Quasar Smart Contract

Quasar is the name of a smart-contract design put forward around 2020 by the team behind the OMG Network, an Ethereum scaling project based on Plasma. Plasma chains let users move funds back to Ethereum, but withdrawals normally wait through a challenge period, often around a week, so that fraudulent exits can be disputed. Quasar aimed to shorten this by letting a third-party liquidity provider pay the user on Ethereum almost straight away, in return for a fee, and then collect the user's funds from the Plasma chain once the normal exit cleared. The provider bears the waiting time and some risk. The idea is similar to the fast-withdrawal services later used with optimistic rollups, which face the same delay. Plasma itself lost ground to rollups as Ethereum's main layer 2 approach, and details of how widely Quasar was used are not well documented.