Plasma Cash and the Ethereum Roadmap on Epicenter
Ethereum Foundation researcher Karl Floersch joined us to discuss the main projects to upgrade Ethereum: Casper, Sharding and Plasma. Karl plays a key role in creating a new and simpler specification for Ethereum sidechains called Plasma Cash. He told us about the evolution of the Plasma project and how’s the vision for Ethereum being shaped in the near future.
In this show episode Karl walked us through the 3 different projects at the works at the Ethereum Foundation — Casper, Sharding and Plasma — and explained how they connect.
First of all, Casper is a Proof of Stake protocol which forms consensus on the root Ethereum chain providing guarantees around transaction and block ordering. The goal is to create the most secure blockchain, one which resists censorship the best. Karl has been focused on implementing the Casper: Friendly Finality Gadget testnet (a hybrid Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake system in introduced in this paper) — which was released in January this year. The Friendly Finality Gadget provides huge benefits — for instance, economic finality after 20 minutes which ensures a high penalty for reverting history, limiting the attack surface of the PoW miners, and thus increasing security guarantees.
The second project, Sharding, is using the Casper’s Proof of Stake to provide a way to process more transactions — increasing transaction throughput. We want to make sure that a laptop is able to validate a blockchain. We allow different computers to validate a different parts of the blockchain, every computer only validates a particular slice of the transaction throughput and we can support many more transactions per second, explains Karl.
The main project discussed in the episode, Plasma, is a design pattern which allows users their to deploy and run their own scalable blockchains, providing them with the security benefits of the main chain. Every Plasma chain can have its own certain logic and be optimised for particular tasks. The Plasma MVP allows one to keep track of every single coin and validate every single coin on the network. In case of Plasma Cash, which took the original Plasma idea and simplified it in many ways, the user cares only about the coins that they actually hold, which makes client-side validation way cheaper. You get the transaction throughput of an exchange with a client-side validation and the security guarantees requiring only a laptop, explains Karl.
All of these projects come together in a unified Ethereum vision, with increased security and and improved finality properties, increased transaction throughput, and — through Plasma — one that allows the Ethereum system to lend its security to other blockchains.
Karl is preparing a course on cryptoeconomics, in which he will walk you through the Plasma chain implementation. Check it out here: cryptoeconomics.study
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