Paper 2025/1300

PlasmaFold: An Efficient and Scalable Layer 2 with Client-Side Proving

Abstract

Despite the growing popularity of blockchains, their scalability remains a significant challenge. Layer-2s (L2s) aim to address this by introducing an operator to process transactions off-chain and post compact summaries to the Layer-1 (L1). However, existing L2 designs struggle with unsatisfactory throughput improvements, complex exit games, limited data availability, stringent synchronization requirements or high computational overhead for users. This paper introduces PlasmaFold, a novel L2 designed to overcome each of those limitations. PlasmaFold utilizes a hybrid architecture: an operator (aggregator) generates proofs on server side for the honest construction of blocks, while users maintain balance proofs on their own devices. This separation of concerns enables instant, non-interactive exits via balance proofs, while block proofs handle most of the validations, minimizing users’ costs. By leveraging Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC), PlasmaFold achieves both instant synchronization and concrete efficiency. Using PlasmaFold proving routines, users can update their balance proofs within a browser in under 1 second per transaction using less than 1 GB of RAM. Our construction does not impact scaling, we show that it remains possible to leverage recent verifiable plasma research designed to keep a minimal on-chain footprint, thereby enabling PlasmaFold to reach a theoretical throughput of over 14000 transactions per second.