Tron vs. Plasma: The Battle of New and Old Stablecoin Public Chains

Author: Lao Bai

With the launch of Plasma FDN imminent, discussions regarding its pros & cons, support (Shill), and bearish sentiments (Fud) are incessant. The most pressing question in the market is: Is the stablecoin public chain a track full of immense imagination? Can it truly disrupt Tron?

Compared to Tron (@trondao), Plasma has two obvious advantages:

• Faster and Cheaper: Transferring USDT with zero fees, which forced Tron to recently “drop prices” by 60%, but there are still fees after all, so it cannot be zero.
• EVM Compatible: This allows blue-chip DeFi projects like AAVE and Curve to migrate more easily. On Tron, the DeFi ecosystem mainly has JustLend's TVL worth paying attention to.

As for the underlying technical architecture of consensus, the author believes it is not important. Although Plasma is a Bitcoin sidechain, its security basically relies on its own PoS mechanism, which is not closely related to Bitcoin and can also be regarded as the Merlin chain.

Of course, the disadvantages of Plasma are equally obvious:

• Scale Gap: Although the USDT TVL on Tron has decreased from a peak of $83 billion to $76 billion, it is still an order of magnitude higher than Plasma, and currently remains in a crushing lead.
• Use Case: USDT is essentially, or at least seems to be at the moment, a product of regulatory avoidance. It's somewhat like an on-chain version of the “Eurodollar” (a concept learned from @joyliumacro's video). Therefore, most USDT holders mainly do two things: 1. Trade and transfer coins on centralized exchanges; 2. Use it as a store of value (SOV) for dollars, indirectly holding dollars and making deposits and withdrawals as needed. Thus, “on-chain payments” are not the primary use case for USDT.

Regarding the above two points, Tron has built a huge moat through years of deep integration. Justin Sun's (@justinsuntron) work over the years has not been in vain. As for on-chain payments, the author believes that the @tempo channel they previously wrote about seems to have more advantages.

Next, we can also talk about the bullish (Shill) and bearish (Fud) viewpoints.

Optimistic

• Team Strength and Resources: The author has communicated with the founder of Plasma and some ecological project parties, feeling that the team is very reliable. The main reason for not investing last year was the inability to see the future trend of stablecoin chains, and the perception that the price was too high in the macro environment of 2024. However, the cooperation between Plasma and Binance, AAVE, etc. indicates that its resources are exceptionally strong; not every chain can have a TVL of 3-4 billion dollars at launch, and after the Binance launch of the contract, its market capitalization can still remain stable at 6-7 billion dollars.

Bearish

• Team Association Risk: Today, rumors have emerged suggesting that the Plasma team is highly overlapping with the Blast team. The authenticity of this information is currently indeterminable, as the author has only communicated with the founder directly. Assuming this is true, whether this is a good or bad thing is subjective. Blast was also a very popular project back in the day, which indicates that the team has ideas and knows how to create buzz; however, the downside is that they may only focus on chasing trends, digging holes without filling them back in, and then abandoning projects once the hype dies down. The author can only say that based on the feedback received from the ecological project parties, Plasma seems to intend to build and engage in ongoing activities for the long term, and it is highly unlikely to end up “eunuch” like Blast.

So, Tron vs. Plasma, established players vs. emerging forces, who do you think is more promising?