Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum is hailed as one of the smartest minds in cryptocurrency. The young Billionaire has been one of the most vocal, visionary voices in the world of cryptocurrencies. Buterin now wants to solve a major problem that has been bothering the world of cryptocurrencies - exchanges getting hacked. While this has been happening since a very long time, the frequency of these hacks has increased of late.
During the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris, Buterin talked about Plasma Cash, which is a ‘more scalable’ version of an existing scalability solution, Plasma. Plasma was developed by Vitalik Buterin, along with Joseph Poon, the creator of lightning network. Plasma Cash, the advanced version of Plasma, has been developed by Vitalik Buterin, along with developers Dan Robinson and Karl Floersch.
Reports from CCN point out that: To explain the Plasma Cash model, Buterin gives the example that if a user deposits some amount of ether to a crypto exchange or any third party service, a Plasma coin would be created with the same value of ether and a unique ID that cannot be merged or split.In contrast with Plasma, Plasma Cash would only require users to pay attention to the blocks that contain coins they want to keep track of:
“A user actually only needs to verify the availability and correctness of the Plasma chain only […] at the specific index of the coin, of any coins that they own and any coins that they care about.”
Buterin believes that cryptocurrency exchanges could make use of the Plasma Cash technology to make themselves hack-resistant. Plasma Coins ensure that no coins can move from one account to the other without the owner being alerted. A complaint system has been set up using which coin owners can block these transactions using their proof data.
“Regardless of what happens in the exchange, users can run their money through the Plasma exit procedure and get their money out. Whenever the next big multi-billion dollar exchange written by a totally incompetent developer gets hacked, no one will lose any money.”
Buterin has had many such revolutionary ideas in the past regarding solving major problems associated with cryptos. Recently, he introduced DAICOs - a decentralized and democratic system for conducting ICOs on Ethereum’s platform. It appears that with Plasma Cash, he intends to take things to the next level.