Author: Lao Bai
With Plasma's launch imminent, numerous Pros & Con, Shill, and Fud presentations have emerged. The market is most concerned about whether the stablecoin public blockchain is a promising development, a platform capable of dethroning Tron.
Compared with Tron, Plasma has two obvious advantages - Pros
1. Faster and cheaper, with zero transfer fees, Tron has recently been forced to "cut prices" by 60%, but it is still a price, not zero.
2. EVM compatibility makes it easy for blue chips like AAVE and Curve to come to Tron. Justlend is the only DeFi ecosystem with a TVL that can be seen.
As for the underlying technical architecture of the consensus, it is really not important. The security of the BTC side chain still depends on its own POS. It has some relationship with BTC but not much. It is not wrong to regard it as Merlin.
Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious - Cons
1. Although Tron’s USDT TVL has dropped from a high of 83B to 76B, it is still an order of magnitude higher than Plasma and is still a crushing leader.
2. USDT is essentially/currently a product of regulatory evasion, a bit like a Southeast Asian on-chain version of "EuroDollar" - (The concept of Eurodollar is still something I have learned from
(As learned from @joyliumacro's video, most USDT holders only do two things: 1. Trade and transfer within a CEX exchange; 2. Treat it as SOV, effectively holding USD, and depositing and withdrawing USD when needed. Therefore, "on-chain payments" are not the primary use case for USDT.
For 1 and 2, Tron's integration has been a huge moat for several years, and Sun Ge's work in this area has not been in vain. As for on-chain payments, the Tempo distribution channel I previously wrote about seems to have a greater advantage.
Then Shill and Fud can also talk about it.
The point I can make is that I have talked with the founder and some Plasma ecosystem projects, and I feel that they are still very solid. The main reason I didn't invest last year was that I didn't see the future trend of the stablecoin chain clearly, and secondly, I felt it was expensive under the general environment in 2024... Moreover, Plasma's cooperation with Binance, AAVE, etc. shows that the resources are extremely good. Not every chain has a TVL of 3-4B at the beginning, and it can still maintain a pre-market market value of 6-7B after listing the pre-market contract on Binance.
Fud's point is that I saw someone reveal today that the Plasma and Blast teams have a high degree of overlap. I can't tell whether this is true or not, after all, I have only talked to the founder himself. Assuming it is true, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion. Blast was also a popular project back then, which shows that the team has ideas and is willing to do something. The downside is that after catching the hot spot, they dug a hole and didn't fill it, and then abandoned it when the heat passed... I can only say that based on the feedback from the ecological project parties this time, Plasma should still plan to build and do something long-term, and it is very likely that it will not be "eunuched" like Blast.
So Tron vs. Plasma, old money vs. new forces, which one do you prefer?
