Plasma Attracts $500 Million for ICO—And One Trader Spent $100K on Ethereum Gas Fees

Plasma attracted $500 million in stablecoin deposits in mere minutes Monday for its upcoming token sale—and one user spent $100,000 on fees in an attempt to jump the queue.

Traders’ bullishness around the public sale has led some to believe that the initial coin offering trend is back. ICOs were all the rage in 2017, but fizzled out due to a string of failed projects and growing regulatory scrutiny.

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In its documentation, Plasma is described as a Bitcoin sidechain that will use the network as a settlement layer as it attempts to “meet the unique needs of stablecoins.” The public sale will auction off 10% of the supply of XPL via deposits into an Ethereum vault through the recently debuted Sonar token sale platform.

While the sale generated $500 million worth of interest, a Plasma team member clarified on X that only $50 million worth of XPL tokens will actually be sold. By holding funds in the deposit vault, users earn the option to purchase a share of tokens in the future sale, but are not obligated to do so—and they can withdraw their funds at any time. They’ll also earn yield on their deposited tokens in the meantime.

Stablecoins have become a central focus in crypto lately. The tokens, typically pegged to and backed by the U.S. dollar or other traditional assets, underpin the crypto industry, allowing traders to enter and exit trades with ease. Stablecoins don’t offer the potential allure of massive gains like other cryptocurrencies, but they’re an essential piece of the crypto market.

The United States Senate is attempting to pass a bill that would establish a framework for legally issuing stablecoins in the States, dubbed the GENIUS Act. 

Meanwhile, Circle, the issuer of USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization according to CoinGecko, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday, in a roaring success. CRCL soared to another new peak price Monday, more than quadrupling the initial offering price.

This whirlwind of excitement around stablecoins may explain why Plasma’s pre-sale vault filled up so quickly, as a project building a stablecoin-specific blockchain.

One trader was so keen to get involved that they paid 39.15 ETH (just over $100,000) to ensure their deposit of $10 million in USDC was executed before the vault filled up.

The extra $100,000 came in what is called a priority fee, which is an optional feature that allows users to pay as much as they want to incentivize validators to process their transaction quicker. This is particularly effective when the network is congested, as it may have been this time with a crowd of people attempting to enter the public sale all at once.

When traders anticipate that others may be upping their priority fees, a gas war breaks out, resulting in huge bills not seen during the normal course of transacting. This behavior was present during the initial coin offering buzz of 2017 and the NFT boom of 2021-22, but more recently, meme coin traders have deployed the same strategy to “snipe” in-demand tokens.

In the Plasma situation, however, the trader may have overshot the mark with their $100,000 priority fee. Out of the top five depositors, according to Etherscan, the highest fee paid was 4.49 ETH (over $11,500).

“Plasma instant cap fill today is a gigantic beacon signaling meta shift,” pseudonymous trader IcoBeast wrote on X. “ICOs are officially back, and Sonar is likely the most impactful crypto-native release of 2025 for the direction of crypto.”

ICOs soared in 2017 with countless projects raising capital by selling crypto tokens, including prominent projects like Filecoin and Tezos. Within a year, Bitcoin.com found, 46% of projects failed before or after raising funding.

Victor Teixeira, fund principal at investment firm Contango Digital Assets, believes that the hysteria experienced during the 2017 ICO craze has been here the whole time—it’s just been in meme coins.

“The meme coin market we experienced in the last year is the same confluence of hype and retail adoption that we saw in the 2017 ICO boom,” Teixeira told Decrypt. “What I think we’re seeing is that even though TRUMP and other meme coins onboarded a lot of investors into Web3, unless you got into these projects within the first two to three hours, you lost money.”

“Retail still wants to take a punt on the 1000x play, and if you can capture that demand and tie it to an actual product, you have a much stronger story to tell, with actual potential to hit the upside,” he added. “In this last cycle, we just didn’t have a real project that could grab that imagination and excitement as well as meme coins could.”

But not everyone is happy with the Plasma ICO, due to the top 10 participants filling 40% of the available deposit supply—a sign that so-called crypto whales dominated the sale. A total of 1,108 wallets were able to participate in the vault deposit campaign—that’s an average of over $450,000 each. That said, according to Etherscan, 141 traders contributed less than $1,000 apiece.

No date has been set for the actual token sale, though as traders have suggested, the impact of Monday’s surging demand may be felt broadly across the market if other projects sense there’s untapped demand for a new wave of ICOs.

Edited by Andrew Hayward