Plasma Debuts XPL at Massive Multiple of ICO Price—And Hands Out Millions in Free Tokens

Stablecoin blockchain Plasma launched its mainnet in beta on Thursday, with its native XPL token going live alongside it. 

Investors who bought into Plasma’s massive initial coin offering, or ICO, earlier this year are up massively. And Plasma confirmed to Decrypt that every single participant in Plasma’s pre-deposit ICO scheme has been sent $8,390 worth of XPL—even if they didn’t actually buy tokens via the ICO.

Plasma’s XPL token peaked at $1.54 a piece shortly after its debut before dropping to $0.91 as of this writing, according to CoinGecko. That puts Plasma’s native staking token at a $8.6 billion fully diluted valuation, which is a 17.3x jump from the $500 million valuation at which the ICO was raised.

XPL is currently the 89th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at $1.59 billion.

“This is the culmination of our team putting everything they had into making Plasma the perfect home for Money 2.0. The launch of our mainnet is just the beginning,” Paul Faecks, CEO and Founder, said on X.

Plasma is a layer-1 blockchain built with stablecoin optimizations at the forefront of the project. It uses the XPL token to power its staking-based consensus mechanism. Plasma has attracted funding from the likes of Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, with the pair also serving as advisors to the project.

The project caught headlines in June after it attracted $1 billion worth of pre-deposits ahead of its initial coin offering. Participants were allocated a portion of the tokens they could purchase based on how much they pre-deposited and for how long. 

Plasma later sold 10% of its 10 billion token supply at a $500 million fully diluted valuation to those who had locked up their funds in the pre-deposit wallet. The initial coin offering was conducted at the same valuation as its previous strategic funding round.

Plasma told Decrypt that half of the ICO participants had claimed their tokens within three hours of hitting mainnet beta. 

ICO depositors who received the unexpected bonus have taken to social media to flaunt the additional $8,390 of XPL that Plasma gifted them. For note, Plasma allocated 25 million tokens, worth approximately $25.5 million at its current price, to be evenly divided among all pre-depositors—meaning those who deposited $1 or $10,000 got the same bonus.

“The team at Plasma is making sure their small supporters eat,” one X user wrote. “FOMO is about to hit HARD,” another said on X.

Plasma’s mainnet beta and token debut come the same week that it announced Plasma One, a stablecoin-native neobank it plans to roll out. The neobank’s card will use the Plasma blockchain as its payment rails, and claims to offer 4% cashback on spending.

Company leadership has described Thursday’s launch as the first step forward, with many more to come.

“This is just the start,” Faecks told Decrypt. “Next is iterating at the chain level to make Plasma more optimized for stablecoin payments and shipping the best products that get stablecoins into the hands of everyone, everywhere.”