Ethereum Plasma: What’s Happening?
If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you probably have heard of the proposed Plasma implementation for the Ethereum network. What is Plasma, and what will it mean?
I won’t go into too much detail here, but in essence, it’s a novel solution proposed to fix the low transactions per second threshold of Ethereum. It allows for parties to create their own “child chain” anchored through a smart contract to the Ethereum blockchain, whereby they can interact with the Ethereum network asynchronously through the child chain that has been created, eliminating the need for the whole Ethereum network to confirm each transaction. The transactions sent onto this child chain use the UTXO model, are verified through cryptographic signatures, and synced onto the main chain when the child chain is closed (read the whitepaper here). There’s also the ability to make a child chain on an existing child chain, and so on.
So What Does This Mean?
The implications for this are enormous — having peers interact with the Ethereum chain without having to update for long periods of time is a huge step in scalability. Theoretically, the Plasma technique allows for the speed at which transactions are confirmed to be constrained by only the connection between the peer and the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum network could transform from a slow blockchain to a combination of a fast initial transaction layer, with the Ethereum main chain becoming the final settlement layer.
What’s Next?
This is what Vitalik specifies is necessary for a Plasma MVP (minimum viable product). (note: skip if you don’t want the gory details)
So, what implementations are out there right now?
- OmiseGo has developed a Plasma MVP, currently under active development
- Truebit’s implementation, released in January
- FourthState, led by some amazing people from Blockchain at Berkeley, have gotten underway on their implementation.
- Loom Network’s hybrid of their own network’s side-chain combined with ERC721 tokens.
All of these teams have done amazing work for their respective projects. It’s important to note, however, that a widely-adopted general implementation for the Ethereum network is still a ways off. These projects are much more one-dimensional and have a tighter niche than what the Ethereum network will require. In combination with Sharding, we will potentially see the true power of the Ethereum network in the next few years to come.
Here at Whiteblock, we spearhead research & scalability testing in the blockchain space. Our previous clients include Ubiq, Syscoin, and the US Department of Defense. Follow us on Medium to keep up with us, and feel free to reach out at hello@whiteblock.io for any inquiries.
