In 2017, Buterin and Joseph Poon presented their idea, which called for scaling up Ethereum's performance, that is, increasing TPS. Like the state channel design, plasma is a technique for conducting off-chain transactions while relying on the underlying Ethereum blockchain to provide its security. Therefore, plasma belongs to the group of off-chain technologies. Truebit is another example in this group.

Plasma works as follows:

• Smart contracts are created on the main-chain and served to be the roots for Plasma child-chains. They define rules for child chains and are called to move assets between the main-chain and child-chains.
• A child-chain is created with its own consensus algorithm, for instance, PoS.
• Deploy smart contracts, which define the actual business rules, to the child-chain.
• Digital assets being created on the main-chain are transferred onto the child-chain by calling the plasma rooting contracts.
• The block builders on the child-chain periodically commit a validation to the main-chain, proving that the current state of the child-chain is valid, in accordance with the consensus rules. A user sends and gets requests executed without ever interacting with the main-chain directly.

Plasma has these advantages:

• Allows an Ethereum blockchain to handle larger datasets
• Enables more complicated applications to run on the blockchain
• Increases throughput greatly

The Ethereum community is actively working on the implementation of Ethereum plasma. Plasma-MVP (minimum viable product) is being worked on first, to gain experience and test its viability. There is the possibility of releasing plasma-mvp by the end of 2018. Plasma's release will follow in one or more quarters.