When and how did plate tectonics itself begin on early Earth?

The rock and mineral record old enough to settle it is scarce and heavily altered: the Hadean and early Archean left almost no surviving crust to read directly, so estimates for when a single, stable, mobile-lid system of plates first organized range from roughly 4 billion to under 3 billion years ago, and some researchers argue the earliest crust moved under a different regime entirely before plate tectonics as it now works took over.