What is the provable per-block loss limit and exact on-chain recovery time if Plasma’s protocol paymaster is exploited via a malicious ERC-20 approval?
Yesterday I approved a token spend on an app without thinking. Same muscle memory as tapping “Accept” on a cookie banner.
The screen flashed, transaction confirmed, and I moved on. Five minutes later, I caught myself staring at the approval list, trying to remember why that permission needed to be unlimited.
I couldn’t. That’s when it felt off. Not broken in a loud way—broken in a quiet, “this assumes I’ll never mess up” way.
It reminded me of giving someone a spare key and realizing there’s no timestamp on when they’re supposed to return it.
You don’t notice the risk until you imagine the wrong person holding it, at the wrong hour, for longer than expected.
That’s the lens I started using to think about Plasma (XPL). Not throughput, not fees—just containment.
If a protocol paymaster gets abused through a bad ERC-20 approval, what’s the actual per-block damage cap? And more importantly, how many blocks until the system can claw itself back on-chain?
Because resilience isn’t about speed when things work. It’s about precision when they don’t.
Open question: does Plasma define loss the way engineers do—or the way users experience it?
