Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the original vision of Layer 2 scaling “no longer makes sense,” arguing that many L2s have failed to properly inherit Ethereum’s security and that scaling should increasingly come from the mainnet and native rollups.
“We need a new path” – Buterin he said on Tuesday in a post to X, arguing that multiple Layer 2s have failed to decentralize and that the Ethereum mainnet is currently sufficiently scalable, with improvements coming from increased gas limits and native rollups coming soon.
“Both of these facts, for separate reasons, mean that the original vision for L2 and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense and we need a new path.”
Layer 2 was conceived as an extension of Ethereum, managing most transactions at high speed and low cost, while inheriting the security of Ethereum.
Buterin said Layers 2 were intended to participate in “scaling Ethereum” by creating a blockchain fully secured by the Ethereum mainnet, where all transactions become valid, uncensored and final; However, many Tier 2s did not meet this standard, he said:
“If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is via a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.”
Buterin said Layer 2 – which includes Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Starknet – should instead move away from scalability and focus on a specific niche, suggesting areas such as privacy, identity, finance, social apps and artificial intelligence.
Ethereum’s technical roadmap has long focused on Layer 2 as the main way to scale the network.
This is also because some Ethereum developers are calling for a focus on scaling the Ethereum mainnet.
Among them is Max Resnick, a former researcher at Ethereum infrastructure firm Consensys, who moved to the Solana ecosystem after his push to prioritize scaling the Ethereum mainnet failed to gain enough support.
Ryan Sean Adams, co-host of Ethereum Bankless, also expressed support for Buterin’s view, stating: “This is the ‘axis of rotation.’ I’m glad it’s being talked about now. Strong ETH, strong L1.”
Native bulkpacks, gas cap increase key to scaling the Ethereum mainnet
Buterin said he is increasingly confident in the role that precompiled native rollups will play in scaling the Ethereum mainnet, especially when integrated with the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) testbed layer.
While traditional rollups are built on top of Ethereum by connecting and executing transactions off-chain before sending transaction data to Ethereum, native rollups are inserted into Ethereum itself – meaning that transaction processing is directly verified by Ethereum validators.
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In mid-December, Ethereum developers also discussed raising the gas limit from 60 million to 80 million after implementing a second hard fork using only blob parameters. The hard fork went into effect in January.
Doing so would directly increase the number of smart contract transactions and operations that can fit into each Ethereum block, further increasing overall throughput while potentially lowering fees.
Last July, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake exposed A 10-year plan to achieve 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on the Ethereum mainnet once all scaling features are implemented, a significant increase from the 15-30 TPS currently seen.
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