The etereum scaling solution could be related to SNARKs rather than plasma

The developers of Ethereum are trying to find the best way to scale the network. However, this has proven to be a difficult task. The possible solutions to solve these problems do not seem as obvious as previously thought.

One of the major implementations that the developers of Ethereum were discussing was Plasma. This solution seemed to be the best for the short-term scaling problems of Ethereum. This is the reason why the developers were able to build five different versions of this specific protocol.

However, things are not going as planned. Plasma does not work as originally intended. This is why researchers now pay attention to the zk-snarks. This is a solution that has been implemented by the popular virtual currency ZCash (ZEC). Allows developers to aggregate transactions in batches.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said it could allow the network to reach 500 transactions per second in the near future. This could be a good solution to scale the network in the short term. In this way, developers would have enough time to work on the long-term solution known as Serenity or Ethereum 2.0.

During a conversation with CoinDesk, Gnosis's CTO, Stefan George, said that zero knowledge is a great tool for resizing the network.

By the way, he said:

"More and more people understand what the possibilities are: even beyond zero knowledge, it is also a great scalability tool that is missing at ethereum and we can use it without waiting".

In April 2017, Buterin and Joseph Poon proposed the plasma solution. It is important to remember that Joseph Poon is the coauthor of the Bitcoin white paper & # 39; s Lightning Network (LN). The intention was the scale of the network that used the calculation of the smart contracts of the main blockchain ethereum.

The implementation of the minimal vital plasma & # 39; has a bad user interface and may be vulnerable to network congestion. David Knott, a plasma researcher for OmiseGo, explained to the public of Devcoin4 that Plasma Cash is difficult to interact with users and developers since it is based on non-fungible tokens.

At the same time, Kelvin Fichter, a plasma researcher for OmiseGo, said that plasma is a confusing term. According to him, nobody knows what plasma is or how it works because the researchers have an opinion about it, and the document shows something different.

This is why Fichter said that there should be a generalized plasma that combines elements of all the different technicians. In the coming years this solution could be a reality, but not in the short term. Plasma will be difficult to implement because it works in a very difficult way compared to snk zk that are very well designed.

The architecture behind zk-snarks is quite elegant and very simple, according to George.

Furthermore, he stated that the use of Plasma could lead to greater centralization in order to process more transactions. This could be harmful to the ecosystem from a regulatory point of view.

Fichter also explained that Plasma problems and challenges could be solved using wake technology. The new term he introduced is "plapps" and refers to decentralized applications performed on plasma. These apps can rely on snarks in terms of how to check transactions on the blockchain.

Although nothing was decided, the scalability problems of Ethereum could be solved using snark technology.