Vitalik's New Blockchain Venture PLASMA: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin

Abstract: Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide. These smart contracts are incentivized to continue operation autonomously via network transaction fees, which is ultimately reliant upon the underlying blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) to enforce transactional state transitions.

We propose a method for decentralized autonomous applications to scale to process not only financial activity, but also construct economic incentives for globally persistent data services, which may produce an alternative to centralized server farms.

Plasma is composed of two key parts of the design: Reframing all blockchain computation into a set of MapReduce functions, and an optional method to do Proof-of-Stake token bonding on top of existing blockchains with the understanding that the Nakamoto Consensus incentives discourage block withholding.

This construction is achieved by composing smart contracts on the main blockchain using fraud proofs whereby state transitions can be enforced on a parent blockchain. We compose blockchains into a tree hierarchy, and treat each as an individual branch blockchain with enforced blockchain history and MapReducable computation committed into merkle proofs. By framing one's ledger entry into a child blockchain which is enforced by the parent chain, one can enable incredible scale with minimized trust (presuming root blockchain availability and correctness).

The greatest complexity around global enforcement of non-global data revolves around data availability and block withholding attacks, Plasma has mitigations for this issue by allowing for exiting faulty chains while also creating mechanisms to incentivize and enforce continued correct execution of data.

As only merkleized commitments are broadcast periodically to the root blockchain (i.e. Ethereum) during non-faulty states, this can allow for incredibly scalable, low cost transactions and computation. Plasma enables persistently operating decentralized applications at high scale.

Read Paper Here (PDF)

FAQ and website coming soon.

Draft is in-progress and may be frequently updated in the next week(s).

(originally published on Plasma.io)

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