The Road from Plasma to the New Now

Back then, the transaction fee for Ethereym was trivial (particularly compared to Bitcoin as of 2017). Therefore, the key idea behind various scaling solutions was speeding up the transaction speed [Richards]. However, as Ethereum surpassed Bitcoin in the transaction fee amount [Redman], the issue of the fees started dominating over the TX speed.

Plasma was one of the earliest attempts (and the only canonical one) to enable more scalability for Ethereum. It was Vitalik’s favorite child [Poon], conceived in 2017 together with Joseph Poon, the man behind Bitcoin’s Lightning Network [Ramachandran]. Plasma used sidechains to unload the root chain. Please read this fabulous explainer by Binance if you need some self-education on the subject. The original idea behind Plasma was to enable a framework for other developers to build their own Ethereum scaling solutions [Poon].

One of such teams, based in India, launched Matic in June 2018 [Kanani]. It was at first called “Project Hermione” [Dagger]. However, Matic went far beyond “proof of white paper” and launched a working PoS mainnet by October 2020. They phased their rollout. By December 2020 Matic entered phase 3 — the external node delegation, which occurs when the blockchain is stable enough to trust third parties with validating transactions within it [Nodes].

The Matic team also created a robust Discord server, where all the node owners and developers could have real-life discussions. Such an array of exciting activities attracted institutional investors: welcome Binance and Coinbase Ventures.

The DeFi boom marked a renaming spree for both L2 solutions. First, Plasma Group, the major locomotive besides wider Plasma technology adoption by the blockchain industry [Plasma], became Optimism in February 2020 [Cuen]. Then Matic became Polygon in February 2021 [Foxley]. And behind the “new brands,” critical technology pivots were going on.