An Introduction to Plasma

As you may know, blockchains are not as effective for processing an enormous amount of transactions as a centralised system like the VISA network that can handle as more as 2,000 transactions per second. Plasma is a scalability solution for blockchains. The Plasma solution was proposed this year by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin. This interesting talk explains how Plasma works and shows how smart contracts can be implemented on such a system. It also explains why not all contracts are suitable as is. Primitives for the programming language Solidity are suggested that could ease cross-chain communications in such systems.

You can find the Plasma white paper and more informations on plasma.io.

For a payment-channel design with a different settlement model, read Bitcoin Lightning channel, routing, and payment fundamentals.

The talk was held by Christian Reitwiessner who is working at the Ethereum Fondation and is the creator of the Solidity programing language used fo developing Ethereum smart contracts. You can find the slides of the talks here and the text version of the talk here.

We are excited to see the future of the Plasma technology.

A current network-level comparison is available through the Bitcoin Lightning capacity and channel explorer.

The same engineering term can describe different protocol rules. Use the protocol-level Bitcoin versus Ethereum guide.

Turn the example into production evidence

A working demo is the beginning of verification, not the end. Add tests for failure paths, inspect every permission, and record the chain, contract address, compiler, and dependency versions used for the deployment.

Check behavior

Test expected inputs, boundary values, reverts, events, and calls made to other contracts.

Check operations

Plan key storage, monitoring, pause or upgrade authority, and a response if an assumption stops being true.