Mission to the moon. There is something quietly radical about the original vision behind #Plasma that gets lost in the postmortem conversations about why it didn't work out. Most of the technical discussion focuses on the data availability problem, the mass exit vulnerability, the difficulty of supporting complex states. These are real failures and they deserved the attention they received. But underneath all of it was an architectural intuition that the scaling debate has largely abandoned, and that intuition was about who actually owns the chain.

When you use a rollup today, you are trusting a sequencer. That sequencer decides the order of your transactions, batches them, and submits them to Ethereum. In optimistic roll ups, there is a fraud proof mechanism that can theoretically challenge a dishonest sequencer, and in ZK roll ups there are validity proofs that make outright fraud cryptographically impossible. These are genuine security improvements over a simple sidechain. But the sequencer still exists, it is still typically operated by a single company or foundation, and it still occupies a position of meaningful power over your experience. Transaction ordering, latency, censorship resistance, fee extraction through MEV all of these flow through the sequencer. The security model says the sequencer cannot steal your funds, but it says much less about whether the sequencer can front run you, ignore your transactions, or shut down.

Plasmas original architecture, at its most ambitious, was imagining something different. The child chain operators were not supposed to be trusted parties. They were supposed to be constrained party entities. Those ability to harm users was limited by the exit mechanism, not by the operator's good intentions or the foundation's reputation. @Plasma $XPL