With the Plasma (XPL) layer 1 mainnet launching on Thursday, early statistics show undeniable success. Let’s review the highlights of this first day.
Plasma (XPL) mainnet makes a successful debut
On Thursday, Layer 1 Plasma (XPL) opened its mainnet, and the least we can say is that the first day was a resounding success. First, investors who participated in the XPL token presale were awarded an airdrop of 9,304 additional tokens, regardless of the amount of their investment:
At the time of writing, this amount of tokens is worth over $11,000, with XPL trading at $1.19. This price propels the asset to 65th place in CoinGecko’s rankings, with a market cap of over $2.21 billion.
On the decentralized finance (DeFi) side, the new layer 1 has made a resounding debut. In less than 24 hours, Plasma’s total value locked (TVL) has propelled the network to 8th place among blockchains in DeFi, with Aave as the main protocol:
As for Aave, Plasma has probably had the best start of any protocol, as its nearly $3.15 billion in TVL makes Plasma Aave’s second-largest network, behind Ethereum (ETH) and its $55.62 billion in TVL. On Thursday, it should be noted that the Plasma instance of the decentralized lending and borrowing protocol had already raised $1.3 billion in TVL in just one hour.
To understand such success, it should be noted that when Plasma launched on Aave, it was possible to borrow USDT0 at negative rates and lend it at a rate of over 300% per year. Naturally, the market then regulated itself with the arrival of liquidity, and this rate is currently 20.84% for lenders versus 2.97% for borrowers.
It should be noted, however, that in order to achieve such spreads, significant incentives in XPL are provided, which does not guarantee the sustainability of returns:
In terms of network usage, the number of transactions exceeded 366,000 on Thursday, with more than 64,300 active addresses:
At this stage, it is still too early to identify a trend, but a new analysis could be carried out in the coming weeks to see how Plasma is managing to integrate into the already highly competitive ecosystem of layer 1 blockchains.
As a reminder, while it is not officially the “Tether blockchain,” the project still has the support of Bitfinex and Paolo Ardoino.
