Plasma, a “purpose-built” blockchain for stablecoin payments, announced it has secured $24 million in funding.
Plasma has raised $20 million in a Series A led by Framework Ventures, a crypto-native venture capital firm “known for its early entrance in the DeFi, AI, and DePIN spaces.”
The Series A follows a $4M investment from early backers “including Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino, Peter Thiel, Cobie and Zaheer Ebtikar.”
Additional participants reportedly “include USD₮0, DRW, Bybit, Flow Traders, 6th Man Ventures, IMC, Nomura, Karatage, and others.”
This investment will accelerate the development of the Plasma blockchain, which introduces a new “approach to stablecoin payments by combining a scalable Bitcoin sidechain architecture with full EVM compatibility and zero-fee USD₮ transfers.”
Plasma is described as a purpose-built blockchain designed to “bring global stablecoin adoption to the next level and unlock trillions of dollars onchain.”
Engineered from the ground up for the needs of stablecoins, Plasma provides a secure “foundation for the next generation of money movement.”
Today, stablecoins offer permissionless “access to currencies like the dollar, along with near-instant, low-cost, 24/7 settlement.”
USD₮, issued by Tether, is the largest stablecoin in the world, “with a nearly 70% market share. Plasma, backed by Bitfinex and USD₮0, is designed to power stablecoins and drive global USD₮ adoption.”
The stablecoin market currently faces “a major obstacle: legacy blockchains limit further stablecoin adoption.”
Most blockchains, such as Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, were “designed long before stablecoins gained traction—or even existed.”
Today, stablecoins have over “$215 billion in supply and process trillions of dollars in monthly transfers, making them one of crypto’s most critical use cases.”
Yet, most stablecoins currently settle “on blockchains with high transaction fees, centralization issues, or high transaction failure rates, without any specialized features to support them.”
Plasma is built to capture the “migration of stablecoins to one chain optimized for stablecoin functionality.”
Plasma is a Bitcoin sidechain featuring “a trust-minimized BTC bridge and anchoring state roots to Bitcoin.”
Combining a BFT consensus with a Reth-based, fully EVM-compatible execution layer, enables Plasma to “inherit robust security while delivering the speed, scalability, and specialized features stablecoins demand.”
The team has secured support from key industry figures, “including Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex, and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who see Plasma’s potential to transform the stablecoin ecosystem.”
Plasma was founded in 2024 and is led by cofounder and CEO Paul Faecks, who brings “expertise in onchain finance from his previous role as cofounder of Alloy, a platform for institutional digital asset operations that served the likes of the German Stock Exchange and Franklin Templeton, and by cofounder Christian Angermayer, an entrepreneur and investor known for his involvement in life sciences, fintech, AI, and crypto through his family office Apeiron Investment Group.”
The Plasma team has experience “at crypto and traditional institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Blur and leading blockchains.”
Plasma’s funding will drive the next phase of its development, “including the launch of its testnet and mainnet, and the expansion of its ecosystem to support payments, remittances, stablecoin DeFi, and personal financial solutions.”
Upon launch, Plasma will reportedly aim to support “additional stablecoin issuers and integrate with stablecoin applications and infrastructure players in the industry.”