I'd like to add my own perspective on Plasma????????
1/ Regarding the relationship between Tether and Bitfinex: According to Wikipedia, both belong to the same parent company, iFinex Inc., registered in the British Virgin Islands.
More critical information is that the New York Attorney General's Office investigated iFinex Inc. in 2019 and found that Tether directly provided Bitfinex with an $850 million funding gap caused by the seizure of third-party payment processor Crypto Capital.
You can refer to Cointelegraph's report here.
Moreover, the CFTC’s subsequent investigation found that Tether and Bitfinex had at least 29 merged assets without any agreement or contract records.
Therefore, Tether and Bitfinex are two entities controlled by the same parent company, similar to FTX and Alameda.
Speaking of this, I specifically asked the former FTX veterans, if two different projects in the same track are invested in by FTX and Alameda respectively, what is the difference?
The answer was that there had been no difference before, but the market felt that Alameda was exploiting investors, leading to the switch to FTX Ventures. In other words, the move was more about branding and risk isolation.
I also compared the projects invested by Tether and Bitfinex. I can see that of the 25 projects Tether has invested in, 13 are in payment-related projects. This suggests that Tether's investment choices are more related to expanding business scenarios. Bitfinex, on the other hand, tends to invest in various platforms.
2/ About Plasma's three goals and fundamentals.
The ultimate goal is to attract users to deposit stablecoins or other assets on the Plasma chain and earn fees from asset deposits, such as using assets to purchase short-term government bonds, or CeDeFi strategy returns, or mint fees, etc.
Essentially, this is also an ICO. Project owners rely on these activities to make money and may promise to use part of the revenue to buy back XPL, which is the lowest level of goal.
A medium-term goal, which I have discussed with the senior teacher before, is to cut off Tron chain’s business in USDT distribution.
If you enter a Tg group, you will find a large number of advertisements, offering high returns for helping to transfer USDT on the Tron chain. These are all related to money laundering, which is also the fundamentals of Tron.
From the product design point of view, Plasma is really interested in the project. The three core functions of the project are:
1) Customized Gas Tokens.
2) USDT transfers require 0 Gas.
3) Private transactions.
Of course, according to the official Docs, these features may not be launched until the third stage of the project development, which is next year.
This is also one of the risks of the project and the question of whether we really want to do it well.
A high-level goal. One component of a closed-loop business model based on the US dollar, from bank card deposits and payments to exchanges and on-chain revenue.
That is, based on crypto-friendly banks, it absorbs savings from the general public and provides on-chain returns to deposit users within the App, such as Pendle's PT, YT Yield or USDe Delta neutral returns.
Use the income from deposits to subsidize the price of XPL tokens, absorb more stablecoins, and become one of the sources of on-chain income.
I'm just not sure what the project's structure is like and whether they will work towards these goals.
In fact, the overall situation is actually created by buying. As long as there is enough buying and profitability, the project owner will have greater motivation to do bigger things and maximize profits.
This is also the expected result of a "good" system - altruistic behavior arising from selfish motives.
What we need to do is to seize the opportunity of the "subsidy war" between exchanges and projects and actively participate, just like we did with ASTER.
