Ethereum’s Plasma Group Creates New Crypto Glossary Entry with Plapps or Plasma Apps Introduction

The Plasma Group recently published that they have built a general-purpose Plasma design allowing developers “to build a broad class of smart contracts.” These contracts are known as plapps, short for Plasma apps.

Announcing a framework for generalized plasma: https://t.co/1jgSamqiGp

— Plasma Group 🔮 (@plasma_group) February 28, 2019

The official announcement reads:

“Writing a new plapp is as simple as writing a special type of smart contract, called a predicate contract, and deploying it to Ethereum. Anyone can use your plapp by interacting with your predicate contract, and it all happens on the plasma chain — where it’s much, much cheaper.”

Plasma Group is dedicated to the creation of an open plasma implementation for the greater Ethereum community. It’s their mission to push layer 2 scaling forward by exploring the full potential of the plasma framework. No matter who you are, you can be a part of this community. Their donors include OmiseGO and independent individuals within the OMG community, LinkTime, Status, ConsenSys, and Gitcoin.

A plasma chain is a blockchain that can have any functionality and any consensus mechanism. The only limitation now is that all state transitions on the root chain (the Ethereum blockchain) must be tracked. Plasma is a blockchain layer 2 scaling solution to scale blockchain systems to millions or potentially billions of transactions per second (in contrast to, for instance, the current limits of 20–30 transactions per second for Ethereum), while preserving security and decentralization.

At ETH Denver held earlier this month, they used this new framework to create bitcoin lightning contracts in a predicate contract on our plasma chain. Since then, we built a python proof-of-concept that demonstrates how things work under the hood. The announcement concludes by saying:

“We designed all of this with the goal of making plapp development as easy as possible, but implementation always teaches you something new. This understanding will allow us to build better tooling for developers.”