Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the unique vision of Layer 2 scaling “not is sensible,” arguing that many L2s have did not properly adopt Ethereum security and that scaling should increasingly occur via mainnet and native rollups.
“We need a brand new path,” Buterin said in a post on Tuesday
“These two facts, each for various reasons, mean that the unique vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum not is sensible and we’d like a brand new path.”
Layer-2s were intended to be extensions of Ethereum and were intended to oversee most transactions at high speed and low price while inheriting the safety of Ethereum.
Buterin said Layer-2s are intended to take part in “Ethereum scaling” by creating block space fully secured by the Ethereum mainnet, where all transactions turn out to be valid, uncensored and final; However, many Layer 2 systems haven’t achieved this standard, he said:
“If you create an EVM with 10,000 TPS whose connection to L1 is brokered via a multisig bridge, you then will not be scaling Ethereum.” Source: David Hoffman
Buterin said Layer 2s – which include Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Starknet – should as a substitute focus from scalability to a particular area of interest, suggesting areas resembling privacy, identity, finance, social apps and AI.
Ethereum's technical roadmap has long focused on Layer 2 as the first option to scale the network.
This also comes as some Ethereum developers have pushed to give attention to scaling the Ethereum mainnet.
Among them is Max Resnick, a former researcher at Ethereum infrastructure company Consensys who moved to the Solana ecosystem after his push to prioritize scaling the Ethereum mainnet did not garner enough support.
Ryan Sean Adams, co-host of the Ethereum show Bankless, also expressed support for Buterin's view, stating: “This is 'the pivot point'.” I'm glad it's being said now. Strong ETH, strong L1.”
Native rollups and gas limit increases are key to scaling the Ethereum mainnet
Buterin said he’s increasingly convinced of the role that precompiled native rollups will play in scaling the Ethereum mainnet, especially as zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine proofs (zkEVM) are integrated into the bottom layer.
While traditional rollups are built on Ethereum by pooling and executing transactions off-chain before sending transaction data to Ethereum, native rollups are built into Ethereum itself – meaning transaction processing is verified directly by Ethereum validators.
In mid-December, Ethereum developers also discussed increasing the gas limit from 60 million to 80 million once the second hard fork was implemented for blob parameters only. The hard fork got here into effect in January.
This would directly increase the variety of transactions and smart contract operations that fit into each Ethereum block, further increasing overall throughput while potentially reducing fees.
Last July, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake unveiled a 10-year plan to achieve 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on the Ethereum mainnet once all scaling features are implemented, a major increase from the 15-30 TPS currently observed.
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