What are Plasma chains ?

Plasma chains are child chains that are anchored to the main ethereum blockchain. Plasma chains are an off-chain solution made mainly to delegate the heavy tasks to the plasma chain. Plasma chain structure is made with the use of smart contracts and merkle trees to create an unlimited number of child chains which are essentially copies of the ethereum mainchain.

Plasma chains resolve disputes with the use of  optimistic rollups.

Plasma is a solution for high transaction volume on blockchain networks. It allows smart contracts to be built on top of existing blockchains, such as Ethereum, using a sidechain.

Plasma works by creating “Child Chains” that exist off the main chain and are secured by it. Each child chain can have its own rules and logic, but they all share the same security guarantees as their parent chain — in this case, Ethereum itself. Because these chains are linked to each other through smart contracts (you can send tokens from one to another).

Plasma chains are a way to help with scaling, privacy, security and speed. They can also help the Ethereum ecosystem because they will make the blockchain much smaller.

Validiums

This scaling solutions enhances scalability by keeping the transaction data and processing the transactions off chain.

 Off-chain transactions executed on the validium chain are verified via a smart contract on the base Ethereum layer using zero-knowledge proofs.

Validium chains reduces gas fees for users by not posting call data to Ethereum Mainnet.

Where there are benefits of validiums like less gas fees and enhanced  scalability. There are also some tradeoffs like absence of on chain data availability which leads the transaction and security to rely on trust rather than cryptographic security mechanisms.

To improve on these issues , the methods suggested are Bonded Data Availability and Data Availability Commitee (DAC).

You can read more about validiums here.

This marks the end of our layer 2 scaling solution series .

I hope that you have understood the various Ethereum layer 2 scaling solutions .

I will be back with more knowledge to make you more versed with Ethereum , crypto and web 3.0.

Until then, Keep exploring

Siddhant :)