Ethereum co-founder and chief scientist Vitalik Buterin wrote a blog post on November 14th advocating for greater research into plasma-based scaling solutions.
Buterin argues that advances in cryptographic proofs of validity are allowing developers to overcome many of the problems previously encountered with Plasma, and offers Plasma as a design that could underpin EVM validators.
Validiums have recently gained traction as a model for Layer 2 scaling solutions, with Polygon announcing plans to merge its PoS Chain and ZkEVM networks into a single zero-knowledge Validium back in June. Polygon described Validium as a “lower-cost, higher-throughput sibling of a rollup” that publishes and stores data off-chain to further reduce transaction fees.
Plasma was introduced in 2017 in an article co-authored by Buterin and Joseph Poon, the co-founder of Lightning Labs – the team behind the Bitcoin sidechain Lightning Network. Plasma-based solutions store all calculations and data off-chain, except for deposits, withdrawals and Merkle roots.
“This opens the door to very large scalability gains that are not affected by on-chain data availability,” Buterin said.
Projects using Plasma increased in 2018, including Plasma Cash, Minimal Viable Plasma, Plasma Prime and Omise Go in the fourth quarter of 2017. However, since then the technology has been overshadowed by rollups powered by Ethereum’s leading Layer 2 scaling solutions were adopted, including Arbitrum, Optimism and ZkSync Era.
Buterin says recent advances in proof of validity development (also known as ZK-SNARKS) are once again opening the door to exploring plasma-based designs. “The biggest challenge in making Plasma usable for payments, client-side data storage, can be efficiently addressed with proof of validity,” he said.
Previous Plasma solutions have encountered challenges when dealing with fungible tokens, but Buterin points to innovative strategies to address this issue and prevent double spending. Buterin added that Plasma’s previous lack of compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine – Ethereum’s core smart contract engine – can also be overcome through the use of proof of validity.
“In 2023, plasma is an underappreciated area of design,” Buterin said. “Rollups remain the gold standard and have unmatched security properties…However, with Plasma we can completely bypass the data availability issue and significantly reduce transaction fees. Plasma can be a significant security upgrade for chains that would otherwise be Validium.”
Still, Buterin acknowledged that Plasma is not suitable for all Web3 applications, such as: B. collateralized debt positions, liquidity pools on automated market maker DEXes, and other protocols where assets would have no “clear beneficial owner.”
Data availability
But not everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem shares Buterin’s enthusiasm for Plasma.
“It’s kind of funny that we’re talking about plasma in 2023,” said Anthony Sassano, host of The Daily Gwei podcast. “Back in 20217, 2018, a little bit of 2019, it was all the rage [but] Because there were so many restrictions…we finally decided [rollups].”
“ZkEVMs and [data availability] The solutions are making such great progress that I don’t think it’s worth going back to the complexity of Plasma exit games,” tweeted Martin Koppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis Chain. Koppelmann’s post was liked by Mihailo Bjelic, co-founder of Polygon.
Ethereum’s upcoming Dencun upgrade will include features designed to improve data availability for Layer 2 networks and further reduce transaction fees associated with transactions on L2.
In May, Lens, the decentralized social media protocol owned by Aave, introduced Momoka, its custom Layer 3 scaling solution. Momoka exclusively serves Lens and stores data off-chain to keep transaction fees low despite the high volume of transactions associated with social media applications.
The key value proposition of Celestia, the recently high-growth modular blockchain, is to ensure data availability for transactions.
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