Cryptoeconomics Lab’s Plasma Chamber allows for a quick and safe Plasma chain with instantaneous confirmation
If you’ve been following the technical developments over the last few years, you know that so much has already been done, and people have dedicated so much energy to invent solutions to the technical issues that stand in the ’s way: many ideas are on their way, many protocols and models are being built to fit with each project’s specific goals, and a variety of standards are invented for different use-cases.
Several protocols are also being researched to solve the scalability problem, also known as the Trilemma: meaning that between security, decentralization, and scalability, you always have to sacrifice one of them.
And as decentralization and safety are both ’s sacro-saint fundamentals, until now, scalability is usually the weakest point of the triangle. Which is why some passionate minds today are working on to drastically improve ’s scalability while maintaining the highest guarantees of security and decentralization, both fundamental qualities of that can’t be replaced by traditional databases.
One of the most promising solutions to the scalability issue is Plasma, co-created by Vitalik and Joseph Poon, and researched by our team at Cryptoeconomics Lab: a network of child-chains, offloading a lot of work from the root chain, to which it commits only very light instead of the full blocks. The goal is to accelerate the inspection process, and scale from 14 to millions of transactions per second.
In this model, one single operator validates the Plasma child chain’s transactions, which is much quicker than waiting for a lot of nodes in the network to agree with each other to validate them. But to resist potential malicious behaviors from this operator, the transactions he commits remain pending for a long period of time, during which users can challenge the transactions, meaning they can check that they are valid, and have them removed if they’re not: for instance, in the case of a double spend.
Fantastic: thanks to the combination of the exit game and ’s security to confirm finality, child chains are now secure, and thanks to all the work offloaded from to the Plasma chain, the rock-secure is now also fast.
Still, lightfast child chains now face slow blocks confirmation, due to the pending transactions’ challenge period.
So how does Alice pay for her last-minute travel so that her transaction is complete right away?
At Cryptoeconomics Lab, we believe that Bob and Alice are right, and we provide them with a way to jump in the plane in just the time to pack up their stuff: what we call Fast Finality.
In essence, Fast Finality is an option that a service provider (in our example, the travel company) will buy from the Plasma chain operator, and most likely provide in return to its (Alice or Bob), thanks to which the transaction will not be pending for days, but be processed immediately.
So how does that work?
First things first, who plays the roles: Alice is Alice, let’s call the Service Provider or merchant TravelWorld, and the Operator is most likely a legally registered entity, that has, 1) the ability to continuously run a network, 2) absolutely no interest in being associated with fraudulent behaviors, not only for its reputation but also because of the possibility for disputes to end up in court, and 3) a huge collateral capacity, to be able to refund potentially all users at once in case something goes wrong with their transactions. Example of such an operator: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
But don’t worry hearing « Amazon »: remember, Amazon doesn’t have access to anyone’s identity nor personal information. Amazon is strictly receiving transactions’ impersonal numbers (Plasma TxHashes), compressing these numbers into a Merkle tree, and sending the root hash to the root chain.
Now what happens when Alice wants to go to Bahamas right now?
Alice sends a transaction with her signature to TravelWorld. TravelWorld forwards it to Amazon Web Services, the operator of the Plasma chain. TravelWorld also buys a non-fungible Fast Finality from AWS, in exchange for Amazon to process Alice’s transaction right now.
The operator, AWS, sends back the transaction to the merchant, TravelWorld, now signed both by Alice and Amazon, and also takes care of including it in the next Plasma block, and of committing the appropriate Merkle Root to the root chain.
Having in hand a transaction signed by Alice and confirmed by the operator, the merchant can now send this transaction to the root chain ( L1), like he would send a customer’s check to his bank, assured that he will receive his money.
Duration of the whole operation: 2 seconds.
TravelWorld can now issue the flight ticket for dear Alice.
In this model, the merchant can’t be fraudulent because he needs both signatures of Alice and of the operator, and Alice can not be fraudulent because she doesn’t have access to a sensitive part of the model. The operator can be fraudulent, but the challenges protocol allows the merchant to prove that although he bought the Fast Finality , Amazon didn’t process it quickly (Amazon can produce a counter-proof, and two disputes’ rounds of proofs production in both directions are allowed), and in case it can’t be proven computationally, then it can always be proven in court and punished, which is not interesting for the operator.
And as always, if the operator makes malicious actions such as block withholding or double spend, any user can dispute him within 2 weeks after the Fast Finality confirmation. In case the operator is proven fraudulent, his collateral is withdrawn and he loses it, which he will also want to avoid.
All boxes are checked: scalability, decentralization, security.
With Plasma Chamber, the whole process speeds up, and thanks to its Fast Finality feature, finality confirmation is instantaneous: is now fast, trustless and safe.
Know more
To know more about Plasma Chamber and see what it can do for you, use the Plasma Chamber SDK to develop your applications, or simply get in touch with the team, please check , or ’s profile on Medium. You can also hear Yuriko introducing Plasma Chamber at in Sydney on 2019/4/13. Thanks to the team at Cryptoeconomics Lab, especially Yuriko Nishijima, and for their kind time answering my questions about the technology behind Plasma Chamber. Remaining errors are my own.
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Author’s note: I’m the content manager for the European Union Observatory & Forum, an initiative led by ConsenSys for the European Commission. If you wish to get in touch with me, I’m not such a heavy tweeter but you can find me on . And if you need a researcher / writer in Tokyo, don’t think twice and hit me up.
Published at Mon, 08 Apr 2019 05:06:48 +0000
