 So yeah, cool. So essentially, you guys have been here for all of DevCon. You probably could have known coming into DevCon that blockchains need to scale if you didn't know going in based on some of the talks that you've gone 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, blockchains are amazing. They're this global truth, especially when they're public blockchains. Then they're this global truth that everyone can see, that everyone can access. And in the case of blockchains like Ethereum, anyone can essentially store information on them and interact with them. Yo, Kelvin? Anyway, and so this is amazing. But they are single threaded, at least as of right now. A bunch of nodes running the 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 sharding. And then there's L2, which is 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 talk. You might know a little. But essentially, the defining characteristic of plasma is that it's a framework for securing blockchains. Yo, Kelvin, putting that password, yo. Anyway, so it's a framework for securing blockchains. And so if you have a side chain, yes, it can talk to another chain. So you could have a side chain that talks to Ethereum. And this is great. And if we take the happy path, everything's fine. But shit breaks. And so with side chains, they're reliant on essentially their own consensus. So if a side chain consensus fails, it's a security issue. With plasma chains, they are actually secured by the root chain. In our case, we're using Ethereum 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 exit state. Anyway, the next slide was a picture of the plasma white paper. It was released on August 11. 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, kind of 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 vision and then turn it into code because it wasn't like a clear specification. And so it kind of took understanding of the vision and then distilling that down into something that could actually be implemented, that could be fully specified so that we could know 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 the core mechanisms. And so essentially, it's all about moving state. If we have all state on Ethereum, we run into the problem I mentioned before. And so what we actually do is we have a plasma chain that also has state transitions. And essentially, it's changing states. And then every so often, the child chain consensus actually submits snapshots of this state back to the root chain. And so the snapshots that are sent back are what actually 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 OK 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 that have been included. And they are making sure that everything is AOK. If everything's not OK, 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 flew plasma MVP. And this was super basic functionality. So essentially, it's a UTXO payments blockchain. It's even simpler than Bitcoin because it doesn't have Bitcoin scripting. And 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 root chain that is responsible for storing these snapshots of state. And so when you want to enter a plasma chain, you send assets or state to this root 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 done and ready to peace out, maybe you want to interact with the rest of Ethereum. As you've seen from all these wonderful DevCon presentations, it's constantly expanding. And there are so many cool things to play with, you just exit. Or 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 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 essentially forces every user to be alive for every given period of time. Or it requires someone the user trusts, so a trusted third party to actually watch the chain on their behalf 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 plasma MVPS chain is found to be invalid, everyone has to exit within a given period of time. And this is all well and good in most situations. But as soon as we dig deep, get into worst-taste scenarios, essentially, if you have this much state and this much capacity available on Ethereum, 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 worst-case scenario, network congestion, if a plasma chain breaks when the Ethereum network is already super congested from ICO 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 child chain actually has to validate everything. So you could have a super fast plasma chain. But then, essentially, the watchers are going to have a lot of trouble validating it because whatever. The watchers are going to have a bunch of trouble validating it because unless they are using dedicated hardware or heavy AWS computing, their everyday laptops just won't be able to keep up. Yo, Kelvin, get up here. Anyway, plasma MVP has these time constraints. 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 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 the transaction. Then she actually has to watch it first be included in a plasma chain and then be included on Ethereum. And then she signs a confirmation signature. And only then does Bob have custody of said value. So boom, now it's unlocked. And now it's finally Bob. And so this is a bummer because essentially, it's pretty horrible for UI because all of a sudden, not only does the user have to sign once, but a user has to sign once, wait a period of time to watch their transaction be included on Ethereum. And then they have to sign again. There's also a grieving vector. So essentially, this is kind of what inspired more viable plasma. Yeah, Kelvin, Kelvin 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 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 transactions that are valid by default. And then if something goes wrong, you essentially have an exit protocol, an interactive game, which you can use to exit the inputs. So yeah, removes confirmation signatures and removes the grieving 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 essentially allows users to only watch their own assets. And so how does this work? Well, every all value on a plasma cache chain is essentially treated as an NFT. 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 cache, if there's an invalid exit, only a discrete piece of value, a specific user's value, can be stolen, which is why users only have to watch their own. NFTs, I kind of think of them as collectible. So yeah, kind of like action figure, action figure. But within the context of plasma and VP, or sorry, plasma cache, it's actually used to represent value. Cool. And so here, when Alice deposits, new NFT 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 can stop watching and everything's OK. And then essentially users only have to check their own value. And this is amazing because it essentially reduces the computational requirements for users to validate a plasma cache 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 cache is that for each NFT that a user holds, you essentially have to have a poof for each block in the plasma cache chain. And so if you spend and transfer ownership of this NFT, you have to have a poof of membership for this transaction. But even if you're just sitting with your NFT 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-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 NFT 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 NFTs on the root chain. And so by checkpointing their NFTs every so often, that's essentially a reset on the amount of data they have to store. And you can actually develop 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 essentially computationally restricted devices, because their storage is super limited. Cool. 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 properties from the get-go, but non-fungibility is a huge issue in a lot of cases. And so what plasma debit essentially does is it allows users to have their NFTs, but it allows users to treat the NFTs as containers. So an NFT could be partially full. And then a user can essentially open up a state channel. In most cases, it would be with the child chain's consensus mechanism. And essentially, they're essentially able to transfer value in and out of their NFTs up to its total value. And so this essentially grants a modicum of fungibility, which is super exciting and awesome. And yeah, now I'm going to hand it over to Kelvin. There we go. OK, so I'm going to talk about the future of plasma. I'm going to make this as quick as I possibly can and click this a bunch so it 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 $0 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 plasma. So that's a high level overview. 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 been designing these zero knowledge constructions. And I would like to attribute some of that to Barry Whitehat, who's been doing a lot of awesome work with snarks and actually building snark-based applications on Ethereum. And I think that that sort of spurred a lot of awesome people saying, hey, 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 five to 10 years from now, we'll see half of the blockchain problems that we have just solved by zero knowledge constructions. And I think that people are starting to recognize that as well right now. People are building things like plasma snap or rollback. And I won't really go into detail about how these things work. But generally, it's solving a lot of the things that we've solved so far with crypto economic constructions just straight up with cryptographic constructions. And that generally means that it's much more efficient. And we have to worry about a lot less. It's pretty amazing. If you're very interested, I would read into it. 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 they start to get production ready. Yeah, this is my snark-nado slide. OK, so this is my brief slide about plasma cash. So new plasma cash is not actually a thing, 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 we started doing this work. And we had some research workshops. And Ben Jones came up with an interesting construction for how to make things a little bit more fungible. And Vitalik put up some posts. So Vitalik did with Vitalik does, which is make these posts 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 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 in his talk a few days ago. But the high level is that we've taken all of these constructions and kind of pasted them together and made this thing that I think is actually quite good. There's still a lot of work to be done. But 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 gonna go, if not the next year. Trying to figure out, can we take this and really push this to something that's production ready, that you can have a fantastic payments and exchange platform on top of. And I think it is a big improvement over MVP, but there's still a lot to be fleshed out. And that's where people are gonna be spending time. So the next thing here is 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 plasmas, one thing. The researchers define it as something else, whatever. It's very, very confusing. And my conclusion here is that we need more formalization. So this is my first attempt. And so this is the standard model of grantian, which is the most elegant physics we have or something. But basically formalization is something that, yes, it makes mathematicians happy, but it also clears up a lot of confusion, right? I wanna be able to point to projects on Twitter and say, you're claiming to be plasma, but you're not. 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 your assets? So on a side chain, 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 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 are certain trade-offs that you make when you design these layer two solutions. And like I was just saying, 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 problems. We're trying to solve the problem of we need a strict ordering on data on these side block chains and we need data availability. And so are we going to assume that the consensus mechanism is gonna give these things? Are we going to not assume it and try to have a fallback and have sort of this assumption that Ethereum is gonna be live? It's all these different things and if we kind of formally define what these different things are, we start to reveal what we're trying to actually solve. And it means that you reveal these knobs, right? That 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 solve that problem in a totally new way? 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 start to see a formal definition of plasma pop up soon enough. So this is my, I copied this off of Vlad's triangle thing. So this is like where we were out here before. This is, you know, when I, whatever. So this is, I'm trying to finish here because I only have a minute left. Generalized plasma is kind of the holy grail and where a lot of people are focusing their time right now. So 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 Plaps 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. 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, two 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 these smart contracts so we can somehow recover back to Ethereum if something bad happens and we want people to do amazing things like runs, you know, whatever, crypto kiddies in a plasma chain and the best thing we can do right now is payments and exchange and payments and exchange is absolutely great but it's not generalized stuff and 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 as the answer. But I would say Plasma VM, it's MVP backwards. I think it's a good, you know, Alpha and Omega. Somebody should take that name. So yeah, we're really not close to generalized Plasma and I think a ton of money and time is gonna 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 out of time here but basically Snarks are getting useful. New Plasma Cash is Plasma Cash and well, yeah, whatever. Plasma Prime is whatever and the Plaps are coming. So I do hope that if there's one thing you take away from this talk, it's that Plaps 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, if you're interested.