Vitalik Buterin & Joseph Poon to Scale Smart Contracts using Plasma Contracts

As posted on ETHNEWS, www.ethnews.com A working draft of Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts, a whitepaper by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and co-author of the Lightning Network whitepaper Joseph Poon, was released August 10, 2017. The paper lays out a plan to massively scale forward the number of transactions per second that the Ethereum blockchain is capable of processing.  

The proposed Plasma framework may enable the Ethereum blockchain (or any other blockchain it integrates with) to advance dramatically. A number of features come together to make this possible, and the protocol itself draws upon the integrations of tools such as proof-of-stake(PoS), Nakamoto Consensus (widely referred to as proof-of-work), a cluster scaling solution called MapReduce, and an incentivized structure to deter byzantine behavior by participants. These attributes coalesce in a manner which allows smart contracts, or executable distributed code contracts, to become scalable. Fraud proofs are used to manage data that is recorded for validation purposes, reducing the load on the network. As per the draft, “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.”