I think the incredible early success of Plasma is ironically the best case study for why L2 architectures are superior.
I know this seems awfully counterintuitive (and self-serving) so let me explain.
Plasma has done a historic job in go-to-market and launch work. I don’t think any chain has attracted more TVL in its first week in history. Its users are comfortable with using the product and building alongside them and Tether.
Yet, as the Plasma team notes in their docs, today they are the only ones that are currently running validators and there are no validator rewards live today.
As part of their progressive decentralization, they will be onboarding external validators and the inflation rate rewarding those validators will be 5% annually to start.
In other words, in order to secure and decentralize the system, Plasma (at today’s prices) is committing to spending more than $550 million, when their users and developers have signaled already it’s not really a conditional priority to deploying capital.
Had Plasma launched an L2, they could have progressively decentralized (like most chains do) without having to commit to spending over a half a billion dollars a year.
The L2 superpower is having security costs be variable as a % of transactions, not significant constant fixed costs.
I don’t think that the experience of using Plasma would be any worse had the chain been an L2. It’s EVM, users are largely using the same apps that exist on rollups. It’s just a more cost effective way to get security.
Congrats again to the Plasma team; but I think this shows the power of rollup architecture from a business operations perspective.
I know this seems awfully counterintuitive (and self-serving) so let me explain.
Plasma has done a historic job in go-to-market and launch work. I don’t think any chain has attracted more TVL in its first week in history. Its users are comfortable with using the product and building alongside them and Tether.
Yet, as the Plasma team notes in their docs, today they are the only ones that are currently running validators and there are no validator rewards live today.
As part of their progressive decentralization, they will be onboarding external validators and the inflation rate rewarding those validators will be 5% annually to start.
In other words, in order to secure and decentralize the system, Plasma (at today’s prices) is committing to spending more than $550 million, when their users and developers have signaled already it’s not really a conditional priority to deploying capital.
Had Plasma launched an L2, they could have progressively decentralized (like most chains do) without having to commit to spending over a half a billion dollars a year.
The L2 superpower is having security costs be variable as a % of transactions, not significant constant fixed costs.
I don’t think that the experience of using Plasma would be any worse had the chain been an L2. It’s EVM, users are largely using the same apps that exist on rollups. It’s just a more cost effective way to get security.
Congrats again to the Plasma team; but I think this shows the power of rollup architecture from a business operations perspective.
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