Coinbase Ventures and UC Berkeley’s House Fund Explore New Technology

A startup in San Francisco that is funded by Coinbase Ventures and UC Berkeley’s House Fund has revealed the launch of a Plasma Cash feature to be integrated on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet and a side chain.

As reported by Trust Nodes, the co-founder and CEO of Elph, Ritik Malhotra stated, “By moving transactions and smart contracts onto a Layer 2 environment using the power of Plasma architecture, Elph can help Ethereum dApp developers scale, secure and speed up their applications, opening up the potential of what can be accomplished on the blockchain.”

A live demo running on testnet takes you through the original transportations of the ETH onto the Plasma Cash Sidechain.

Now there are limitless transactions and can run around 6,000 transactions in a second.

Elph also states that, “backed by the security of Ethereum via Plasma, all transactions first occur on Elph’s network, are periodically consolidated into batches, and then recorded as a single transaction on Ethereum. This allows for hundreds of thousands of transactions to be recorded in a single block confirmation.”

In fact, this is a sidechain which runs on an open-source code and according to project “sidechains are layer-2 blockchains that allow digital assets from one blockchain to be used in a separate blockchain and moved back to the original one if needed.”

They act as ‘two way pegs’ which are able to shift assets for different purposes. For example, side chains can compromise on specific aspects of decentralization to make sure scalability is increased.

“Elph’s Plasma Chain is a sidechain that’s backed by the security of Ethereum. This allows Elph to achieve scalability as a sidechain while maintaining a peg to allow users to withdraw their assets back to Ethereum if needed", said Malhotra.

According to their Github, the Elph Network Plasma contracts are an implementation of Plasma Cash. and with support for Ethereum, ERC721, ERC20 tokens these contracts act as the primary start allowing assets to be securely transferred to and from the network. They also have an SDK for MetaMask like a took which can easily connect. The team wanted to learn more such as how this is pegged and what the role of plasma actually is.