When Plasma’s XPL token was issued a month ago crypto investors were chomping at the bit to buy a slice of the new blockchain built for StableCoins.
But despite StableCoins being a dominant theme throughout this bull cycle, plasma has failed to live up to the hype; XPL has now lost more than 80% of its value since September’s short-lived $1.67.
XPL Currently trading at $0.309 after sliding 13.6% in just the last 24 hoursthat prompts around $8 million in liquids.
Risks now fall in the top 100 crypto tokens entirely with a market cap of only $550 million, with the 100th largest retaining a market cap of $540 million.
What’s wrong?
Investors wonder where it all went wrong. Plasma is one of the most hyped projects of the year, backed by the likes of Bitfinex, Framework Ventures and Jordan Fish (Cobie) across two funding rounds that saw it raise $24 million, according to Icodrops.
Then there was a public sale, where it raised $50 million after selling 1 billion tokens for $0.05 each. These buyers remain well in profit but the same cannot be said for those who bought XPL on the exchanges when it went live in September.
Sentiment plummeted straight after the debut on allegations that the plasma team was colluding with market makers to short the XPL token, effectively locking in revenue.
Plasma founder Paul Faecks Those claims were denied in a tweet It read: “No team members are selling any XPL. All investors and Team XPL are locked in for 3 years with a 1 year gap.”
“We are not engaged with Wintermute as a market maker and have not contracted with Wintermute for any of their services,” he continued. “We have the same information as the public on Wintermute’s ownership of XPL.”
Veteran Trader Alex Wice Challenged faecks in his tweet.
However, relentless selling pressure remained and muted demand meant the XPL token continued to form new lows.
Onchain metrics
Plasma blockchain is designed to be the blockchain for StableCoins, offering zero-fee transfers and high throughput.
In practice, it has become a lending protocol; The plasma website has a “lending vault” that currently has $676 million in total value locked (TVL), offering nearly 8% annual returns.
Right now the main use case for XPL Tokens is to reduce fees for non-sponsor transfers, with XPL staking and delegation planned for Q1 of 2026.
The plasma Website Boasting figures of more than 1,000 transactions per second (TPS), while in reality the plasma block explorer shows a Current figure of only 14.9 tpsin part due to the lack of activity taking place.
To its credit, plasma claims to offer sub-second block times, and on top of that new blocks are created every second, despite many of the blocks containing only a Some transactions.
What’s next for XPL?
The XPL token will likely provide more than one use case by the start of 2026 when staking becomes active. But until then investors need a stimulus to drive demand, and failure to do so could see XPL fall off the deep end as the hype continues to fade.
XPL has been a double edge, one of the reasons for owning XPL is to reduce transaction fees, but for a blockchain designed to offer zero-fees on stablecoin transfers and minimal fees on other tokens, there is no need to own XPL because using the chain is so cheap.
Perhaps the demand will increase as soon as the plasma rolls on the “plasma one” card, but at this time it remains a desperate situation in terms of action and price relation.
