The State of Plasma

Plasma Group has been hard at work implementing predicates on top of their Plasma Cashflow codebase. Unlike Plasma Cash[flow] and Plasma M[ore]VP, which only allow for simple monetary transfers, ‘predicates’ allow for a measure of smart contract execution. Specifically, verification of predicates is essentially what Bitcoin Script allows; anything that you can do with Script (which is a lot! ) can be done with this, including linking to the Lightning Network. Verification of stateless predicates, however, does not offer the same range of functionality as execution of stateful contracts (which is only available on the Ethereum base chain in this context).

LeapDAO has implemented DAI transfers on their Plasma Leap chain. This solves one important roadblock for mass adoption of cryptocurrencies: requiring users to hold volatile assets. The guarantees on fund safety promised by Plasma also make this potentially superior to solutions like xDAI, which rely on an honest centralized operator.

Despite the known limitations of Plasma MVP (the sum of safe transaction throughput of all Plamsa MVP chains is constant-factor upper-bounded by the cheap available block space on Ethereum) and suggestions to use a Plasma Cash variant instead, OmiseGO has bravely pushed forward to an alpha release of their Plasma MoreVP, Ari. Hoard, in partnership with OmiseGO, has continued work on Plasma Dog, a game using OmiseGO’s Plasma framework. Unfortunately, rewards in the game reduce to an obfuscated faucet; a good first step, but a significant amount of effort on researching proper cryptoeconomics for games will be needed.

Loom has passed a number of milestones, including adding many external validators to their PlasmaChain and building numerous exciting game-oriented applications on top of it. On the research side, Konstantopoulos presented requirements for implemented Plasma Cash-like constructions on top of Bitcoin Script, which could potentially make it simpler and cheaper to implement on top of Ethereum.

See Also (non-exhaustive)