TEDA also funded both sides of its chain war

,

, and

tags, and retaining all original content and tag locations.

The world's largest stablecoin issuer pays approximately US$2.9 billion a year to blockchains beyond its control. The strategy is to simultaneously support two competing chains: Plasma, a $373 million bet focusing on DeFi capabilities, and Stable, a enterprise-class track that uses USDT as a fuel bill. One publisher, two armies, an enemy called Tron, and a strategy that only makes sense if you see whose problem it solves.

Abstract

The Tether ecosystem has spawned two chains specifically designed for USDT that compete directly with each other: Prasma (launched in September, with token sales of US$373 million, using the payment manager model, and DeFi's total lockdown volume of approximately US$551 million) and Stabur (launched in December, with USDT as fuel fee and focusing on enterprise-level applications).

The motivation comes from one number: analysis shows that TEDA spends nearly US$2.9 billion on network expenses every year, most of which goes to Ethereum and Wave Field-these values are lost to the bottom line beyond the control of the issuer, while TEDA's own revenue is approximately US$5 billion.

The two chains embody diametrically opposed design philosophies: one is a subsidized universal DeFi economy with native tokens and traditional functions; the other is a streamlined payment track, fueled by the dollar itself. The market strategies of the two are also diametrically opposed.

The real target is not each other, but the wavefield-it still carries about 45% of USDT and earns fees from the world's largest remittance flow. This moat has not been physically shaken by the two challengers.

Funding both parties at the same time is not indecisive, but an investment portfolio: no matter which chain can recover the cost lost, the issuer will win; if the two chains occupy different market segments, the win will be greater; the only way to lose is to maintain the status quo-the status quo that costs US$2.9 billion a year to get rid of.

Cost loss: The real cause of war

First look at this number that explains everything, because without it, the dual-chain strategy looks like a waste; with it, the strategy becomes obvious.

The success of USDT has created a unique corporate landscape: the assets belong to TEDA, the scale of activities is huge, and the toll gate belongs to others. Every USDT transfer on Ethereum pays fuel costs to the Ethereum validator; every transfer on the wavefield-where nearly half of the USDT's are gathered and is the real operating remittance channel in Asia, Africa and Latin America-pays the cost of energy and bandwidth to the wavefield economy.

Taken together, an analysis of the TEDA ecosystem shows that annual network expense expenditures related to USDT flows are approximately US$2.9 billion, while industry estimates of issuer revenue for the same period are close to US$4.9 billion. This means that the value captured by the underlying chains of USDT is close to the issuer's own revenue.

Delphi Digital explains the problem most clearly: As circulation is spread across multiple chains, most of the infrastructure supporting USDT has exceeded TEDA's control, and the economic value generated by use is unevenly captured by tracks (especially Ethereum and wavefields).

For most companies, this is just an annoyance. But for stablecoin issuers, this is a strategic weakness with triple threats: economically, profits are flowing to "landlords"; competitively, it funds the chain of wavefields, and the operators of wavefields are independent characters, with their own tokens, their own political positions, and their own regulatory risks, which are not something TEDA can choose; Architecturally, this means that the user experience of the world's most widely used digital dollar-fees, congestion, fuel token requirements-is determined by those networks optimized for other goals.

The dedicated USDT chain is a response to these triple threats: recoup fees, own tracks, and design experiences around the dollar. The only question is which design to choose, and TEDA Ecosystem's answer is: Both.

Two chains, two philosophies

These two competing chains are best understood as opposite answers to the same question: How many "chains" of functions does a stablecoin need?

Plasma's answer is: complete chain. It is a complete first level of EVM, with its own token XPL, which undertakes the functions of traditional native tokens-pledge by verifier, settle assets, and accumulate value through chain growth-while paying the principal contract to absorb fuel costs, making simple USDT transfers free to users. The design retains the familiar crypto economy: XPL was publicly sold for $373 million and was oversubscribed seven times; there were more than 100 DeFi integrations when the chain was launched; the total lockdown volume has increased to approximately $551 million; sub-second PlasmaBFT ultimately serves both transactions and payments; Bitcoin anchoring adds a security narrative; the confidential transfer module is for payroll and business-to-business payments.

Simply put, Pulasma is a universal chain that subsidizes its stablecoin channel, with the bet that free USDT transfers attract users, while users 'other activities (borrowing, trading, income) generate revenue and accumulate on the tokens. The payment manager's economic model relies precisely on the "patron logic" analyzed in our fuel-free transfer guide: historically, most zero-fee chains died when subsidies were exhausted, and Prasma's differentiated proposition was that their subsidies were underwritten by ecosystems that had a direct commercial interest in the popularization of USDT.

Stubble's answer is: Keep as few chain functions as possible. There is no indirect mechanism such as a payment manager, or even a separate fuel asset: USDT0 (full-chain dollar) itself is a fee token; simple transfers are waived according to the rules of the agreement; native STABLE tokens are limited to pledge and governance, and are deliberately invisible to users.

Prasma pursues DeFi, while Stapur provides enterprise-class block space-dedicated capacity reserved for institutional payment flows. The measure is not the total lockup amount, but the US$2 billion in advance deposits received before the main online launch. The design ceded the DeFi economy to others and optimized only one thing: dollar transfers with predictability at payment levels. The bet is that remittance processors, merchants and finance departments choose tracks the same way they choose a clearing bank-stability, not composability.

Different philosophies bring different vulnerabilities, and it is necessary to truthfully describe both. Prasma's risk lies in target dilution: a universal chain competes for DeFi with Ethereum, Solana, and all second-layer networks, and free USDT transfers are just a way to attract users. If the economy can never move beyond the subsidy stage, XPL tokens will have to face the question of value accumulation that this journal applies everywhere. Staple risks the opposite: an overly streamlined track, with a moat based solely on execution and consistency of interests, no ecosystem stickiness to retain users, and its token value case (as described in our STABLE guide) relies on governance decisions that have not yet been made. One chain may be too large; the other may be too thin; and both face the really important risk, and that risk is in Asia, in the incumbent.

Wave field: The enemy the two chains fight for together

The decent way to put it is that Prasma and Stabur solve different market segments. The unseemly truth is that both are trying to capture the same trophy: about 45% of the USDT and the fee stream it generates is present on the wavefield.

The dominance of wavefields is the most neglected fact in the stablecoins field. It carries the largest share of the largest stablecoins, remittances and exchange settlement flows in markets where USDT is not a trading chip but a savings technology. Its moat is the kind that the white paper cannot break: cash network effects, muscle memory embedded in thousands of local exchanges and over-the-counter trading counters, hundreds of millions of wallets, and non-zero but known, tolerable, and priced fees to each remittance channel.

Both challengers are clearly targeting it: Plasma's remittance routing promotion is "TRX fuel fees that skip the wavefield", and Stapur's free transfer promotion is the same sentence plus different channels. Both discover what payments challengers always find: Users don't migrate for architecture, they migrate when their exchanges, employers, or remittance applications migrate-making this battle a battle for business development rather than a technology competition.

Therefore, the important scoreboard is neither the total number of locked positions nor the number of transactions (both can be manipulated), but the proportion of USDT supply per chain. By this measure, the war has just begun: the share of the wavefield is only marginal erosion, the total circulation of the challenger is still a fraction of it, and the incumbent has the advantage that every toll road owner has: profitability is sufficient to support its own retention incentives.

This is why a dual-chain strategy makes sense from a publisher's perspective-and this is the end point of this article. TEDA doesn't need to choose a winner's design; it needs to plug the cost drain and leave the track to family ownership. Funding two philosophies is the way portfolio managers respond to uncertain markets: Prasma tests whether a subsidized DeFi economy can drive payment gravity, and Stabble tests whether enterprise-level minimalism can achieve it; competition between the two chains allows both sides to iterate faster than monopoly; every dollar of USDT circulation they win from wavefield or Ethereum converts lost fees into part of the family economy.

If both succeed, the market will be segmented-retail and DeFi on one end, institutions on the other-and the publisher will own the entire stack. If one party dies, survivors will inherit its lessons and circulation. The only way to lose is to maintain the status quo, and the status quo is what costs $2.9 billion a year.

Warfare is usually a negative-sum game for the participants and profitable for arms dealers; and this war is designed by arms dealers-a fact to keep in mind when the ecosystem pretends for the coming year that the two chains are not aiming at each other, the wavefield, or quietly targeting the $2.9 billion.

Regulatory shadow shared by both chains

There is also a force shaping the war from the outside that the family's own coverage of Washington makes it unavoidable: both chains are the infrastructure of the TEDA ecosystem, and they came online at a time when U.S. law was determining what an offshore issuance of dollars could do.

The GENIUS Act's stablecoin framework (which we have reported on a missed implementation deadline) and the CLARITY Act's market structure battle (which is being fought in the Senate this week) together delineate the boundaries between two chains that can reach markets. The core risks are the same for both: USDT remains an offshore issuance of U.S. dollars, within a framework designed to favor domestic regulatory issuance; and each remittance channel won by both chains translates informal USDT use into a visible, systematic flow of funds that regulators can view, name, and set cards.

Opposite strategies in the two chains produce opposite risk exposures. Staple's corporate propaganda is intended to move closer to the regulated world, attracting institutions whose compliance departments must approve tracks-making it a guinea pig for the family to test whether TEDA-related infrastructure can pass U.S. due diligence. Prasma's retail and DeFi economy proactively avoids such scrutiny by the way it is structured, thriving in the permission-free channels targeted by the anti- money laundering provisions in every pending bill.

One chain gambling family can join a regulated system; another family can grow until it does not need to join. Legislation being passed by Congress this month will score the two bets before the technology of the two chains justifies their design. The honest summary of the pattern revealed at the beginning of this article is that the battle for cost loss is the family's offensive battle, and the regulatory boundary is its defensive battle; and the second war, unlike the first, was not designed by the publisher.

Unpriced third-party bidders

One character complicates the simple landscape of family wars, and an honest landscape should include it: the chain of power is not static, and the most likely spoilers in the war are not the failure of any challenger, but the cost loss becomes more tolerable.

The defense of the wavefield is already reflected in its pricing behavior: the network regularly adjusts its resource model when migration pressure rises; and its operators have the ultimate weapon of toll road owners-reducing fees to near zero on attacked lanes while keeping charges positive elsewhere. This is a price-discrimination tactic that incumbents from airlines to telecommunications companies have used against "cherry-picking" entrants. Each basis point lower in the wavefield reduces the challenger's promotional advantage; while the wavefield can be cut from profits, the challenger needs to be subsidized from war funds-an asymmetry that benefits the incumbent in any protracted price war.

Ethereum's defenses are structural: the institutional and DeFi-based USDTs that exist there are the most sticky flows in the ecosystem, and they are tied to the composability of the deepest markets in the crypto space, without any payment-optimized tracks can compete with them. This is why the real battlefield is remittance circulation in the wavefield, not collateral circulation in Ethereum; and why the challenger's reach is much smaller than the $2.9 billion claimed in the title.

In addition, the war may move towards a fourth trajectory-the one expected by the arms dealers 'framework: cost losses themselves become products. The TEDA ecosystem does not strictly need which chains win the migration war, as long as the existence of these chains constrains pricing for incumbents, transforms issuers from price takers to price negotiators, and gives families a credible exit infrastructure-that can be invoked in every business conversation with Wave Field. Leveraging, not conquest, may be the true deliverable of the strategy: $373 million and $2 billion in advance deposits at least buy the "migration capabilities" that are key to turning passive tenants into negotiating tenants. By this interpretation, the two chains have quietly achieved success at the only important meeting, and the circulation share scoreboard underestimates a war-its first victory was a better lease.

What to Focus on

USDT Circulation by Chain (Quarter):The only honest scoreboard in war: Prasma and Stapur as a proportion of the total USDT supply, compared to wavefield and Ethereum. The number of transactions can be exaggerated; it is the amount of remaining liquid that is the real cost loss that moves. Focus on whether the combined share of challengers reaches double digits and who those shares come from.

Subsidy gesture: Plasma's payer expenses versus its DeFi economy's fee income, and Stabble's new issuance plans versus its corporate fee stream. The free layer of both chains has funding models that can be rated in this magazine's framework; the first chain that demonstrated that cross-subsidies can cover free channels found a sustainable form.

Channel Flips: The event that can really drive war: a major remittance processor, exchange, or payment application transfers settlement on a designated channel from the wavefield to any challenger. A real channel trumps any total lockup milestone, and this specific form of business development announcements is the key signal.

Publisher's Hand: Standardized USDT release decisions-where TEDA is originally cast and USDT0 is bridged-are the publishers quietly choose preferences. Any integration action (sharing infrastructure, merging, formally designating channels) will signal the portfolio manager to close his position. The war will end as it began, with family decisions.

Conclusion on observable facts

Developer behavior will test both philosophies faster than any strategy memo. Chains are selected twice: once for users to transfer funds, and once for builders to deploy products. The opposite designs of the two chains put forward opposite demands for the second group: Prasma's complete EVM economy, a hundred first-day DeFi integrations, which attract builders with composability and token alignment; Stabble's enterprise-level blockchain space attracts builders with predictability and a group of institutional customers who pay for stability. Early returns are reflected in the metrics boasted by both sides: on one hand, total lockups and integrations, and on the other, pre-deposits and corporate cooperation. The indicators avoided by both sides, as well as the divergence in the first year, will reveal whether the crypto payment infrastructure follows the platform script (ecosystem wins) or the utility script (reliability wins).

It is worth noting that wavefield gained its status when it had neither: it gained position when no one was looking by distributing it to exchanges and money transfer counters. This reminds us that the decisive voters in the war may not be users or builders, but the hundreds of business development conversations-with processors, exchanges, and payroll providers-that can truly move liquidity on a massive scale. Both challengers understand this, so the real battle of the war will be invisible, unfolding in an integrated roadmap and settlement agreement, and, if reported, will be reported channel by channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Prasma and Stubble? Summarize in one sentence.

Prasma is the first layer of a universal stablecoin. It was launched in September and has the native token XPL. The payment manager makes simple USDT transfers free. The total lockup volume of the DeFi ecosystem is approximately US$551 million. Stapur is a first layer of payment that will be launched in December. USDT0 itself is a fuel asset. Simple transfers are free according to the rules of the agreement, focusing on corporate and institutional capital flows.

Why does the TEDA ecosystem support both?

Because the strategic issue-about $2.9 billion in USDT-related network costs flow every year to chains outside the family, mainly wavefield and Ethereum-is more important than which design can solve it. Supporting two opposing philosophies is portfolio logic: each tests a different path to recoup expense streams, competition sharpens both sides, and the liquidity won by either side transforms a lost economy into a consistent economy.

What are the technical differences between the two chains?

Plasma maintains the traditional chain economy: XPL is responsible for pledge and settlement, payment managers subsidize free USDT channels, EVM ecosystem is fully universal, bitcoin anchoring and confidential transfers expand the feature set. Stabble removes separate fuel assets, USDT0 pays fees, simple transfers waive fees, STABLE tokens are limited to pledge and governance only, capacity is marketed as enterprise-level block space.

Are they really competitors or are they complementary?

Direct competition, regardless of diplomatic rhetoric. Both target existing USDT circulation and the same source of migration (first, the remittance channel of the wave field), and both promote the same core interest-free dollar transfers. Splitting by retail/DeFi and institutional channels is a possible balance, but that is a result of competition, not an alternative.

Why is the wavefield the real target?

The wavefield carries approximately 45% of USDT, the largest share of the largest stablecoins, concentrated in remittance and exchange settlement channels-where USDT is used as daily currency. Its costs are the single largest component of the cost loss of the ecosystem, and its moat (integrations, habits, cash network effects) is exactly what the two challengers were designed to attack, but so far there has been only marginal erosion.

What does victory mean for any chain?

Resident USDT flow, not an activity indicator. Real progress will be achieved only when the challenger reaches a double-digit share of the total USDT supply, or reverses the settlement of a designated remittance channel from the wave field to himself. For the issuer ecosystem, the victory is broader: any combined outcome of shifting fee streams from external chains to family-consistent chains includes a split where the two chains hold different market segments.

What are the main risks for each chain?

Plasma: Universal Trap-Competing with a much larger ecosystem for DeFi, while its free channel relies on subsidies, XPL tokens face standard value accumulation doubts. Stubble: The minimalist trap-there is no track where the ecosystem is sticky, token value cases await governance decisions, relying on slow corporate adoption cycles. The two share risks: the on-site advantage of the wavefield and the possibility that users will not migrate at all.

What does this mean for USDT holders?

The immediate risks are small and have certain structural benefits: competition between the two chains makes USDT cheaper and easier to move, and the full-chain pipeline (USDT0) connects them is the same as described in our guide, with the same trust stack. The outcome of the war is more important to XPL and STABLE holders, whose tokens are certificates of equity that are correspondingly designed to win, and also have an impact on the fee economy of Wave Field and Ethereum. This article is an educational analysis and non-investment advice.