When blockchains began to face congestion and rising fees, Plasma introduced a powerful idea: scale by hierarchy. Instead of processing everything on a single chain, Plasma uses child chains to handle most transactions, while the main chain acts as the final source of truth.
This layered structure improves efficiency and lowers costs without abandoning decentralization. Users can always exit back to the main chain if something goes wrong, preserving trust even in off-chain execution.
Although the ecosystem has since evolved toward rollups and newer Layer-2 designs, Plasma’s core concept remains influential. It laid the groundwork for today’s scalable architectures and proved that off-chain execution could safely support global blockchain adoption.
