Lots of people excited about XPL / Plasma on the timeline today. Here's a technical tl;dr if you don't know anything about it: 1. It is a new proof of stake L1, meaning a separate blockchain using its own token for security (it is not an L2 and doesn't inherit security from any other chain) 2. It is EVM (works out of the box w/ solidity ETH contracts) 3. Uses a new consensus mechanism to achieve 1000+ transactions per second (honestly I was hoping for 10-100x more here) 4. Advertises a "trust-minimized" Bitcoin bridge, aka not really trust-minimized and just a big multi-sig secured by a network of verifiers 5. Purpose-built for stablecoins (gas fee abstraction, custom gas fee tokens, stablecoins as first class citizens, etc) I know they have some nice backing from Bitfinex/Tether, but from a technical perspective I'm left a bit unimpressed. Am I really supposed to believe that Plasma is going to dominate the stablecoin space with 1000+ TPS??

They don't mention this in their docs (you have to dig in their 37 page token paper to find it), but they do periodically post a state root commitment to Bitcoin L1 (this is similar to Stacks in a way). They make all kinds of "inheriting Bitcoin security" claims from this anchoring, but in my mind, state root commitments on Bitcoin L1 are basically worthless. Posting state roots to Bitcoin L1 provide immutability of finalized state. This means that after everything on the Plasma side has determined what is correct (all validators have agreed on final state) then that state is hashed and posted to Bitcoin L1 periodically. This gives you the benefit of public immutable state roots for auditability (you can't just change state commitments on Bitcoin) and some degree of censorship resistance (you can't censor historical state root commitments). But what this actually means is it doesn't inherit any security from Bitcoin L1. Plasma’s consensus, validator integrity, and bridge operations rely entirely on its own infrastructure.