February 6, 2025
Ethereum’s rollups are ‘gold standard’ but Plasma needs a revisit: Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the team currently working on the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) should revisit Plasma, the once-famous Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution.

Invented in 2017, Plasma moves data and computation (except deposits, withdrawals, and Merkle roots) to an off-chain environment.

It was replaced by optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) aggregation because these two solutions provided cheaper client data storage costs and “unmatched” security properties, Buterin explained In a post on November 14 (Twitter).

Buterin said rollups are still the “gold standard,” but Plasma is an “underrated design space” that shouldn’t be forgotten.

“Plasma can bring significant security upgrades to chains that would otherwise become verification chains,” Buterin added.

“ZK-EVM is finally coming to fruition this year, which provides a great opportunity to re-explore this design space and come up with more efficient structures to simplify the developer experience and protect user funds.”

Like Plasma, validum moves data and calculations off-chain, but implements ZK proofs to verify transactions. Plasma, on the other hand, uses fraud proofs – which is much slower.

Buterin believes that improvements to ZK proofs (such as validity proofs) address past limitations of Plasma, making it more feasible as a scaling solution.

Buterin admits that applying Plasma to applications other than payments will also prove to be Plasma’s Achilles’ heel before ZK proves to enter the mainstream.

Buterin expects the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem to continue to develop through a variety of technical approaches.

related: Has Ethereum quietly given up on Plasma?

Minimal Viable Plasma, Plasma Cash and Plasma Cashflow are iterations derived from Plasma.

Polygon Labs, a company focused on Ethereum Layer 2 scaling, implemented Plasma in 2019 but has since implemented several other solutions.

Part of the reason for moving away from Plasma is that Plasma Group, a non-profit research firm, announced that they would cease work on Ethereum-based scalability in January 2020.

OMG, the token of the OMG Network using Plasma, surged 28.6% to $0.78 in the three hours following Buterin’s announcement. according to Go to CoinGecko. However, it has since fallen 14.3% to $0.67.