On January the 4th, Ethereum value has hit its’ new record value, climbing to about 1.35 million transactions a day. Experts claim that Ethereum scalability is close to its’ theoretical limit. However, in comparison with the classic payment systems, like VISA or MasterCard, this figure does not surprise at all.
It seems ridiculous to speculate about the Blockchain revolution, when it takes Ethereum at least 15 seconds to process 65,000 transactions, while Visa completes the same amount only in a second. With an average cost of $3 per single transaction, it is impossible to trade on such slow and insufficient platform.
Imagine if someone would offer you to complete 100,000 transactions on any blockchain platform in just one second, paying only for a deposit commission and the ETH withdrawal, with absolutely no transaction fee?
Seems surreal, right?
Nevertheless, the BANKEX PLASMA technology is already here!
Brief history of PLASMA
By enabling the smart contracts to a large audience, Ethereum has opened up fantastic opportunities literally to every technology, business, and industry sector looking to enrich their activity.
At the beginning of the cryptomania everything seemed perfect – investors were mimicking each others’ actions as crypto markets were continuing to appreciate in value. However, our hopes and dreams were crushed at once by low scalability and insufficiency of Ethereum network that makes up every second crypto transaction in the world. If you wanted to buy some popular tokens at the very start of crowdsale, you have probably failed – Ethereum was bloated and overloaded. During the last summer, we have received a lot of such complaints.
To answer this challenge Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin in August 2017 released a white paper, describing the new protocol for scalable autonomous smart contracts and called it PLASMA. The main idea was to compose sub-blockchains with a smart contract under a parent Ethereum blockchain. Thus, it is now possible to process transactions on our own by forming blocks in this sub-chain and regularly sew them on to parent blockchain by sending a small portion of information instead of a full block content. This approach allows achieving a very high productivity keeping all advantages of parent Ethereum blockchain.
“Anyone can create a custom Plasma chain for smart contract scalability for many different use cases. Plasma is a series of smart contracts which allows for many blockchains within a root blockchain. The root blockchain enforces the state in the Plasma chain. The root chain is the enforcer of all computation globally but is only computed and penalized if there is proof of fraud. Many Plasma blockchains can co-exist with their business logic and smart contract terms. In Ethereum, Plasma would be composed of EVM smart contracts running directly on Ethereum, but only processing tiny commitments which can represent an incredibly large amount of computation and financial LEDGER entries in non-Byzantine cases.” – Plasma White Paper.
However, a problem cannot be resolved only by means of a white paper – someone must write the code and build the infrastructure to make this theoretical feature available as a network service. And the rally began – developers have understood, that PLASMA protocol implementation would have an extremely high demand in diverse business context.
BANKEX PLASMA Implementation
BANKEX Foundation technical team developed Plasma-like protocol when participating in the world’s largest Ethereum hackathon ETHWaterloo, with more than 400 other developers in October 2017.
This was taken as a prototype solution for the world’s first private blockchain that supports Plasma Protocol, which will allow users to transfer different assets directly to each other leaving intermediaries behind and solving one of the acutest problems in the present crypto world — high gas consumption.
We’ve got a traction from Vitalik Buterin https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/931323377008046080
The code is available for public audit on BANKEX Github: https://github.com/BankEx/ethwaterloo-hackathon
Where we are now: Beta 1
Beta 1 version is available at https://plasma.bankex.com/. Via this technology you can easily test how fast Plasma protocol is able to work. However, there are some limitations: Parent Ethereum smart contract currently is ready on 80% — one of the drawbacks is that it does not have the control functions yet. In other words, the user must utterly trust us, without any necessity to inspect and check the blocks’ validity. For technology testing it is not critical, and, of course, these functions will appear soon.
PLASMA First Steps Roadmap
