The State of Plasma

Plasma Group has come out with a new design for optimistic exits that borrows inspiration from rollups (for both validity proofs and fraud proofs). The essence of this technique is to perform exits and checkpoints for the Plasma Chain optimistically, with minimal data posted on-chain, and only post necessary data in a stateless manner as calldata as needed, similarly to rollups. This can support several hundreds of exits per second with the current Ethereum chain’s capabilities, and is still under active research to formalize the limits and applicability of this technique.

To coordinate Plasma research, plasma.build, has been launched as a Plasma-exclusive center of research, complementary to the well-know ethresear.ch research forum. In addition to a bunch of interesting topics and improvements surrounding Plasma predicates, there has been a strong push for standardizing Plasma variants and APIs, along with documenting progress and changes with a new “PLIP” format. In tandem with the launch of this forum, the Plasma implementers calls have resumed in earnest.

LeapDAO’s Plasma Leap testnet suffered a complete shutdown in June due to two physical validator machines with the same key signing two conflicting block thanks to network issues. Lesson learned: if you’re a validator, don’t use hot backups (yes, this applies to Eth 2.0 as well)!

Cryptoeconmoics Lab’s Plasma Chamber and predicate research was presented at Scaling Ethereum as an alternative implementation of Plasma Group’s Plasma Cashflow with interesting experimental features, including batched cryptoeconomics checkpointing and predicate support. Additionally, their blog has many Plasma explainers translated for a Japanese audience.

Georgios Konstantopoulos, an independent researcher, let out a spicy tweetstorm earlier this month on the distinction between side chains and Plasma chains. TL;DR: unqualified side chains are not Layer-2 because they do not have the same security and trustlessness guarantees as the main chain. They can be considered separate blockchains, and as such are not a scaling solution. Plasma and channels, through their exit games, have these guarantees and thus are proper Layer-2 solutions.

OmiseGO’s Plasma MoreVP implementation has been chugging along, with several development updates to make it ready for public use, but otherwise has mostly stalled on the research side. This is mostly due to the use of the fundamentally broken Plasma M[ore]VP design, which suffers from the unsolved mass exit problem, rather than a coin-based Plasma Cash variant.

See Also (non-exhaustive)