What is PL^G?
PLUG, from a product perspective, has built from scratch a platform for building blockchain-based applications and services. PLUG has not been built on Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other cryptocurrency code base; instead, we have built PLUG to directly address the needs of business-driven blockchains. The inspiration behind the first version of PLUG was seeing people trying to create interesting, especially non-financial, use cases on top of the Bitcoin codebase in late 2013 and having a difficult time due to the inflexible nature of the Bitcoin architecture. Combining some of the best ideas from Bitcoin, along with research from traditional consensus and distributed systems, it soon became apparent how to provide similar, underlying functionality in a more extensible way. This led to the first version of PLUG, and the philosophy that security at the platform level does not have to get in the way of usability at the service level has guided our company’s path every step of the way. Our central thesis is that, hype aside, the central value proposition blockchain will provide in practice is the movement of certain types of organizational trust and management of identity from a manual, operationally-driven process to an automated, protocol-driven process.