Plasma
is a scaling technique where operations are moved off-chain into a secondary , where they can be performed faster and at lower cost.
The idea is based on “sidechains”, originally . Plasma introduced a novel improvement: unlike on a sidechain, a user of a Plasma chain would always have a guarantee that they can withdraw their assets to main-chain, even if the operator of that Plasma chain tried to censor or steal from them.
Plasma research has made large strides since the paper release in August 2017, though the technology remains further from production than state channels. The year began with only a few teams actively working on Plasma, as the research community began to explore various tradeoff and design choices within a family of related techniques derived from the original paper.
The majority of these designs have focused on the simplest use case: payments. These designs include Plasma MVP () and Plasma Cash (, and the subject of ). More recently, researchers have begun exploring zero-knowledge-proof based Plasma-like designs like the “Rollup” ( in September).
Each of these can be augmented to mitigate their shortcomings, while minimizing tradeoffs. This unfortunately resulted in a “naming meme”, where each new tweak on an existing design was given a unique name, leading to significant confusion for anyone not deeply involved in the research community. Useful taxonomies that divide up the design space are a work in progress.
At the same time, research continued into expanding Plasma beyond payments. While this work continues, current consensus among researchers is that an optimized “full EVM” plasma (which could run any smart contract) is a
This broad exploration of a large design space has been productive for researchers, but practical implementations are still mostly theoretical or in early stages. One exception is the Plasma Cash implementation built by Loom, .
5. Zero Knowledge is coming
Over the past year the developer community began to appreciate that new zero-knowledge technology will have a significant impact on technologies. Over the past 12 months, it has felt like every technical conversation in the community takes the form of “well, we can do it this way for now, but of course once we have good zkSTARKs, it will be like this…”.
Most people in the crypto industry will have heard of , most famously used in the privacy Zcash. But zero-knowledge technology won’t just be used for privacy. It has important implications for many scalability techniques as well. Recent research and development into this technology (specifically, a class of zero-knowledge tech called zkSTARKs) may dramatically lower the computational cost required to use them in production, opening up new opportunities to integrate them with programmable bitcoins like .
In short, let us prove that some operation happened, without having to share the underlying data. If the verification of that proof can be done cheaply enough, then it could let smart-contracts verify that an operation took place off-chain. This means that we could, for instance, conduct . Or, we could conduct intensive computation off-chain, and still have it verified on-chain.
2018 was the year that the full potential of zero-knowledge tech started to sink in. In January, Eli Ben-Sasson & his co-authors The community began to work on how this technology can be used for scaling and in conjunction with other technologies, . On the layer 1 side, developers made plans to ensure that ETH 2.0 has the requisite support for zkSTARKs, like STARK.
New zkSNARK libraries were released, like iden3’s and , adding to existing libraries like . In December 2018 a team at scaling proof of concept, later released on testnet as the () . BarryWhiteHat on using zkSNARKs on . And Ben-Sasson & others launched , a company aimed at commercial applications of zkSTARKs, and received a from the Foundation.
6. The Road to ETH 2.0
ETH 2.0 is the name for the long-term research and development of the platform, incorporating fundamental base-layer upgrades like and .
The history of ETH 2.0, aka Serenity, has featured false starts, dead ends and more false starts. But in 2018, the long-term roadmap began to solidify.
In January 2018, the , though it suffered from networking issues that made it difficult to use. A few months later however, the research direction moved away from FFG, and towards a plan that would see Casper and Sharding implemented together. In Q2, consensus began to form around what is now the .
Explaining ETH 2.0 is beyond the scope of this post. If you want to get caught up, we recommend EthHub’s summary , , or .
Once the research vision was clear, it was possible to for what became known as “ETH 2.0”. This allowed to begin implementing that specification into client software. At the end of 2018, there were at least 8 teams building clients for ETH 2.0. Recently, Ben Edgington also began a .
While all roadmaps are subject to change and projections are uncertain, the beacon chain is expected to go live in 2019, with a beacon chain testnet scheduled to happen in the next few months. The beacon chain will allow ETH holders to choose to transfer their ETH to the beacon chain in order to earn rewards as a validator. However, that ETH cannot be transferred back to the “ETH 1” chain.
The next phase will include shards, which will be managed by the beacon chain. It’s also possible that the the current proof of work chain, somewhat similar to the way that FFG was once planned a year ago to be used for finalization.
While the roadmap has considerably firmed up, there are still sharding. While the first few phases are relatively clear and there are no , plenty of interesting research and implementation problems remain for future phases so that we get to a truly scalable layer 1 of .
What did it all mean?
We warned you this post would be long. But it’s still not comprehensive. A lot more happened in the ecosystem this year, including a few developments worth noting quickly here:
- Ethereum core developers to the current Ethereum protocol (“Ethereum 1.X”), while ETH 2.0 is under development
- Regulators across the world , including securities regulators. Many jurisdictions are now in the process of deciding how digital assets, like the kind that can be created on Ethereum, are treated under law.
- Non-plasma sidechain technology, like and , launched into production
- UX made progress, like and
- The Ethereum Foundation to fund critical work from across the community.
Should we view this year as a success, or a setback?
A strange thing about this moment in ’s history is that you will receive wildly different answers depending on someone’s frame of reference.
If your baseline is 2015–2016, you remember when was still firmly an experiment, with virtually no users, developer tools, or even applications. The contrast with 2018 is startling. There are real applications now, live on mainnet, that provide real utility to their users — even if those user bases remain small. The thing we believed could happen, which may have once seemed impossible, is starting to happen, in bits and pieces.
But if your frame of reference is the hyped up narrative sold to you by ICO whitepapers and glossy keynote conferences, then it must be disappointing. Mass not only has not yet arrived, but remains over the horizon. There are hard problems yet to be solved, and the technical progress zigs and zags, instead of following the comforting straight line of a tidy infographic roadmap.
Welcome to the real. There are experiments to be run, lessons to be learned, and to solve. Grab a shovel, and see you next year.
Published at Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:12:04 +0000
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