Proof of stake is another consensus protocol that has been used on multiple block chains for quite some time now, there was a proposal on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list to attach proof of stake sidechains to the original Bitcoin blockchain. This allows for the development of decentralized networks which aim to manage reserves of Bitcoin, using custom application code and smart contracts that use Bitcoin as the native currency.

Simplicity is a low-level programming language for building smart contracts. It enables developers to build sophisticated and reliable smart contracts which are not possible on blockchains such as Ethereum’s EVM.

This week’s paper pick was recently published by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin and introduces a framework that allows highly scalable smart contracts:

Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide. These smart contracts are incentivized to continue operation autonomously via network transaction fees, which is ultimately reliant upon the underlying blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) to enforce transactional state transitions.

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