so yeah cool so essentially you guys
have been here for all of DEFCON you
probably you could have known coming
into DEFCON that blockchains need to
scale if you didn't know going in based
on some of the talks that you've got to
you probably know now so I don't really
have to make that argument but I'll just
go into it a little bit
essentially block chains are amazing
there's this global truth especially
when they're public Bakhtin's then
they're then they're this global truth
that everyone can see that everyone can
access and in the case of block chains
like a cerium anyone can essentially
store information on them and interact
with them
yo anyway and so this is this is amazing
but they are single threaded at least as
of right now bunch of nodes running the
same same stuff all over the world this
is great in terms of keeping a record of
it everyone who's running a full node
has their own personal copy of the
blockchain
they're running but the downside is it's
expensive and so this is where we get
into scaling l1 with stuff like charting
and then there's l2 which is like
essentially like the three big ones are
state channels side chains and then
plasma which is kind of in the middle in
terms of the security guarantees that it
provides so plasma it's cool you've come
to this this talk you might know a
little but essentially the defining
characteristic of plasma is that it's a
framework for securing block chains yo
Kelvin putting that password yeah anyway
so it's a framework for securing block
chains and so if you have a sidechain
yes it can talk to another chain so you
could have a sidechain that talks to
aetherium and this is great and
in the happy if we take the happy pass
everything's fine
but breaks and so with side chains
they're reliant on essentially if their
own consensus so if a side chain
consensus fails it's a security issue
with plasma chains they are actually
secured by the loot chain in in our case
we're using a cerium as the root chain
and so if the plasma chain consensus
breaks it's a disruption as opposed to a
security failure which is pretty cool
because essentially you can exist eight
anyway the next slide was a picture of
the plasma white paper it was released
on August 11th and if you're interested
in getting into plasma I would say it's
a solid read in terms of selling the
vision of plasma but since then a lot of
stuff has changed so I would say trying
to follow the spirit and not the letter
don't take it too literally yeah so read
it but yeah take it with a grain of salt
boom we've come a long way this is where
you go if you want the most up-to-date
stuff sure sometimes it can be a little
technical or hard to digest but this is
kind of where a lot of the bleeding edge
discussion happens and what's super cool
is that as time has gone on kind of the
discussion around what plasma is and
what plasma can facilitate has grown
seemingly exponentially so when the
plasma white paper was first released it
was kind of as I said before this boom
vision and that was amazing but I think
it was actually quite intimidating to
kind of take this take this vision and
then turn it into code because it wasn't
like a clear specification and so it
kind of took on understanding of the
vision and then distilling distilling
that down in
something that could actually be
implemented that could be fully
specified so that we could know the like
the security properties that it provides
at a granular level and yeah as time
went on then essentially we kind of got
a very clear idea about like the core
mechanisms and so essentially it's all
about moving state if we have all all
state on on a cerium we run into the
problem I mentioned before and so what
we actually do is we have a plasma train
that also has state transitions and
essentially it's transference it's it's
changing States and then every so often
the child chain consensus actually
submits snapshots of this state back to
solute chain and so this the snapshots
that are sent back are what actually
secures secures the chain and if the
child chain consensus essentially
creates an invalid state or accepts an
invalid state transition then all of a
sudden you have an invalid state but
it's okay because you can exit based off
a previous valid state how do we know
when something is invalid this is where
clients come in so essentially you have
the child chain consensus but then you
also have to have clients or watchers
who are not actively participating in
the decision making of a plasma chain
what they're actually doing is just
validating it they're taking blocks and
that have been included and they are
making sure that everything is a-okay if
everything is not okay then essentially
you exit and the client is essentially
what allows you to detect when things
have gone wrong and so yes intimidating
but kind of things were distilled and
out-out flew plasma MVP and this was
super super
basic functionality so essentially it's
a UTI so payments blockchain it's even
simpler than Bitcoin because it doesn't
have Bitcoin scripting and it's it's a
bit more limited at least in terms of
the inputs and outputs anyway so with
plasma MVP and with other plasma
constructions you essentially have a
smart contract on your route chain that
is responsible for storing these
snapshots of state and so when you when
you want to enter a plasma chain you
send assets or state to this route chain
smart contract and your assets are
essentially stored there and they're
locked up and then you can play with
them on a plasma chain for a fraction of
the cost and when you're when you're
done and ready ready to piece out maybe
you want to interact with the rest of a
cerium as you've seen from all these
wonderful Def Con presentations it's
constantly expanding and there's so many
cool things to play with you just exit
or if if something goes bad then you
have to exit because it's no longer safe
to essentially sign off on state
transitions for your assets on an
invalid on an invalid plasma chain cool
so plasma MVP got something out the door
it's awesome but it did have some issues
and so the two kind of issues with
plasma MVP and plasma MVPs architectures
is that the plasma MVP actually
introduces a time constraint so
essentially this this essentially forces
every user to be alive
every for every given period of time or
it requires someone the user trust so a
trusted third party to actually watch
the chain on their behalf and be and
check it every given period of time and
checking it is doable
the real downside and the real
constraint here
is that if a plasmid MVPs chain is found
to be invalid everyone has to exit
within a given period of time and this
this is all well and good in most most
situations but as soon as we dig deep
get into worst-case scenarios
essentially if you have this much state
and this this much capacity available on
a cerium you run into trouble and there
are things we can do to minimize this
but essentially you kind of have to plan
for it from the get-go
by predicting like worst case scenario
network congestion if a plasma chain
breaks when the cerium network is
already super congested from IC o---- or
trade mining or one of the many things
that is being created right now you
essentially have to factor that in and
then you shouldn't allow any essentially
too much state and you want to make sure
that it can all be exited within the
given time period
other downside is that essentially your
watcher that's validating the chow chain
actually has to validate everything so
you could have a super-fast plasma chain
but then essentially if the watchers are
going to have a lot of trouble
validating it because whatever the
Watchers are gonna have a bunch of
trouble validating it because unless
they are using like dedicated hardware
or heavy AWS computing they're everyday
like laptops just won't be able just
won't be able to keep up yo Kelsey get
out here
anyway so plasma MVP has these time
constraints it also and you have to
validate the entire chain
you also have confirmation signatures so
what this means is essentially if I if
boom thank you Kelvin if if Alice sends
Bob value Bob does not actually have
access to this value until he receives
the confirmation so as you can see here
Alice makes makes the transaction then
she actually has to watch it first be
included in a plasma chain and then
being included on a cerium and then she
signs a confirmation signature and only
then does Bob have custody of set value
so boom now it's unlocked and now it's
it's finally Bob and so this this is
bummer because essentially it's pretty
pretty horrible for UI because all of a
sudden not only does the user have to
sign once but that a user has to sign
once wait a period of time to watch
their transaction be included on a
cerium and then they have to sign again
there's also a grieving vector and so
essentially this is kind of what
inspired more viable more viable plasma
yeah Calvin Calvin right there main man
main man behind that and essentially the
big thing here is that whereas with
plasma MVP you're only able to exit
outputs with more viable plasma you're
able to exit inputs as well and so
essentially the clear difference with
between more viable plasma and minimum
viable plasma is that with minimum
essentially transactions are invalid by
default and they only become valid after
a confirmation signature
whereas with more viable plasma
essentially you have you have
transactions that are valid by default
and then if something goes wrong you
essentially have an exit protocol an
interactive game by which you can use to
exit the inputs so yeah removes
confirmation signatures and removes the
grievant vector super super cool stuff
but you still have to validate the
entire chain and it still has the time
constraints so you're vulnerable to
network congestion boom
plasma cache and so essentially plasma
cache gets rid of the time constraints
and also it it essentially allows users
to only watch only watch the their own
assets and so how does this how does
this work well we every all value on a
plasma cash chain is essentially treated
as an NST so as opposed to having a
large pool of assets like you do on
plasma MVP where if one invalid exit
gets through essentially the child chain
consensus can steal everything in the
smart contract with plasma cash if
there's an invalid exit only a discrete
piece of value a specific users value
can be stolen
which is why users only have to watch
their own NF T's I kind of think of them
as like kind of like collectible so yeah
kind of like action figure action figure
but within the context of plasma and VP
or sorry plasma cash it's actually used
to represent value cool and so here when
Alice deposits new NF T is created with
the value that Alice deposited and then
Alice only has to watch that value when
she exits all of a sudden she she can
stop watching and everything's
everything's okay and then essentially
anyway yeah so essentially users only
have to check their own their own value
and this is amazing because
it essentially reduces the computational
requirements for users to validate a
plasma cash chain because you can kind
of divide it amongst all users and so
now the kind of heavy computational
requirements are only on the child chain
consensus which is a lot less limiting
because they're expected to be able to
have fairly fairly powerful hardware
then there was plasma XT and so one
downside to plasma cash is that for each
NS key that a user holds you essentially
have to have a proof for each block in
the plasma cash chain and so if you
spend and transfer ownership of this NFT
you have to kind you have to have a
proof of membership for this transaction
and but even if you're just sitting with
your NS p value and not using it all you
still have to keep track of the value
and you essentially have to constantly
be collecting proofs of non approves
this non-inclusion to be able to prove
that you have not transferred your NFT
like in secret and so essentially when
you're transferring ownership of the NFT
you have to pass around all its history
as well and if you're holding a
particular NFD for a year this can
actually end up being a lot of data and
so what plasma xt does is it essentially
allows users to checkpoint their n FPS
on the route chain and so by
checkpointing their n FPS every so often
that's essentially our we set on the
amount of data they have to store and
you can actually develop like very
targeted algorithms for checkpointing so
that users who are more sensitive to
data storage don't have to keep track of
it as much this is super awesome for
like essentially computationally
restricted
devices because yeah their storage is
super limited cool and then we have and
then we have plasma debit essentially
which attempts to deal with the non
fungibility of tokens because it's great
that essentially plasma cash has better
like properties from the get-go but none
fungibility is a huge issue in a lot of
cases and so what plasma debit
essentially does is it allows is it
allows users to have their NS keys but
it allows users to kind of treat the NF
keys as containers so an NF T could be
partially full and then a user can
essentially open up a state channel in
most cases it would be with the child
chains consensus mechanism and
essentially they're they're essentially
able to transfer value in and out of
their NF TS up to its total value and so
this essentially grants a modicum of
fungibility which is yeah super exciting
and awesome and yeah now I'm going to
hand it over to Kelvin okay so I'm gonna
talk about the future of plasma I'm
gonna make this as quick as I possibly
can and click this doesn't get locked so
I think a lot of people are wondering
where is plasma headed and these are
sort of the things that I think are
really interesting in the future of
plasma I'll get into more detail about
each one of these but generally it's
zero and all our stuff some new research
is coming around plasma cash then
formalizing plasma as a thing so what
actually is plasma and then sort of the
Holy Grail which is generalized plasmas
so so the first thing here is zero
knowledge so I think we've seen
something of what I like to call a snark
NATO recently where a lot of people have
have been designing these zero knowledge
constructions and and I would like to
attribute some of that to Barry whitehat
who's been doing a lot of Awesome work
with with snarks and actually building
snark based applications on aetherium
I think that that sort of spurred a lot
of awesome people saying hey how do we
you know this thing might actually start
to be production ready soon let's start
building applications with it let's
start designing applications so I have
this feeling that you know five to ten
years from now we'll see half of the
blockchain problems that we have just
solved by zero knowledge constructions
and and I think that you know people are
starting to recognize that as well right
now and people are building things like
plasma snap or roll back and I won't
really go into detail about how these
things work but generally it's it's
solving a lot of the things that we've
solved so far with crypto economic
constructions just straight up with with
cryptographic constructions and and that
generally means that it's much more
efficient and we we have to worry about
a lot less and it's it's pretty amazing
if you're very interested I would read
into it it's you should look into
zero-knowledge applications in general
and start to design these things because
in a few years you should be ready when
when they start to get production ready
so yeah this is my snarky Nieto slide ok
so so this is my brief slide about
plasma cash so so new plasma cash is not
actually a thing don't I don't take
pictures of this slide so really what
happened was that for a long time plasma
cash was this thing that was sort of
useful for some things but not useful
for a lot and and we started doing this
work and we had some research workshops
and you know Ben Ben Jones came up with
an interesting construction for for how
to you know make things a little bit
more fungible and Vitalik put up some
posts right so if it did move like this
which is like make these posts that that
spur a ton of conversation about stuff
and a lot of interesting plasma cash
research came out of it and so we had
this thing that we originally calling
plasma cash flow which was like whatever
that's not a real thing anymore either
and eventually all these things got
combined into one big thing that we're
calling plasma prime so it's basically
the next giant iteration on top of
plasma cash Karl talked about it a
little bit and his talk a few days ago
but the the high level is that we've
taken all of these constructions and
kind of pasted them together and made
the
thing that I think is is actually quite
good there's still a lot of work to be
done but it's it's definitely a massive
improvement on top of plasma cash and
this is where a lot of research I'm
assuming in the next few months is
really going to go if not the next year
trying to figure out you know can we
take this and really push this to
something that's production-ready
that you could have like a fantastic
payments in exchange platform on top of
and I think it is a big improvement over
MEP but there's still a lot to be
fleshed out and that's where people are
going to be spending time so actually
here is its formalization so I think
plasma is a confusing term right nobody
really knows what plasma is I don't know
it's kind of just been thrown out there
the paper defines plasma is one thing
the you know researchers define it as
something else whatever it's it's you
know it's it's very very confusing I'm
and my conclusion here is that we need
more formalization so this is my first
attempt and so so this is the standard
model Lagrangian which is you know the
most elegant physics we have or
something but basically formalization is
is something that yes it makes math
divisions happy but it also clears up a
lot of confusion right I want to be able
to point to projects on Twitter and say
you know you're claiming to be plasma
but you're not right but but really I
want to be able to have these
definitions for the certain security
properties that plasma chains give me
right because I believe that users have
a right to understand how safe are their
assets right what assumptions are being
made with with your assets so on on a
sidechain you're making certain
assumptions about the consensus
mechanism and you're not making those
assumptions in a plasma chain and so I
would like to clear that up and so that
we can have these really formal
definitions for what these things are
and and start to explain to users what
these things mean and I think the other
big thing here is revealing the
trade-off space so really what this
means is that there there are certain
trade-offs that you make when you design
these layer 2 solutions and like I was
just saying you know side chains make
these assumptions on the consensus
mechanism but a plasma chain doesn't and
it's like why are we making these
assumptions well we're trying to solve
certain problem
so we're trying to solve the problem of
we need a strict ordering on data on
these you know side block chains and and
we need data availability and so are we
going to assume that the consensus
mechanism isn't going to give these
things are we going to not assume it and
I try to have a fallback and have sort
of this assumption that aetherium is
going to be live it's all these
different things and and if we if we
kind of formally define what these
different things are we start to reveal
what we're trying to actually solve and
and it means that you you reveal these
knobs right that you you could turn and
solve the fundamental problems in very
different ways and I think it'll allow
us to create novel constructions because
we can just say oh we were doing this
because we were trying to solve this
specific problem what if we solved that
problem in a totally new way um I think
this is really important and I know a
lot of people are interested in doing
this work and so I'm hoping that we
started to see a formal definition of
plasma pop up soon enough so this is my
you know this I copied this off of you
know glads triangle thing so this is
like you know where we were out here
before this is you know when I whatever
so so this is this is I'm trying to
finish here cuz I only have a minute
left generalize plasma is kind of the
Holy Grail and where a lot of people are
focusing their time right now so this is
this is the big one and I'm gonna make a
statement here I hope this gets accepted
but I'm now calling plasma apps plap s--
which if you look in urban dictionary
it does say plasma app it doesn't say
plasma app don't look it up but it's
hard right like so we've written stuff
about why it's hard I there's you know
I'm starting to think that there are
actually things that are just
straight-up impossible on a plasma chain
and I think you know other layer too
people will kind of understand why this
is but the formalization will help us
understand exactly why it is that some
of these things are impossible but this
is kind of the idea we want we want
these smart contracts that we can
somehow recover back to aetherium if
something bad happens and we want people
do amazing things like like runs you
know whatever Crypt or kitties in the
plasma chain and the best thing we can
do right now is payments in exchange and
payments in exchange is absolutely great
but but it's not generalized stuff and
so so a lot of people are focusing on
this people have been coming up with
different constructions there's like
plasma leap some other people are
publishing stuff we're gonna have a
debate later about whether it's good to
actually name these things like this I
think I have no answer but I would say
plasma VM its MVP backwards I think it's
a good you know Alpha and Omega somebody
should take that name so so yeah we're
we're really not close to generalized
plasma and I think a ton of money in
time is going to be spent looking at
this in the next few months or even
years and yeah so this is the Holy Grail
if you are interested in this you can
talk to me later and I can explain to
you all about why it's hard and what the
work that has been done so far on this
is yeah so in conclusion I'm at a time
here but basically snarks are getting
useful new plasma caches plasma cash and
well it's whatever plasma prime is
whatever and the claps are coming so I I
do hope that if there's one thing you
take away from this talk it's that claps
is a new term I credit Ben Jones as well
for that term and please use it
liberally thank you come talk to me
after
[Applause]
you