The Plasma Case Study: Launch Liquid
Pioneered by Plasma. Powered by LayerZero.
Global payments move over $150T each year, but the rails beneath them remain slow and fragmented. It’s time for value to move with speed and simplicity.
Plasma is a stablecoin-native blockchain built for payments, and designed for frictionless, fee-abstracted value transfer across assets. Launched in early October, Plasma pulled in $8B in net deposits within three weeks of launch, immediately vaulting it into the top-10 blockchains by TVL. It wasted no time fostering a fast-growing ecosystem of applications built for payments, lending, and even neobanking (“Plasma One”).
This piece breaks down how Plasma launched liquid, showing how building with LayerZero infrastructure coordinated a multi-billion-dollar debut powered by deposits from USDT0, USDe, weETH, and more.
How Plasma Launched Liquid
Outsourcing Interoperability
Most blockchains build first and connect to other networks later, isolating applications, creating frustrating UX problems, and limiting early asset expansion. Plasma rewrote this narrative.
By embedding LayerZero as its interoperability solution, Plasma launched liquid – connecting everywhere from day one and turning interoperability into distribution for assets, users, and applications. The result: over $8B in deposits within days of launch, while most chains spend months chasing a fraction of that.
Plasma embedded LayerZero in three core places:
- Native Bridging: Stargate served as Plasma’s official bridge, enabling 1:1 asset transfers across blockchains with zero slippage. Linked directly from both Plasma’s frontend and Aave’s UI on launch day, users knew exactly where to deposit with a single click.
- Asset Expansion: Major asset issuers launched their blue-chip assets as LayerZero OFTs, giving them native Plasma support from block one. This led to USDT0, USDe, USDai, weETH, XPL, XAUT0, USR, ENA, PENDLE, and AUSD0 being ready for launch.
- Fast Swaps: Powered by Aori, Stargate’s Fast Swaps let users swap into Plasma-native assets like XPL from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base in under a second.
Together, these integrations powered Plasma’s liquidity flywheel.
“Launching a blockchain demands many moving parts working in concert and with clear intent. By partnering closely with LayerZero and Stargate, we launched with an industry-leading interoperability solution. Bridging into Plasma was seamless, which enabled us to scale liquidity efficiently and quickly rank among the largest chains by TVL and stablecoin supply.” - Paul Faecks, CEO and Founder
Activating Assets and Applications
Since LayerZero provided the infrastructure for connecting blockchains, users, and apps, Plasma could focus on go-to-market strategies for its launch.
The success of their launch boiled down to four main integrations: USDT0, Aave, ether.fi, and Ethena.
USDT0
Deployed to Plasma on the OFT Standard, USDT0 allowed users to move size into Plasma with zero slippage.
For instance, LayerZero facilitated 20 individual transfers of over $100M into Plasma, including six exceeding $250M. Nineteen of these were USDT0. The largest single transfer? $800M, costing the user $0.81.
The combination of pre-planned liquidity and a streamlined UX gave the Plasma team confidence to launch and incentivize large CEX and DeFi campaigns that offered extra rewards for USDT0 deposits.
Plasma launched with ~$2B in planned USDT0 liquidity, making USDT0 both the default gas token and unit of account from day one. However, with the initiatives in place, Plasma drove USDT0 supply to $5B, establishing the asset as the backbone of payments, AMMs, and money markets across the Plasma ecosystem. The success of the pre-planned liquidity and post-launch incentives has led Plasma to rank among the top five blockchains by stablecoin deployment.
It has also accelerated USDT0, which has surged to $7B in deployed supply, making it the fourth-largest stablecoin across connected blockchains.
“USDT0’s interoperability through LayerZero enabled us to move billions in liquidity seamlessly across chains, with near-instant settlement. This product laid the foundation that makes Plasma possible, and is a live example of what truly unified digital liquidity looks like: fast, scalable, and chain-agnostic.” – Lorenzo R. Co-Founder, USDT0.
Aave
The combination of outsourcing interoperability to LayerZero and focusing on incentives again paid off for Aave here. The industry’s leading lending market, Aave, saw $6.6B deposited on Plasma within 48 hours, making Plasma its second-largest market.
Behind the scenes with Aave, Plasma lined up XPL incentives well before launch, ensuring lenders and borrowers were ready to deploy size the moment the chain went live. Specifically, as part of the Aave V3 deployment proposal (ARFC), Plasma pledged 10 million USDT in incentives and committed that future lending incentive distributions would go exclusively to Aave.
Notably, Aave’s entire Plasma app is built on tokens moving through LayerZero infrastructure, including USDT0, sUSDe, USDe, and XAUt0. Just three weeks prior, all of these assets were held on other blockchains.
ether.fi
ether.fi is the largest restaking application in crypto and 6th largest dApp by TVL. Their flagship asset, weETH, is an OFT and was a day-1 asset live on Plasma, available to bridge on Stargate. EtherFi committed over $500M in weETH before Plasma even launched. From there, incentives induced more liquidity to enter the system.
As of October 2025, over one month after launch, Plasma holds the largest weETH supply across all blockchains, with roughly $600M locked in smart contracts.
Ethena
Ethena is the synthetic dollar protocol, with its token USDe sitting as the third-largest dollar-denominated asset in the industry.
Built with the OFT Standard, Plasma was able to have Ethena be ready for launch on day one, as they did with USDT0 and weETH.
However, with Ethena, there was no pre-planned liquidity. Rather, Ethena’s demand mostly came from its usage as a looped asset on Aave, Pendle, and Fluid.
Within hours of launch, more than $1B in USDe was deployed on Plasma, making it Ethena’s largest market outside Ethereum mainnet.
The New Standard for Chain Launches
Plasma’s debut showed what happens when liquidity, interoperability, and ecosystem design are aligned from the start.
Instead of focusing on building an in-house bridge or manually helping assets expand, Plasma focused on a strong go-to-market strategy laden with well-timed incentives and pre-planned launches.
The result was over $10B in inflows within weeks (and $8B of net inflows), with massive success for blue-chip assets and applications like USDT0, Aave, Ethena, and EtherFi.
For new networks, Plasma’s launch marks a shift in how blockchains come to market and shows what’s possible when you build with LayerZero.
Launch Liquid.
A special thank you to Tyler Kalinske for his work in editing this piece.
