Extending plasma-core

Note: This article is for developers who want to build their own full plasma nodes using plasma-core.


As explained in `What is plasma-core?`_ plasma-core is just the core of our plasma node ecosystem. It’s not really a full plasma client. In order to build out a full client that exposes all of the functionality a user will expect, you’ll need to extend plasma-core.

To this end, plasma-core is designed to be maximally extensible. It tries to make as few decisions on your behalf as possible. This means you can make a lot of different clients out of plasma-core! So far we’ve tested out creating a full Node.js node and a full node inside of a Chrome extension!

What’s missing

plasma-core is missing a few key features that a user might expect. Here’s a list of what’s missing so that you know what to expect if you want to build a full plasma node.

Front-facing Services

plasma-core doesn’t come with any sort of front-facing services (i.e. an HTTP server that handles JSON-RPC requests). If you want users to be able to interact with your node software, you’ll need to implement a service like this. We left this to node developers because different types of nodes might handle this in completely different ways. For example, the node that we’re building inside of a Chrome extension talks to apps via Chrome’s native message passing interface instead of over HTTP. Front-facing services need to wrap and pipe calls into JSONRPCService.

User interface

Because plasma-core doesn’t provide any front-facing services, it also doesn’t provide any sort of user interface. As a node developer, you’ll probably want to create some sort of simple interface that allows users to interact with the node. This might take the form of a CLI that sends requests to an HTTP server or a local website that connects to the node.

Wallet Management

Private key storage and transaction signing is not handled by plasma-core. plasma-core only provides a mock wallet for testing that should not be used in production. You will therefore have to implement your own WalletService.

However, key management is hard and you probably shouldn’t be building your own wallets. We therefore recommend deferring this functionality to a user’s Ethereum node. This can be as easy as forwarding the necessary API calls (as described on the WalletService documentation page) to the Ethereum node. plasma-extension uses this method by forwarding all wallet-related activity to MetaMask.