Co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem may continue to develop through a variety of technical methods.
The co-founder of the smart contract blockchain breaks down the current state of the Ethereum scaling ecosystem on his personal page blogmultiple Layer 2 protocols vary in approach to bring greater scalability, lower cost, and greater security.
As Buterin highlighted, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) roll-ups pioneered by Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, and more recently Kakarot and Taiko have greatly improved the security of their respective solutions.
Different types of layer 2https://t.co/ry4VTtWhJ1
—vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 31, 2023
At the same time, “side chain projects” like Polygon have also developed their own rollup solutions. Buterin also highlighted “almost EVM” such as zkSync, extensions such as Arbitrum Stylus, and zero-knowledge proof pioneer Starknet as important players in promoting ecosystem expansion technologies:
“One of the inevitable consequences of this is that we see a trend towards Layer 2 initiatives becoming more heterogeneous. I expect this trend to continue for several key reasons.”
Buterin noted that some projects that currently exist as independent layer 1s are looking to bring themselves closer to the Ethereum ecosystem and potentially become layer 2 ecosystems.
Related: Polygon’s “Holy Grail” Ethereum extension zkEVM beta lands on mainnet
This type of transition remains difficult because a “one-and-done” approach would result in reduced usability, given that the technology has not yet reached a stage where rollup technology can be fully incorporated. At the same time, delaying such a shift risks sacrificing momentum and making it too late and meaningless.
Buterin also pointed out 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 have looked to “permissioned consortium chains” to achieve this goal:
“In reality, they may only require a ‘halfway house’ level of decentralization. Additionally, their throughput is often so high that they are not even suitable for aggregation, at least in the short term.”
Finally, Buterin considered non-financial applications such as games and social media platforms, which want to be decentralized but don’t require high levels of security. Buterin highlighted social media use cases, noting that different parts of the app require separate functionality:
“Rare and high-value activities like username registration and account recovery should be done on aggregate, but frequent and low-value activities like posting and voting require lower security.”
He added that a cascading failure that resulted in users’ posts disappearing would be an “acceptable cost,” while a similar failure that resulted in the loss of accounts would be far more severe.
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Buterin also noted that non-blockchain users may not be able to accept the costs associated with paying aggregation fees, while previous blockchain users are accustomed to paying higher prices for on-chain interactions.
The Ethereum co-founder then delves into the trade-offs between different rollup solutions and systems that provide different scaling capabilities for the ecosystem. “Connectivity” to Ethereum depends on the security of withdrawing from Layer 2 to Ethereum and the security of reading data from the Ethereum blockchain.
Related: Ethereum’s original danksharding reduces rollup costs by 10x – Head of Consensys zkEVM Linea
Buterin noted that high security and tight connectivity are important for some applications, while others require something looser in exchange for greater scalability:
“In many cases, starting with something looser today and moving to tighter coupling over the next decade as technology advances may well be the best option.”
Ethereum’s next planned hard fork will introduce EIP-4844, often referred to as “original sharding.” EIP is expected to significantly increase the data availability of the network. Buterin also pointed out that improvements in data compression could enable greater functionality.
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