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This page explains how transaction fees work on the Plasma network, including the roadmap for paying gas in custom tokens.

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Gas on Plasma

Plasma uses the standard EVM gas model to measure the computational cost of transactions and contract execution. Gas fees are paid to validators as compensation for securing the network and processing transactions. Like Ethereum, total transaction cost is calculated as: Total Fee = Gas Used × Gas Price Plasma is designed to maintain low and predictable gas prices. Most standard transactions cost less than one cent, with execution costs aligned closely with Ethereum for developer familiarity.

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Key Features

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Custom Gas Tokens

Plasma is building support for custom gas tokens via a native paymaster contract. Developers will be able to register whitelisted ERC-20 tokens (such as stablecoins or ecosystem tokens) to be used as gas within their applications. Unlike external paymasters, Plasma’s gas token paymaster is maintained by the protocol and does not charge a fee. This will let projects abstract away XPL from their UX and let users pay fees in tokens they already hold.

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Predictable Costs and High Throughput

Because Plasma mirrors Ethereum’s gas cost structure, developers can expect familiar pricing for common operations. The difference is in performance. Plasma’s pipelined consensus and high throughput ensure fast, reliable transaction inclusion even under load. The Core Protocol roadmap describes how this is being extended further with dedicated payment lanes, faster finality, and custom fee structures.

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Why This Matters

Fee abstraction is one of the biggest UX barriers in crypto. Plasma is built to remove that barrier for stablecoin payment apps. Users will be able to send stablecoins without holding XPL. Apps will be able to denominate fees in local stablecoins. Developers avoid the complexity of wrapping native tokens or deploying their own paymasters. These design choices make Plasma a strong fit for cost-sensitive, high-volume applications, from cross-border payments to retail wallets to stablecoin-based DeFi.