What Is Ethereum Trying To Achieve With Plasma?

The Ethereum network is actively working on boosting transaction capacity and as of recently, has hired the startup Optimism which wants to lead this change. As the crypto news today show, the network’s throughput is limited to roughly 15 transactions per second which is why Ethereum cannot become a widespread platform for automating functions such as supply chain management and loans – unless it scales. So, what many people are asking themselves is what is Ethereum trying to achieve with Optimism (which is) the former nonprofit Plasma Group?

To begin with, Optimism was a former nonprofit organizaiton named Plasma Group which was focused on building a second layer for Ethereum as described by the creator of the cryptocurrency, Vitalik Buterin and his co-creator Joseph Poon in a 2017 paper.

Then, in January 2020, the team was again in the Ethereum latest news for announcing that it was transitioning from a research collective to a for-profit startup called Optimism, backed by $3.5 million from partners like Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures.

So, what is Ethereum trying to achieve with Plasma is simple – the startup will launch an alpha testing environment today called the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM). This will be a machine based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and will give Optimism’s speedier second layer as well as the same smart-contract functionality of the underlying blockchain.

“The OVM enables support for all existing Ethereum developer tooling including Solidity and Vyper, testing frameworks like Truffle, wallets like Metamask, and libraries like Web3.js,” the company said in a statement.

“We designed the OVM to be used as drop-in replacement for the EVM inside of Optimistic Rollup.”

By making the smart contracts work above the base layer, what is Ethereum trying to achieve is make the network scalable. As the Optimism co-founder Ben Jones said, the second layer will eventually incorporate optimistic rollups, which process more transactions faster.

Even though the details of how this system would work are “still up in the air” according to Jones, they will probably refer to mining dynamics and network fees. For now, it is too soon to say how the OVM will work but clearly, the Plasma solution which Vitalik Buterin had are far from dead now.