Left Hand Plasma, Right Hand Stablecoin, Will the Stablecoin King Squeeze Tron?

Tether, relying on the global circulation of USDT, has long been a giant in the stablecoin industry. Solely based on treasury bond interest, it earns an annual profit of $13 billion, making it one of the most profitable fintech companies in the world. However, upon reviewing its business model, Tether found that although it had reaped significant profits in the issuance and management of USDT, the true meaning of "on-chain economic sharing" did not actually fall into its hands.

On Ethereum, the Gas fees collected daily, contributed by USDT, amount to nearly $100,000, accounting for over 6% of the entire Ethereum transaction fee consumption. But that's not all. It is the Tron network where USDT value capture is most pronounced. According to the latest on-chain data, USDT's transaction volume and Gas consumption on the Tron network have accounted for over 98% of the entire public chain, meaning that Tron's transaction prosperity is almost entirely supported by USDT's "blood transfusion."

For every USDT on-chain transfer, users typically pay a fee ranging from $0.3 to $8. Looking at more intuitive data, the Tron network currently generates over $2.1 million in daily on-chain revenue, equivalent to an annualized income of up to $770 million. The vast majority of this comes from the high-frequency transfer fees of USDT. The total number of on-chain transactions on the Tron network in a 24-hour period is as high as 2.46 million, with an average transaction fee of around $0.85, closely matching USDT's average on-chain fee rate. Currently, Tron's overall market cap has exceeded $25 billion, with its stable on-chain revenue scale consistently ranking at the forefront of major public chains.

Data Source: DefiLama

For Tether, this is actually a typical case of "value capture imbalance." The issuance and branding of USDT have brought enormous user traffic and industry-level stable demand. However, all on-chain fees and ecosystem dividends have long been taxed by the infrastructure rather than led by Tether itself. This not only weakens Tether's strategic discourse in future on-chain payment and settlement networks but also renders it passive in the face of new threats such as Tron's proprietary stablecoin or even traffic diversion.

If content with being merely a "super coin mint" for stablecoins without leadership in on-chain infrastructure, Tether's future value ceiling will be extremely limited.

This is also the fundamental reason why Tether is fully committed to its proprietary stablecoin chain ecosystem. Through this dedicated chain model, Tether can not only "reclaim its own system" the huge fees and ecosystem dividends that originally flowed to public chains like Ethereum and Tron but also establish its own on-chain closed-loop in areas such as B2B payments, compliant settlement, and industrial synergy.

More importantly, Tron is currently attempting to reduce its reliance on USDT.

Recently, Tron launched a USD1 stablecoin tied to the Trump family. Tron's founder Justin Sun himself is an advisor to the Trump family's DeFi project, the "big brother" of TRUMP coin, and the intertwined and complex relationship between the two seems to suggest that Tron may intend to gradually reduce its use and issuance of USDT in the coming years.

Furthermore, in terms of transaction fee costs, Tron's advantage as a stablecoin settlement network is gradually diminishing. Without buying and burning TRX, the current transaction fee for each Tron transaction even surpasses the traditionally expensive Bitcoin network and is higher than the Ethereum mainnet, Apots Chain, and BNB Chain.

This is not good news for USDT because, in comparison, the cost of transferring USDC via the Base network is only 0.000409 USD. Even Circle's introduction of the Circle Paymaster feature allows users to pay gas fees using USDC on the Arbitrum and Base networks.

Therefore, these trends and competitive threats force Tether to quickly adjust its business strategy.

Plasma: Tron's Source of Anxiety

Tether's first step was to quietly support a new chain called Plasma by the end of 2024.

Initially just a few announcements and a few rounds of financing—Bitfinex (Tether's parent company), Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Framework, and other capital injected a total of 24 million USD, followed by an additional 3.5 million USD in external funding, pushing Plasma's valuation to 500 million USD in just two months.

Plasma treats the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inherits UTXO security, and is directly compatible with the EVM at the execution layer. Most importantly, all on-chain transactions can be paid directly with USDT for gas, making USDT transfers completely free.

It is precisely because of this simple and direct selling point of "zero fees" that the recent release of the governance token XPL quota by the official to allow users to provide liquidity saw the first five billion USD limit sold out within minutes, with the additional 5 billion USD deposit limit being sold out within 30 minutes. Some whales even paid a $100,000 gas fee on the Ethereum mainnet to secure a spot early. This demonstrates the market's desire for a "fee-less stablecoin chain."

Beyond the technical architecture, Plasma has also quietly embedded two key features. The first one is "Native Privacy." On-chain transactions are default public, but if users need to shield their addresses and amounts, they can simply toggle an option in the wallet to enter shielded mode; when faced with audit or compliance requirements, selective disclosure is also possible. The second feature is "Bitcoin Liquidity." Plasma promises to seamlessly bring native BTC onto the chain through a permissionless bridge, leveraging Tether's deep USD pool, enabling low-slippage exchanges and BTC-backed stablecoin borrowing all within the same environment.

All of this is also perfectly aligned with Tether's past year of "stacking Bitcoin" actions. The Plasma team and Bitfinex's partners have long been advocates of Bitcoin.

On the central stage of the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino stood in front of an image of Goku, saying, "Bitcoin is my Goku, our friend."

In the spring of 2025, Tether announced its majority ownership of Twenty One Capital, a company that listed on Nasdaq through acquisition and merger, similar to MicroStrategy, focused on Bitcoin financial services.

Tether allocated $458.7 million to increase its BTC holdings and transferred 37,000 BTC to a new address, providing ammunition for Twenty One Capital. Currently, Tether and Twenty One Capital collectively hold around 137,000 BTC, ranking third in terms of Bitcoin holdings among all publicly traded companies, behind only MicroStrategy and mining firm MARA Holdings.

Data Source: https://bitbo.io/

Initially, the outside world was puzzled by Tether converting stablecoin profits into "digital gold," but now the answer is becoming clear: USDT serves as a settlement currency, BTC as a reserve asset, and both converge within Plasma, consolidating the scattered $150 billion USDT across dozens of networks into a unified settlement layer, where transfers, exchanges, and redemptions all take place within Tether's own domain.

Upon the mainnet test release, Plasma will rank as the world's ninth-largest blockchain in stablecoin liquidity, valued at $1 billion.

Previously, Tether had to follow the pace of Ethereum and Tron. Once the counterpart increased fees or changed rules, USDT could only passively comply. The infrastructure supporting USDT (settlement, execution, bridging, etc.) was also to a large extent beyond Tether's control. Now, Plasma has integrated issuance, circulation, and redemption into its own ecosystem. Consequently, Tether will gain more pricing power and decision-making authority, naturally taking hold of this network's toll gate.

 How much more can Plasma earn for Tether in a year?

Although Plasma offers zero fees for USDT transfers, it does not mean Plasma has no revenue.

Plasma's confidence in proclaiming "USDT transfers are completely free" is not based on Tether subsidizing with real money but on dividing transactions into two billing methods based on complexity and priority. In straightforward terms, it's like saying "Children under 1.2 meters ride free."

Regular USDT transfers, as they occupy a small block, are akin to "children under 1.2 meters," with nodes directly including such transactions in blocks without charging Gas to users. To prevent spam transactions, Plasma has a basic throughput limit. Additionally, to deter malicious spamming, users also need to maintain a small on-chain collateral acting as a security deposit. Once the abuse threshold is triggered, this collateral will be automatically seized. This approach maintains the "free" experience while warding off junk traffic.

Furthermore, requests beyond simple transfers, such as more complex operations like multi-contract calls, batch settlements, or institutional-grade fast settlements, are identified by the system and require payment. The main income of Plasma nodes comes from these transactions, along with collecting minimal fees from asset cross-chain transfers and custody services, enabling the entire network to be self-sustaining. Removing fees for basic transfers allows for a more flexible pricing model: as per current on-chain estimates, processing over a thousand free transactions per second consumes minimal resources, and nodes can cover costs and maintain surplus through a small number of high-level transactions.

This mechanism is supported by Plasma's "two-layer framework." The bottom layer periodically anchors block states back to Bitcoin, outsourcing security to BTC's proof-of-work. The upper layer directly interoperates with the EVM, enabling developers to port Ethereum contracts and run them. Without traditional Gas calculations, execution efficiency is even higher. According to Messari's evaluation report, Plasma's refined consensus can stably process thousands of payments at the single-core CPU level in stress tests, with node rewards solely derived from those complex transactions.

So how does Plasma actually make money? The answer is about to be revealed.

First, Enterprise-Grade "Dedicated Lane" — Cross-border payment companies or game publishers looking to accelerate transfers from milliseconds to sub-milliseconds need to enter the express lane, paying a fixed USDT monthly fee to ensure bandwidth.

Second, Contract and Batch Settlement — DeFi protocols invoking complex logic still require Gas fees, but now the pricing unit has shifted from ETH to USDT.

Third, Bridging and Custody — Moving assets from other chains to Plasma or redeeming from Plasma incurs a small exit tax, with this money entering the Plasma treasury and being distributed to nodes and the foundation according to the rules.

Fourth, Governance Token XPL Inflation — Validators staking XPL receive block rewards, with a portion held in the Plasma treasury and periodically auctioned off to sustainably subsidize peer-to-peer USDT 0gas payments.

When these four revenue streams are combined, they are sufficient to support the network's free transaction costs, and could even bring a whole new revenue stream to Tether.

If Plasma can successfully capture the majority of the USDT traffic currently running on Tron and Ethereum, the initial direct revenue will be mostly the on-chain fees taken by Tron and Ethereum — resulting in an estimated annual income of about $1 billion to $2 billion. Adding in enterprise services and cross-chain fees, the additional revenue range is expected to reach $1.2 billion to $3 billion.

However, due to Plasma's free regular USDT transfer fees, a conservative estimate suggests that Plasma could generate $1 billion in revenue for Tether annually.

Moreover, Plasma may also have other hidden benefits and ecosystem spillovers: for example, attracting new large-scale liquidity and projects, collecting a certain "tax"; providing SDKs, enterprise node access, and charging commercial fees for on-chain applications, and more.

Comparing this new revenue stream with Tether's existing financials is more illustrative: in 2024, of Tether's approximately $13 billion in revenue, $7 billion comes from treasury interest, $45 million from a 0.1% issuance/redemption fee, and the remaining nearly $6 billion is from Bitcoin, gold, and early project investment gains. This means that Plasma might be able to further boost Tether's annual profit by 15% to 20%.

Stable: A Customized USDT L1 Chain for Institutions

After Plasma embraced the liquidity and developer ecosystem from these Layer 1 chains, Tether did not stop there. This month, a Layer 1 chain named Stable, supported by the Bitfinex and USDT Unified Liquidity Protocol USDT0, made an official announcement, with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, serving as an advisor to the project.

Unlike Plasma, which is a Bitcoin Layer 2 solution, Stable is a Layer 1 chain. Although it also uses USDT as gas and enables free peer-to-peer USDT transfers, it targets a completely different audience: global financial institutions, enterprise settlements, large-scale clearing, on-chain corporate finance, B2B cross-border transactions, instead of focusing on retail/micropayment scenarios.

The internal testnet of Stable is already live, and the team is guiding early builders to explore SDKs for wallets, applications, and custody integrations, including fast fiat onboarding, USD-operated smart contracts, and gasless wallet operations where users may not even be aware they are on the blockchain.

Clues to Stable's launch can be found in Tether's recent intensive forays into commodity investments. This spring, Tether acquired 70% ownership of the Latin American agribusiness and renewable energy giant Adecoagro. It then announced that USDT would directly participate in South American grain and oil, ethanol, and even crude oil settlements. On June 5th, Tether announced a strategic investment in the African blockchain financial platform Shiga Digital, which provides virtual accounts, OTC trading services, fund management, and foreign exchange (FX) services for African businesses. Moving to the most recent news on June 12th, Tether announced the acquisition of approximately 31.9% of the shares (78,421,780 shares) of the Canadian publicly traded gold mining company Elemental and has signed an option agreement with AlphaStream Limited, allowing it to purchase an additional 34,444,580 shares after October 29, 2025.

The traditional reliance of bulk commodity trading on bank wire transfers and letters of credit has been long-standing. A single shipment can involve tens of millions of dollars, and funds often take several days to "clear" within the banking system. By converting this money into on-chain USDT, cross-border counterparties can almost instantly release the funds. Stable's enterprise channel has precisely reserved a "dedicated express lane" for this high-value, compliant, low-latency USD flow. Clearinghouses and custodian banks can even use the USDT0 bridging protocol to move stablecoins in and out without worrying about which chain the other party is operating on.

For a heavyweight merchant holding real-world assets and requiring regulatory compliance, as long as the settlement efficiency can truly surpass traditional wire transfers, they don't mind paying a bit more in transaction fees; for Tether, this type of transaction volume is not only more stable than retail transfers but also generates higher profit margins. More importantly, by packaging "USDT + physical assets" into the same ledger, Tether can finally embed the USD flows captured on-chain directly into commodities, energy, and even the entire supply chain. Paolo Ardoino mentioned in a recent interview that in the next five years, the biggest growth scenario for USDT will not be in crypto trading but in commodity trade.

The two chains have clear division of labor: Plasma enhances on-chain user experience, transforming small transactions into large volumes with 0 Gas fees; Stable ensures institutional compliance, using dedicated settlement channels to turn large volumes into sustainable high profits. Their common goal is only one—to free USDT from the constraints of any specific chain's fees and avoid being subjected to any single ecosystem's "taxation." From daily remittances to thousands of tons of soybeans, all USD flows will ultimately return to Tether's self-controlled ledger, which is the ultimate destination of "chain sovereignty counterattack."

Tether's Exclusive New Stablecoin in the U.S.?

"What Americans want is a checking account (daily payment), while overseas users see USDT as savings (digital savings)." Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino recently revealed Tether's next move: a localized USD payment coin.

Previously, Paolo hinted that Tether might establish a new company in the U.S. to issue a stablecoin specifically targeting the local payment scene, while the existing USDT will continue to focus on the international market and developing regions. When asked whether Tether will build a payment network similar to Square and support stablecoin payments, Paolo's response was, "I can't disclose all the plans at the moment, but your thinking is on the right track."

This move cannot avoid a crucial player—the U.S. banking sector.

Last week, Paolo retweeted news about the first U.S. bank clearly stating its willingness to issue a stablecoin on X, accompanied by the intriguing phrase "Select your player." The industry immediately speculated that Tether is likely partnering with this bank.

What many people do not know is that Tether has a heavyweight ally on Wall Street: Cantor Fitzgerald, led by the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce during the Trump era and billionaire Howard Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald now manages billions of dollars in Tether Treasury positions and is also the most prominent advocate for USDT in the traditional capital markets. Once the U.S. version of the stablecoin goes live, Cantor's clearing network and market-making positions will naturally provide the best liquidity support.

Of course, Tether's "shady reputation" continues to be scrutinized by U.S. regulators: a Treasury Department report specifically mentioned that a Mexican drug cartel favors USDT, and some lawmakers have even used it as a case study of the dark side of crypto. Tether first relocated its headquarters to El Salvador, a Bitcoin-friendly region, and then made high-profile purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds in the bond market worth billions, using the narrative of "I am a U.S. bondholder" to mitigate policy risks.

Thus, Plasma has deeply integrated retail zero-fee payments and on-chain developers into the Tether ecosystem; Stablecoin is moving tons of soybeans, crude oil, and cross-border salaries to instant USD settlement; and the upcoming "U.S. Payment Coin" is poised to eliminate the last moat of bank wire transfers. The three networks have clear division of labor, yet all hold the "toll gate" in the same hand.

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