Bankex researchers announced test results this month from Plasma, a second-layer scaling solution for Ethereum developed earlier this year by co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Lightning co-author Joseph
Bankex researchers announced test results this month from Plasma, a second-layer scaling solution for Ethereum developed earlier this year by co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Lightning co-author Joseph Poon. The protocol addresses a mounting problem: transaction congestion that drives up costs for moving ether.
CryptoKitties, the digital collectibles game, consumes about 20 percent of Ethereum's daily bandwidth on its own. Each asset trade triggers a cascade of transactions settled on the main blockchain, straining the network. Bankex put Plasma through its paces on Rinkeby, Ethereum's public test network, to measure whether the protocol could expand the system's transaction capacity.
Bankex's testing proved encouraging. On December 14th, the team ran Plasma on Rinkeby and measured throughput at around 5,000 transactions per second. That's 250 times Ethereum's current speed. "During the first test of the Plasma protocol, conducted December 14th on the Rinkeby test network, the transaction per second ratio is estimated to be around 5 thousand per second. This is 250 times faster than Ethereum's current bandwidth. The working version of Plasma is expected to boost transaction speed to 100 000 transactions per second. And all this at zero cost," the Bankex developers said.
Plasma operates on a straightforward principle: individual users shouldn't bear the cost of validating every transaction across the network. That would tank efficiency. Christian Reitwiessner, who leads Ethereum's Solidity development team and the C++ implementation, put it this way: "Scalability does not come from the fact that blockchains are relieved from their load by creating a big number of smaller chains and moving the transactions there. Scalability is only achieved once a user does not have to verify every single transaction that is sent to the system."
The solution chains multiple compatible blockchains designed for specific functions. This design can push Ethereum from 10 transactions per second toward tens of thousands per second, matching what Visa and the New York Stock Exchange process.
CryptoKitties forced the issue. The game became the first application to stress-test whether Ethereum could handle decentralized trading and asset exchanges at scale. Ethereum cannot yet host centralized exchanges with millions of concurrent users. Plasma could change that.
Full implementation on Ethereum's main network will take months or years of development.
