Plasma Unlocks 1.76 Billion XPL on September 25 — 63% of Circulating Supply Meets a $253 Million Market Cap

On September 25, one year to the day after Plasma's mainnet beta went live, the largest scheduled supply event in the chain's short history lands. Roughly 1.76 billion XPL becomes transferable in a single day — about 63.2% of everything currently circulating, worth around $157 million at today's prices, per the unlock data tracked by PANews and relayed by Gate News. It is the biggest single release scheduled between September 21 and 26.

Plasma's native token trades at $0.0912 with a $253.5 million market cap and a $912.8 million fully diluted valuation. It is down 94.6% from the $1.68 all-time high printed on September 27, 2025, two days after launch, and up 51.7% from the $0.0601 low of June 10. Over the past 30 days XPL is 10.2% lower; over the past seven it is 17.1% higher. The cliff is the reason those two numbers disagree.

What Actually Unlocks on September 25

The mechanics are published, not rumoured. Plasma's tokenomics documentation sets the initial supply at 10 billion XPL at mainnet beta launch on September 25, 2025, split between a 10% public sale, a 40% Ecosystem and Growth allocation and 25% each for the team and investors.

Both the team and investor allocations carry the same one-year cliff: one-third of each 2.5 billion-token bucket clears on September 25, 2026 — roughly 833 million XPL from the team and the same from investors, about 1.67 billion combined by the project's own arithmetic. The vesting breakdown puts the release between 1.67 billion and 1.81 billion depending on how the monthly ecosystem tranche is counted. Third-party trackers have settled on 1.76 billion and a dollar figure near $157 million.

Whatever the exact number, circulating supply steps from 2.78 billion to somewhere around 4.5 billion — roughly 45% of the original 10 billion — and the gap between market cap and fully diluted value narrows for the first time since the token listed.

It is also a step change, not the end of one. The remaining two-thirds of both buckets unlock monthly on a pro-rata basis through September 25, 2028, alongside the 32% of Ecosystem and Growth tokens releasing on the same three-year clock. September 25 is the largest single date in that schedule, not the last.

The Tape Started Pricing the Cliff Weeks Ago

On September 8 XPL printed a high of $0.10112. Five sessions later it closed at $0.07782 after touching $0.0766 — a 24.2% drawdown inside a week, and the deepest leg of the past month.

The recovery that followed is exactly where the cliff shows up. September 17 closed +7.84%, September 18 added +7.38% to $0.09384 with a $0.0951 high, and then the bids thinned: September 19 closed -1.75%, and Sunday's session closed -3.20% at $0.08925 after tagging $0.09584 and slipping to $0.08572 — an 11.81% intraday range on a rejected breakout attempt.

Volume tells the same story. The 20-day average sits at $10.3 million per session against $22.7 million over 60 days. Traders are carrying roughly half the exposure into the unlock date that they carried in July.

Zoom out and the token is 94.6% below its September 2025 debut high, 51.7% above its June low, and 35% below the $0.1409 close that marked the best session of the last 200 days on April 16.

The Levels That Decide the Week

The ceiling is a narrow band, not a line: $0.09510 from September 18, $0.09584 from September 20, and the 0.786 retracement of the September 8 to September 13 leg at $0.09587. Three separate touches of the same eight-tick zone, all rejected. Anyone waiting for a clean break has been given the same answer three times.

A close above $0.0959 would open the measured move of the base that formed between $0.07660 and $0.09584 — 0.01924 per token, projecting $0.11508, with the 1.618 extension at $0.12038 sitting just below the 120-session high of $0.12320 from June 17. The trend averages line up underneath: the 20-day sits at $0.0881 and the 50-day at $0.0847.

To the downside the first real test is $0.08597, the 0.382 retracement of the September 8 to September 13 decline. Below it, the $0.0766 to $0.0782 shelf held four consecutive sessions between September 13 and 16 — the most-tested floor of the quarter. A daily close under $0.0766 puts the June all-time low at $0.0601 back in play.

What the Chain Is Holding Into the Unlock

Price is the noisier half of this story. The chain's deposit base is the other. DefiLlama counts $1.257 billion of stablecoins circulating on Plasma against a peak of $6.35 billion on October 9, 2025 — 80% below the high-water mark. DeFi TVL has fallen further: $562 million today versus $6.36 billion at the same October peak.

But the direction has changed. Stablecoins on Plasma have grown by $141 million in the last seven days and $291 million in the last 30 after a year of net outflows, the first sustained expansion since that October peak. Deposit inflows of that size are the one fundamental in this setup that does not depend on the cliff — $1.26 billion of stablecoins against a $253 million token market cap is a ratio only a handful of chains can show.

How the Cliff Usually Resolves

Unlocking is not selling. Tokens become transferable; holders decide separately whether to move them, and vesting cliffs are published months in advance, which is why the drawdown often lands before the date rather than on it — the -24.2% week that ended September 13 is the closest thing this chart offers to evidence of one.

“One-third of the XPL team tokens are subject to a one-year cliff from the public launch of Plasma mainnet beta (September 25, 2025), unlocking on September 25, 2026.” — Plasma tokenomics documentation

What matters on the 25th is not the headline number but three observable things: whether $0.08597 survives the first daily close after the release, whether exchange deposits spike in the days around it, and whether the stablecoin inflow trend continues through the month. Live price and market data are on the Plasma page on CoinMarketCap, the full vesting timetable is in the schedule breakdown, and the official allocation rules are in Plasma's own documentation.

For context on the sector this sits inside: we mapped the entire $309 billion stablecoin supply earlier this week, covered Circle's Arc mainnet going live with USDC as gas and the first U.S. bank stablecoin settlement on Stellar. Supply cliffs matter more in a market where the deposit base is finally growing again.