It is named after Malpelo Island, the only emerged part of the plate.

This microplate was previously assumed to be part of the Nazca plate.

[2] The formation of the oceanic crust of the plate has been estimated to be since the Middle Miocene (14.7 Ma).

[3] The researchers used a Columbia University database of multibeam sonar soundings west of Ecuador and Colombia to identify a diffuse plate boundary that runs from the Panama transform fault (PTF) eastward to where the boundary intersects a deep oceanic trench just offshore of the South American coast, north of the Galapagos Islands.

[2] Gómez Tapias, Jorge; Montes Ramírez, Nohora E.; Almanza Meléndez, María F.; Alcárcel Gutiérrez, Fernando A.; Madrid Montoya, César A.; Diederix, Hans (2015).