The expansion plan of the new Ethereum: the past and present of Plasma (1)
The Plasma we are talking about specifically refers to Plasma, one of the second layer expansion solutions of Ethereum. It used to be a very promising second-layer expansion technology in the Ethereum system. The so-called second-layer expansion refers to adding a side-chain-like solution to expand the performance of Ethereum without changing the main chain of Ethereum.
Plasma was once very popular but now it is on the decline. This process is embarrassing, but it also left us with a lot of inspiration.
I will fully introduce the past and present of Plasma in a series of articles.
Let’s first pull the time back to August 2017. At that time, Ethereum was extremely popular because of ICO. Driven by ICO, the price of Ethereum almost reached its historical peak. Due to its extensive use by various ICO projects as a token issuance platform, Ethereum has become overcrowded and burdened.
At that time, researchers, developers, and even the Ethereum community were eagerly looking for ways to expand the performance of Ethereum and solve its congestion problem. The topic of Ethereum performance scaling is hot at various blockchain conferences.
It is in this situation that Plasma was born. When it came out, it claimed to be able to handle all financial transactions in the world.
Three years have passed, and the time has come to 2020. We are disappointed to find that the performance of Ethereum is still unbearable. Although Ethereum has defeated almost all kinds of public chains that once chanted "Ethereum Killer", and Ethereum 2.0 presents us with a bright future, the industry and the outside world still have not stopped exploring various performance expansion solutions.
Among them, many new solutions have emerged, especially Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup have received the most attention and voice, and they are even considered to be the best expansion solutions at present. Meanwhile, Plasma has gradually lost its aura.
So who exactly killed Plasma?
Let's go back to 2017, the year when the young Ethereum debuted in front of the public for the first time. As soon as it debuted, people imagined it to be omnipotent, and people thought that all off-chain assets could eventually be tokenized into Ethereum on-chain assets.
As long as the technical exchange meeting held in San Francisco is related to Ethereum, there are no seats, and there are not even enough standing seats. Among all the topics about Ethereum, the most criticized one is the poor performance of Ethereum.
At a face-to-face meeting in San Francisco, Vitalik and Joseph Poon published a paper introducing a second-layer scaling solution for Ethereum, which is Plasma.
The topic discussed at the exchange meeting was how to enable Ethereum to handle Visa card-level transactions. Vitalik and Joseph have great hopes for the nascent Plasma technology in the paper, claiming that it will allow Ethereum to process all transactions in the world. This enthusiasm infected the entire Ethereum community and developers, and then the entire community began to conduct research and discussions around Plasma.
How does plasma work?
In this paper by Vitalik and Joseph, Plasma is a new mechanism for building a MapReduce tree that includes a blockchain. Each node in the tree represents a blockchain. The blockchain represented by these nodes forms a large-scale and complex tree structure. Its structure diagram is as follows:
Not long after this paper was published, V God published a new paper to simplify the structure of this tree, and called this simplified tree MVP (Minimal Viable Plasma).
Before discussing MVP and Plasma in depth, we have to look at what a sidechain is. In the next article, we will explain the sidechain technology closely related to Plasma.
