The Plasma Team to Stop Ethereum Scalability Research

For layer-two scaling solutions, the non-profit used this money to research to solve practical obstacles. The team identified several of its key achievements, including the creation of Plasma Cashflow implementations, the release of a generalized plasma specification and Optimistic Rollup coining.

It largely served to make Plasma sidechains into fully-fledged blockchains that embrace smart contracts, as opposed to limited capacity for money transfer.

Plasma Group concluded after one year of operation that research efforts on plasma scalability are unnecessary, as the theoretical basis is sufficiently mature:

“A year ago, scalability research felt like the most pressing need to us, so we threw everything we had into accelerating it. It is amazing to see the multitude of competent teams pushing production plasma into reality now. This shift from research to implementation means that our mission as a research organization must shift as well.”

Financing for public goods as the next step

Although acknowledging that scalability remains a high priority, researchers have described funding for public goods such as open-source software as a key obstacle. It follows similar statements made by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, who in 2014 included this issue as one of 16 hard issues in the blockchain.

Although detailed steps are yet to be disclosed to shift the focus of the Plasma Group, the non-profit announced that it would grant Gitcoin the entire funding runway.

Gitcoin is an open-source technology world-focused crowdfunding platform. It offers community-sourced grants for blockchain projects, in this way having previously funded Plasma Group.

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