Last month, my colleague Ben Edgington wrote an article titled “The State of the Ethereum Protocol #1,” in which he delved into past and present developments and changes in the basic Ethereum protocol.

In this article, I’ll discuss some basic information about Plasma so that readers can better understand its progress and future.

Plasma profile

We often talk about Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions for Ethereum. As Ben talks about in his article, tier 1 solutions are built into the core infrastructure of the blockchain itself. The second layer solutions, which I will discuss, are built on top of the blockchain and do not change any of the rules of the blockchain.

Plasma is a layer 2 technology built on top of the Ethereum protocol that combines smart contracts with cryptographic authentication. In short, fast and cheap transactions can be made by taking transactions out of the Ethereum main chain and into a “sub-” chain. These sub-chains report back regularly to the main chain, which is used to settle any disputes (almost like the High court). The main chain will use mathematically verifiable methods to settle disputes and reward the right party with its own funds.

One basic rule of thumb about Plasma is security: you will always control your money, not anyone else’s (companies or hackers can’t steal your money). Some of Plasma’s applications include decentralized exchanges (for equal-asset exchanges), fast payments that enrich business ecosystems, and many-to-many model asset transfer requirements.

Vitalik Buterin recently said that building complex features into the base layer of blockchain is a “bad idea,” writing:

“Because platforms must constantly be discussed, implemented, and coordinated in the face of newly discovered technology improvements, this can lead to a high level of governance overhead, and densely adding these new features to the base protocol layer can lead to a depression in Ethereum. “We shouldn’t just rely on changes to the underlying protocols to continue our progress, and I do think that as blockchains become more mature, the base layer networks will inevitably stabilize, and the layer 2 networks will bear more and more of the burden of continued innovation and change.”

What’s the status of Plasma?

Plasma White paper [August 2017]

Vitalik and Joseph Poon published a Plasma white paper in August 2017. At the time of the white paper’s release, the community reaction was a bit mixed, but the majority reaction was one of excitement. Shortly after, the OmiseGO project announced it would use Plasma to build a decentralized exchange.

Minimum Available Plasma [January 2018]

In January 2018, Vitalik, with the help of Joseph Poon and David Knott, published a specification for “Minimum Usable plasma” on Ethresear. ch. Plasma MVP is designed to simplify Plasma, provide basic security features, and allow developers to develop Plasma quickly. At this point, a select few developers are invited to join a “Plasma Implementer Video conference.” Since then, Joseph Poon and Karl Floersch have held a video conference every two weeks on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Est. In this video conference, participants discuss new theories, proposals, technical feasibility, or sing happy Birthday songs.

Plasma Cash [March 2018]

In March 2018, Vitalik, Karl Floersch, and Dan Robinson announced Plasma Cash, which is generally referred to as “Plasma Cash is Plasma.” Plasma Cash gets its name because it is thought to behave like Cash, that is, it cannot be partitioned or cut into different values. Now we have “notes” in standard terms, such as $10, $10, $50 and $100. Each chunk of money deposited into Plasma Cash smart contracts becomes indivisible like “money”. Plasma Cash makes use of unique identifiers, and when you deposit Ether into a Plasma contract, the contract allows users to store only information about their currency. But even then, the need for storage may be excessive from the user’s point of view because of the need to store and maintain growing transaction histories, included proofs, and non-included proofs.

Plasma XT [May 2018]

In May 2018, Kelvin Fichter, with the help of Dan Robinson, David Knott, Joseph Poon, Karl Floersch, Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake, Introduced Plasma XT, a scheme using Cryptoeconomic Aggregate Signatures and Checkpointing technology that reduces storage requirements and maintains final results. A successful checkpoint allows the user to discard the past history prior to the checkpoint, which significantly reduces storage requirements from the user’s perspective because the checkpoint is considered final and previous transactions cannot be reversed or challenged. Cryptographic economy aggregation signature technology that allows an operator to use bitfields to efficiently obtain a signature from a user at a proposed checkpoint.

Plasma Debit and More Feasible Plasma[June 2018]

One feature of Plasma Cash is that it cannot be sliced or combined. In general, this makes it difficult to use Plasma Cash as a payment transfer management mechanism. In June 2018, Dan Robinson, with the help of Kelvin Fichter, Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, and Karl Floersch, introduced a mechanism called Plasma Debit, This mechanism allows the exchange of divisible amounts. This mechanism, named Plasma Debit, is similar to paying with a Debit card. Each Plasma Debit coin, between the current coin’s owner and operator, is basically a two-way payment channel (like the multi-signature payment channel of the lightning network). This allows the operator to record microtransactions in any number of payment channels. This method is currently only applicable to single operators running Plasma chains.

Also in June 2018, Kelvin Fichter and Ben Jones, More Viable Plasma was introduced with the help of Vitalik Buterin, Li Xuanji, David Knott, Eva Beylin, and Kasima Tharnpipitchai. Like minimum available Plasma, it is often referred to simply as Plasma MoreVP, and is an extended version of MVP, but reorganizes the exit priority from input age priority to minimum input priority, and removes the confirmation signature.

There are currently over 100 Plasma discussion topics on ethresear.ch, and if you’re interested in Plasma solutions, you can find a lot of useful stuff there. Learnplasma is a great place to go if you are new to the field but want to learn the basics. Learnplasma is a site created by Kelvin Fichter and maintained by the community.

Market participant

OmiseGO began development in plasma- MVP in early January. It uses Plasma to build a decentralised exchange for its future payment network. In an update in July, they announced that they had spent some time cleaning up the repository and preparing to convert it to a hackathon-level Plasma MVP. “Basically, that means Plasma MVP will be used as a learning tool. The motivation is to get more people aware of Plasma, so that more developers can quickly build prototypes and applications on top of it.

In late June, Loom Network released their Plasma Cash version to enhance their NFT capabilities. Plasma Cash is a good use case for NFT because they provide a unique identifier on the Plasma chain and do not require a capital split operation. Loom has built a PlasmaChain, which acts as a layer 2 network hub connecting multiple side chains to the Ethereum network to allow faster and cheaper token transactions. You can find their report here: https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-cash

Plasma implementation of interest

OmiseGO (MVP-Python, Cash-Python):

https://github.com/omisego/plasma-contracts https://github.com/omisego/plasma-mvp https://github.com/omisego/plasma-cash

Loom Network (Cash-Python): https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-cash

BankEX (MVP-JS): https://github.com/BANKEX/PlasmaParentContract https://github.com/BANKEX/PlasmaETHexchange

Blockchian @ Berekley (MVP-GO): https://github.com/FourthState/plasma-mvp-rootchain https://github.com/FourthState/plasma-mvp-sidechain

DeepBlockchain (Cash-N/A): https://github.com/wolkdb/deepblockchains

Lucidity Tech (Cash-JS): https://github.com/luciditytech/lucidity-plasma-cash

Plasma is worth paying attention to

— Joseph Poon (Plasma) — Vitalik Buterin (Plasma) — Karl Floersch (Ethereum Foundation) — David Knott (OmiseGO) — Kelvin Fichter (OmiseGO) — Dan Robinson (Chain) — Xuanji Li (L4 Ventures) — Georgios Konstantopoulos (Loom Network)

conclusion

Plasma is evolving, it’s beautiful and exciting, and developers can do it in a variety of ways. Plasma is not a product in itself, but an idea, a specification, that guides developers on how to think about a second layer of technology that does not require a trusted operator to guarantee a user’s money. A lot of people are probably asking, “When can we actually use Plasma?” It’s hard to find someone who can give you an answer. Many implementations have a long way to go, especially Loom Network and OmiseGO. We still have a lot of work to do, especially in terms of user experience, because a lot of these solutions rely heavily on active user participation in order to eliminate fraud.

If there is one thing you can take away from this article, it is that there are a lot of good developers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of blockchain scalability to come up with safe, economical solutions that can be used. There will be various solutions, but we need to do it methodically to make sure we don’t jeopardize the entire blockchain community.

Original: https://media.consensys.net/the-state-of-plasma-1-6b48c1e4b295

By Kevin Zhang

Translation: Free and easy

Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/the-state-of-plasma)