First proposed in 2017 by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and developer Joseph Poon in the seminal “Plasma: Autonomous Smart Contracts” whitepaper, Plasma is a framework for building scalable blockchain applications using child chains (also called “plasma chains”) that operate alongside a main blockchain (the “root chain”).

The core idea is simple yet powerful: instead of processing every transaction on the main chain—which is secure but slow and expensive—most transactions are handled off-chain on a Plasma child chain. Only periodic summaries or commitments are submitted to the root chain, drastically reducing congestion and cost while inheriting the root chain’s security guarantees.@Plasma #plasma $XPL