What made me change how I look at Plasma
The first thing I misunderstood about Plasma was thinking it was trying to compete on activity.
It isn’t.
Plasma is built around the idea that settlement systems fail when behavior changes under pressure, not when throughput is low. Once rules start bending, even briefly, users change how they manage risk. That’s when capital becomes defensive.
What Plasma does differently is lock behavior early.
Execution paths are constrained. Validator discretion is minimal. The system is not designed to adapt dynamically when things get uncomfortable. It is designed to behave the same way, especially then.
XPL plays a quiet but critical role here. It doesn’t exist to boost usage or attract liquidity. It exists to make deviation from settlement rules economically painful over time. Accountability lives at the protocol layer, not in governance debates or emergency responses.
That choice makes Plasma look slower and less exciting in early phases. But it also explains why activity that remains tends to be easier to justify economically once incentives fade.
Plasma isn’t optimizing for growth narratives.
It’s optimizing for behavior that doesn’t change when it matters most.
