-in state for at least 40 days. When the Plasma mainnet Beta goes live, participants will receive the allocated XPL tokens.

This public offering is only open to qualified regions and has strict compliance requirements. Users in certain areas must verify their accredited investor status to purchase XPL, and the purchased tokens will be locked for 12 months. Plasma emphasizes that this issuance structure reflects the core values of its network: encouraging long-term participation, maintaining aligned interests, and enhancing transparency to ensure that early contributors can fairly share in the benefits of network growth.