Plasma chains
A plasma chain is a separate blockchain that is anchored to the main Ethereum chain, and uses fraud proofs (like Optimistic rollups) to arbitrate disputes. These chains are sometimes referred to as "child" chains as they are essentially smaller copies of the Ethereum Mainnet. Merkle trees enable creation of a limitless stack of these chains that can work to offload bandwidth from the parent chains (including Mainnet). These derive their security through fraud proofs, and each child chain has its own mechanism for block validation.
Prerequisites
You should have a good understanding of all the foundational topics and a high-level understanding of Ethereum scaling. Implementing scaling solutions such as Plasma is an advanced topic as the technology is less battle-tested, and continues to be researched and developed.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| High throughput, low cost per transaction. | Does not support general computation. Only basic token transfers, swaps, and a few other transaction types are supported via predicate logic. |
| Good for transactions between arbitrary users (no overhead per user pair if both are established on the plasma chain) | Need to periodically watch the network (liveness requirement) or delegate this responsibility to someone else to ensure the security of your funds. |
| Relies on one or more operators to store data and serve it upon request. | |
| Withdrawals are delayed by several days to allow for challenges. For fungible assets this can be mitigated by liquidity providers, but there is an associated capital cost. |
Use Plasma
Multiple projects provide implementations of Plasma that you can integrate into your dapps:
- OMG Network
- Polygon (previously Matic Network)
- Gluon
- Gazelle
- LeapDAO
Further reading
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