When it comes to Plasma, most people's first reaction is "scaling solution." However, this understanding is actually off the mark—it aims to solve problems that are fundamentally more complex than simply increasing TPS.

First, let's clarify a fact that can easily be confused: assets and status are not the same thing at all.

Assets must be acknowledged by everyone simultaneously; this is the bottom line of consensus. But what about the state? As long as one can prove their innocence when being challenged, that is enough. The current issue is that 99% of state changes on the chain are simply not cared about, yet the system has to bear the costs for 100% of the actions—DA costs and synchronization overhead all have to be shouldered. This is not a performance issue; it is fundamentally a flaw in architectural design from the outset.

Breaking down the logic will make it clearer: In a chain, there are some things that "no one would question at all," and some things that "once questioned must be able to provide evidence on the spot." Blockchain is inherently only meant to handle the latter; the former can be dealt with in other ways.

The idea of Rollup is to bundle two things together, while Plasma chooses to separate them - this is not a trade-off in performance, but a delineation of boundaries.

Think about those real scenarios again: the position of your character on the map in the game doesn't need to be broadcasted across the entire network; the intermediate steps of AI reasoning don't need to be individually recorded on the blockchain; every slight adjustment in social relationships doesn't need to be immediately permanent. But these systems have a common point - when the results are questioned, you can't just brush it off with "trust me."

The solution of Plasma is not to hide the data, but to postpone the consensus process. On-chain arbitration is only initiated when it is truly needed.

Some people complain that Plasma "is too heavy in terms of engineering." This statement is not without merit, but it assumes a premise: applications should not be responsible for their own state.

The question is - shouldn't it really be?