Plasma – what is the interesting technology?

Due to the high popularity of Etherium and its own low bandwidth, back in 2017 Vitalik Buterin’s team with Joseph Poon began thinking about second-tier solutions that would increase blockchain throughput without requiring an upgrade of the core network. Joseph Poon was the author of the Lightning Network, a second-tier solution for Bitcoin that allows you to instantly send small amounts of BTC within the network without requiring a ten-minute wait. Poon developed the same concept for Ethereum, it was called Plasma. It was implemented by Omise, one of the largest payment providers in Asia.

Omise’s idea was simple – to implement a network in which the cost of a transaction would be less than the fees of Visa and Mastercard; to use this network themselves, and to connect other large companies with which they already have business ties. Development began in 2017.

The developers originally planned to use a sharding tree architecture, in which shards could be made up of other shards, and so on to infinity, which would achieve any scalability. But the reality turned out to be that this is not technologically feasible at the moment.

So how does OMG Plasma work?

Architecturally, there are three components to the network.

• The first is a smart contract that sends transaction information to the main Etherium network.
• The second component is the operator, which provides the necessary processing power for the smart contracts.
• And the third is a watcher, a program that makes sure that the operators do not harm the network.

These three components combine to form a network.

As a result, OMG Plasma is capable of achieving a rate of 4,000 transactions per second with complete security of the transferred assets. Any ERC20 token can be transferred, and the transaction cost is only ⅓ of the cost of gas in the main network.

Quite a number of companies are interested in Plasma, and some major exchanges have even transferred all their USDT transactions to OMG Network, which allows them to save and transfer funds much faster. In addition, Nomura, one of the largest Japanese financial holdings, Shinhan, a major Asian bank, have been spotted on the list of partnerships, and there is information about negotiations with Toyota. In any case, OMG Plasma is now one of the most solid technologies on Etherium.