Overview

What is Plasma?

Plasma is a high-performance, scalable, and secure blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins. Traditional blockchains were designed long before stablecoins existed or gained traction. Today, stablecoins have over $225 billion in supply and see trillions of dollars transferred monthly, making them one of crypto’s most critical use cases. However, current blockchains face significant obstacles for stablecoins, such as high transaction fees, centralization issues, high transaction failure rates, and a lack of specialized features required to support stablecoins from first principles.

With backing from Bitfinex/USDT0, Plasma is engineered from the ground up to meet the unique needs of stablecoins. Our team brings together expertise in software engineering at Apple and Microsoft, high-frequency trading at Goldman Sachs, distributed systems research at Imperial College London and Los Alamos National Lab, and hands-on experience building some of the largest stablecoins and blockchains.

Technical Overview

At its core, Plasma leverages PlasmaBFT, a custom consensus protocol inspired by Fast HotStuff, to achieve rapid finality and low-latency transaction processing. The consensus and networking layers are optimized for the demands of high-frequency, global stablecoin transfers.

Our execution layer is built on Reth, a high-performance, modular, Ethereum-compatible execution engine written in Rust. Plasma introduces several performance and usability enhancements at the execution layer while remaining fully compliant with the EVM specification. In practical terms, any smart contract deployable on Ethereum can be deployed on Plasma without requiring any code modifications.

Plasma also integrates a native, trust-minimized Bitcoin Bridge that periodically anchors state differences on Bitcoin. Although Plasma is technically a Layer 1 blockchain with its own consensus mechanism, the native Bitcoin Bridge and design philosophy align it with the Bitcoin ecosystem—making it what's considered to be a Bitcoin sidechain.

Furthermore, Plasma introduces unique stablecoin-centric features:

• Custom Gas Tokens: Allow fees to be paid in popular assets like USDT or BTC via an automated swap mechanism.

• Zero-Fee USDT Transfers: Enable fee-free transfers for simple transactions with adaptive prioritization.

• Confidential Transactions: Protect users’ transaction details through confidential transactions without sacrificing compliance (currently under active research).

Together, these technical components create a robust blockchain optimized for stablecoins, delivering rapid performance, high security, and cost efficiency.

Roadmap

Our focus on stablecoins drives us to prioritize direct integration with stablecoin issuers, onramps, liquidity providers, banking-as-a-service platforms, fintechs, and related institutions. We plan to launch an initial mainnet beta built on a robust, secure foundation to begin these integrations early.

For our initial mainnet beta, Plasma will deploy its core components: the PlasmaBFT consensus protocol, rigorously optimized for high throughput and low latency, and a fully EVM-compatible execution layer built on Reth. This configuration forms the essential foundation for future core feature enhancements and performance improvements.