What is Plug Chain?
- Real Vision
- June 13, 2022
- 6:41 PM
Plug Chain is an open-source, high-performance blockchain dedicated to information and data sharing. The protocol is designed to enable communication between blockchains and off-chain sources. As such, Plug Chain aims to facilitate the efficient flow of information between blockchains and real-world data, as well as enable cross-chain interoperability between blockchains. It can be considered an oracle chain.
According to the Plug Chain blog, the project is a collaboration of experienced developers and engineers. From the onset, there have been six core members who have been involved in building the project, including the founder of the Plug Tech Foundation, Bowen Zhao.
Plug Chain was founded in early 2021 and its testnet went live on the June 23 in the same year. According to this article, Plug Chain was supported by more than 80 Chinese-based engineers from the beginning. The Plug Chain mainnet went live in August 2021.
The native cryptocurrency of Plug Chain is (PLUGCN).
Plug Chain: A scam?
Plug Chain claims to be the foremost protocol that allows blockchains to be seamlessly integrated with real-world data sources. However, there has been controversy surrounding the authenticity of the project with some writers raising flags.
A cursory search on “is this coin a scam” reveals that Plug Chain has a zero rating. Interestingly, Plug Chain has in the past warned users of impersonation scams concerning its tokens. The project cautioned users to be wary of bad actors claiming to be Plug Chain admins and targeting users’ tokens.
While this approach paints the Plug Chain project in a positive light, certain aspects concerning its founders and organizational structure remain ambiguous. Also, taking a quick look at a Bitcoin Talk Forum post reveals that there seem to be mainly bots shilling the projects, which is a rather negative sign as well.
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How does Plug Chain work?
Plug Chain aims to integrate cross-chain technology and decentralized oracles to support industries and use cases that have been ignored by existing blockchain capabilities. A blockchain oracle acts as a bridge between smart contracts and off-chain sources, including data providers, web APIs, enterprise backends, cloud providers, IoT devices, payment rails, and so forth.
However, these decentralized protocols are plagued by multiple problems. For one, centralized oracles rely on a singular data source for price feeds, which may not be entirely accurate and pose a centralization risk. Secondly, most oracle networks have neither been tested on a large scale nor stood the test of time, and there is very little certainty whether their economic models will be viable at scale.
Moreover, blockchain oracles are limited by the performance of their blockchains. For instance, an oracle built on top of Ethereum will find it expensive to aggregate data on-chain due to network congestion and high gas fees.
Having said that, a decentralized oracle network is the core function of Plug Chain at present. The Plug Chain oracle network aggregates multiple data points through individual oracles and deploys a trusted execution environment to feed accurate data to smart contracts.
The Plug Chain oracle encrypts data queries using a public key and adopts a verifiable random number engine and encryption signature technology to ensure the reliability of query results. The protocol uses multiple nodes to run complex computations off-chain as well as improve on-chain performance. Plug Chain has high concurrency and aims to process 10,000 to 50,000 TPS.
The Plug Chain Oracle machine network enables cross-chain interoperability by combining the Cosmos framework and incorporating a ‘shared connectivity layer’ similar to the one used by the Polkadot blockchain to relay assets cross-chain.
The Cosmos SDK framework is essential in establishing an “inter-block communication” mechanism used to send messages that indicate cross-chain token transfers. You can learn more about this by reading the Plug Chain whitepaper.
What does Plug Chain promise?
As mentioned above Plug Chain is a high-performance public chain that uses cross-chain features and oracle technology to develop and optimize for usage in the real economy.
Joey Huang, a co-founder of Plug Chain, stated, “Layer 0 blockchain is the base layer, the most basic, fundamental blockchain. The whole original idea of Plug Chain is that we are trying to make sure it is the most basic chain.“
Plug Chain promises fast speeds and high scalability in comparison to other oracle network chains. The current TPS of the Plug Chain ranges from 10,000 to 50,000. However, these values can increase with the boosting of server bandwidth to achieve peak performance of the Plug network. To achieve this sort of scalability, it seems like Plug Chain is deprioritizing decentralization as boosting server bandwidth raises the requirements for full nodes to run and operate the blockchain.
Also, Plug Chain aims to improve the interaction between chains by hosting a large number of operations such as verification, data storage, and judgment on their underlying public chain.
The Plug Chain Token (PLUGCN)
The Plug Chain token (PLUGCN) is a utility token. PLUGCN is based on the PRC-20 standard and is fully compatible with ERC-20 tokens. According to this Plug Chain Medium article, the maximum supply of PLUGCN is 100 billion tokens. You can buy PLUGCN on XT.COM and LBank.
Plug Chain token-compatible wallets include:
- Google Chrome Plugin Wallet
- Windows Cosmo Desktop Wallet
- Android Cosmo Wallet
- macOS Cosmo Desktop Wallet
The Plug Chain network is secured by staking PLUGCN tokens. The staked tokens are incentivized through block inflation, which is distributed with every block and ranges from 7 to 20 percent. Other incentives include block-proposer rewards and network fees.