According to co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the ethereum layer 2 ecosystem is likely to continue evolving with various technological approaches.
The co-founder of the smart contract blockchain analyzed the current landscape of the ethereum scaling ecosystem in eth.limo/general/2023/10/31/l2types.html” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>your personal blogwith several Layer 2 protocols that differ in their approaches to provide greater scalability, lower costs, and greater security.
As Buterin highlighted, the ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) rollups pioneered by Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, and more recently Kakarot and Taiko, have dramatically improved the respective security of their solutions.
Different types of layer 2https://t.co/ry4VTtWhJ1
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 31, 2023
Meanwhile, “sidechain projects” like Polygon have also developed their own rollup solutions. Buterin also highlights “near EVMs” like zkSync, extensions like Arbitrum Stylus, and zero-knowledge proof pioneers Starknet as important players driving scaling technology for the ecosystem:
“One of the inevitable consequences of this is that we are seeing a trend for layer 2 projects to become more heterogeneous. I expect this trend to continue, for a few key reasons.”
Buterin notes that some projects that currently exist as independent layer 1 are looking to move closer to the ethereum ecosystem and potentially become layer 2 ecosystems.
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This type of transition remains difficult, as an “all at once” approach would cause a decrease in usability since the technology is not at a stage where it can be fully included in the technology stack. Meanwhile, postponing such a transition risks “sacrificing momentum and arriving too late to make sense.”
Buterin also notes that some centralized non-ethereum projects want to provide users with greater security guarantees and are looking for blockchain-based solutions. Historically, these types of projects would have resorted to “authorized consortium chains” to achieve this:
“Realistically, they probably only need a halfway level of decentralization. Furthermore, their often very high level of performance makes them unsuitable even for accumulations, at least in the short term.”
Lastly, Buterin considers non-financial applications such as games and social media platforms that want to be decentralized but do not need high levels of security. Highlighting a social media use case, Buterin notes that different parts of the app would require separate functionality:
“Rare, high-value activities, such as username registration and account recovery, should be performed cumulatively, but frequent, low-value activities, such as posting and voting, need less security.
He adds that a failure in the chain that causes a user’s post to disappear would be an “acceptable cost,” while a similar failure that causes the loss of an account would be much more serious.
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Buterin also notes that the costs associated with paying accrued fees may not be acceptable to non-blockchain users, while previous blockchain users are accustomed to paying much higher prices for on-chain interactions.
The ethereum co-founder then delves into the trade-offs between different cumulative solutions and systems that offer different scaling capabilities to the ecosystem. The “connection” to ethereum depends on the security of withdrawing money to ethereum from L2 and the security of reading data from the ethereum blockchain.
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Buterin notes that high security and tight connection are important for some applications, while others require something more flexible in exchange for greater scalability:
In many cases, starting with something more flexible today and moving to more tightly coupled over the next decade as the technology improves may be optimal.”
ethereum‘s next scheduled hard fork will introduce EIP-4844, commonly known as “proto-wet sharding.” The EIP is expected to dramatically increase the amount of network data availability. Buterin also notes that improvements in data compression allow for greater functionality.
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