In the past two years, the narrative of "modular blockchains" has become a industry consensus—building an L2 based on OP Stack or ZK Stack seems to be the only way forward, as if anything else is outdated. But when it comes to payments and settlements, the traditional L2 approach may not hold up.

Honestly, although L2 solutions are cheaper, the core issue is that they "rent" Ethereum's security. Once the mainnet gets congested, your settlement costs and final confirmation times become uncontrollable. Plus, cross-chain bridges fragment liquidity, which poses too much risk for financial transactions that require "payment upon delivery."

Why is Plasma still stubbornly sticking to Layer 1? Frankly, what I value is that sense of "sovereignty." It doesn't rely on others' block space but instead uses Reth to build a fully autonomous high-performance execution layer. Coupled with PlasmaBFT's sub-second consensus mechanism, the entire control remains in your hands—that's crucial.

What's more interesting is that it doesn't play solo like early Alt-L1s, but anchors its state root to the Bitcoin network. The architecture of "independent execution + BTC finality" actually breaks out of the dead end of L2 competition. For high-frequency payments, it avoids queuing for confirmation and doesn't compromise on security.

It's quite realistic—compared to trusting a centralized sequencer, capable players are definitely more willing to trust Bitcoin's code.