OmiseGo News: Team Close To Completing Plasma Integration

OmiseGo is building a public, permissionless, peer-to-peer network that focuses on mobile wallets being used in Southeast Asia. As an ERC-20 token based on a decentralized exchange, OmiseGo will be scaling their startup with Plasma technology.

In their most recent announcement, the OmiseGo team detailed where they’re at in terms of completing the ambitious Plasma project, as well as what they’ll be researching during their next phase.

What is Plasma?

Plasma was originally envisioned in August 2017 by Joseph Poon, the founder of Lightning Network, and Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. In the words of its creators:

Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide.

This allows for a theoretically infinite amount of blockchains to be created within the Plasmachain (a side chain), all without sharing information with other Ethereum-based applications. Also, only one transaction with Ethereum (the root chain) needs to be made when the user chooses to enter or exit the Plasmachain.

Plasma Update #5

In a recent conference, OmiseGo Director of Engineering Kasima Tharnpipitchai explained where their team currently stands in regards to Plasma development. He made the point that Plasma is not yet in production, but that he feels confident in saying their project is the closest to completing the task.

Plasma presentation starts at the 47:43 mark.

Watcher API, Early Alpha Production, and Plasma Cash Research

The 5th Plasma update was released by the OmiseGo team on October 8th, 2018, in which a sense of urgency is conveyed toward bringing a working form of Plasma to their network as fast as they can. They describe the focus of their previous “sprint” as getting their Watcher API ready for internal integration.

According to the update, they’ve been fixing bugs that would occur “when reporting initial deposits in the watcher and when publishing multiple plasma blocks at the same root chain block height.”

They’ve also improved the API’s ability to report account balances, submit transactions through the watcher, and increase syncing performance between the root chain and side chain.

As for progress on the complete integration of their project, the development team announced in the update that they are “putting the final touches on our first integration library before making that repo and npm module (Node Package Manager, a javascript packaging format) public as well.”

They’ll be using Javascript, one of the most popular programming languages used today, as their first integration library, which will build the foundation for an early alpha version of their product.

Researching Plasma Cash has led the OmiseGo development team to simplifying Buterik’s atomic swap protocol by using small denomination coins to encourage interchangeable assets in Plasma Cash.

Designs for this are currently being prepared for publication, and further updates will be released soon. For a solid understanding of Plasma Cash, check out this article.

Related: Should You Invest In OmiseGo?