Two months ago, we announced that we were adding Plasma Cash to Loom Network.

Today, we’re proud to release our initial implementation of Plasma Cash, which allows the use of ERC721 non-fungible tokens on Loom sidechains.

That means users will now be able to have gas-less transactions and sub-second confirmation times on sidechains, all while having their token fully backed by the security of Ethereum mainnet.

Plasma Cash Smart Contracts Now Open Source

Developers, you can find the source code for our implementation on our github:

https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-erc721

We’ve also announced our release on ethresear.ch for public auditing by the Plasma community.

We look forward to future contributions from other developers and projects building on top of our initial code release.

Current Implementation and Next Steps

Since our initial focus at Loom Network is building blockchain games like Zombie Battleground, our initial implementation of Plasma Cash is specifically for ERC721 non-fungible tokens.

Porting the code to handle ETH, ERC20s, and other types of tokens is fairly trivial, but will require more comprehensive tests.

For our purposes, being able to utilize Plasma Cash for non-fungible tokens like ERC721s opens up a number of important use cases in gaming. Thus, this was the very first use case we chose to tackle.

Next Steps — Token Splitting and Merging

Our next steps are to add support for ERC20 tokens and ETH.

Research is still ongoing on efficient constructions for token splitting and merging on the Plasma chain, and currently no clear consensus has been reached on the best way to move forward with this. A research construction called Plasma Debit aims to partially solve this issue

We will be actively collaborating with the Plasma research team over the coming months to find the best way to work with token splitting on Plasma chains.