The belief that L2s are superior to L1s is no longer held by Vitalik Buterin.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that he is unsure about the merits of “L1 even at the price of more intricate L2s” due to the lack of clarity around the relative merits of the two types of blockchain networks.
Buterin said on X, the social media site previously known as Twitter, that his confidence in the idea of simplifying L1s at the expense of L2s is three times lower today than it was five years ago. Furthermore, he stated:
“The catch is that it’s not always obvious that L2 bug risk is preferable when comparing it to L1 bug risk.” The developer of Ethereum provided the scenario of a Layer 1 blockchain experiencing a consensus breakdown as an example. Things get back to normal after “something breaks” and “scramble for a day” among the key developers. Nevertheless, Buterin noted that “people may completely lose sums of money” if an L2 problem were to occur.
“It may really be worth providing some quite advanced L1 capabilities to minimize the coding cost of L2s and let them be relatively basic,” said Ethereum’s Buterin.
The discussion started when Bitcoin supporter Leo Fernevak said in an X post that the foundation layer would not scale. Fernevak said that L2s can support complicated features and further stated that the foundation layer would eventually become fully independent of any attempts at “scaling.”
When Fernevak commented on Bitcoin Magazine’s technical editor, @brian trollz, he pointed out that L2s are totally constrained by what can be done on L1s. Buterin is reportedly just as pumped as everyone else about Verkle trees’ potential to drastically reduce nodes’ disk space consumption and provide substantial staking advantages to the Ethereum network.
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