Under the heavy pressure of public opinion, Vitalik issued a message calling L2: Come back and support ETH.

Original title: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond

Author:Vitalik Buterin

Original compilation: Odaily Planet Daily, how is your husband?

Recently, the performance of Ethereum in this cycle has caused widespread dissatisfaction. Community members have expressed their disappointment with the inaction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). Even some leading projects in the Ethereum ecosystem have begun to express their dissatisfaction with the Ethereum Foundation. Will raise questions, it seems to have the meaning of "forcing the uterus".

The founders of multiple well-known projects have spoken out one after another, expressing their concerns about the future direction of Ethereum:

The founders of Synthetix and Infinex believe that EF should require L2 (the second layer network) to use its revenue to buy back ETH, thus increasing the demand for ETH and increasing its value.

The founder of Curve believes that EF should abandon its L2 strategy immediately.

The founder of Aave released "12 Measures to Save EF", calling on the foundation to take quick action to deal with the current predicament.

A more intense voice came from the founder of Wintermute, who believed that there was a possibility of a "death spiral" in Ethereum.

Facing strong doubts from ecological cornerstone projects, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin finally spoke out today and announced that he would impose a "toll" on the L2 network.

Details can be found in "Counting the Seven Deadly Sins of Ethereum. Who can play the "Divine Comedy of Rescue" for them? ” and “Leading projects collectively “forced the palace”, but the Ethereum Foundation remains unmoved”.

This change may become a key node in the future development of Ethereum, and it also allows us to see how Ethereum can meet new opportunities and challenges in self-adjustment.

The following is Vitalik's original text, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.

Ethereum’s goal has not changed since day one: to build a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain platform. It is a free and open platform for decentralized applications, and its principles are in the same vein as GNU + Linux, Mozilla, Tor, Wikipedia, and many great free and open source software projects (what you might today call the rebirth and cypherpunk spirit).

Over the past decade, Ethereum has also developed a characteristic that I admire very much: in addition to being an innovation in cryptography and economics, Ethereum is also a socio-technical innovation. The Ethereum ecosystem as a whole demonstrates a more open and decentralized approach to collaboration. Political philosopher Ahmed Gatnash described his experience while attending Devcon this way:

… It gave me a glimpse of what an alternative world might look like—a world with few thresholds and no connection to traditional systems. Here, society's standard status system is turned upside down, and those who enjoy the highest social status are the geeks who focus on independently solving problems they truly care deeply about, rather than those who play games in order to climb the ladder of traditional institutions and accumulate power. . Here, almost all power is soft power. I think that's beautiful and very encouraging - it gives a sense that anything is possible in a world that's actually within our reach.

Technical projects and social projects are inherently intertwined. If you have a decentralized technical system at time point T, but it is maintained by a centralized social process, there is no guarantee that your technical system will still be decentralized at time point T+1. Likewise, social processes are sustained by technology in many ways: technology attracts users, the ecosystem it creates provides incentives for developers to stay, technology keeps communities grounded and focused on building rather than just socializing, and so on.

After ten years of hard work, under the joint governance of technical and social attributes, Ethereum has demonstrated another important quality: Ethereum can provide practical services to people on a large scale. Millions of people use ETH or stablecoins as a way to save, and even more people use these assets for payments: I am one of them. Ethereum has efficient, useful privacy tools that I use to pay for a VPN to protect my internet data. It also owns ENS, a robust decentralized alternative for DNS and wider public key infrastructure. Additionally, there are easy-to-use decentralized Twitter alternatives on Ethereum, as well as DeFi tools that provide millions of people with assets that offer higher yields and lower risks than traditional finance.

Five years ago, I was reluctant to talk about the latter use case, mainly because the infrastructure and code were not yet mature. At that time, we had just experienced the large-scale and painful smart contract hacking incidents in 2016-2017, and if there was a 5% probability of losing 100% of the income every year, then the annualized return of 7% would be compared to the annual return of 5%. The return rate is meaningless. Additionally, transaction fees are too high to enable large-scale adoption of these tools. Now that these tools have proven their resilience over time, the quality of audit tools has improved, and we are increasingly confident in their security. We learned what not to do. L2 scaling technology is working, and transaction fees have remained at very low levels for nearly a year.

We need to continue to enhance Ethereum’s technical and social properties as well as its utility. If there is only the former without the latter, we will become an increasingly ineffective "decentralized" community that can only protest against the "immoral and wrongful behavior" of mainstream institutions but cannot truly provide a better alternative. plan. Without the latter, we would be indistinguishable from the Wall Street “greed is good” mentality that many join the Ethereum community to escape.

This duality of technology and practicality has many far-reaching consequences. In this article, I want to focus on a specific aspect that is crucial for Ethereum users in the short and medium term: Ethereum’s scaling strategy.

The rise of layer 2

Today, our path to scaling Ethereum is through Layer 2 protocols. Layer 2s of 2025 are already a giant leap forward from the early experiments of 2019: they have reached key decentralization milestones, are protecting billions of dollars in assets, and have increased Ethereum’s transaction capacity by 17x, At the same time, the cost was reduced by the same amount.

This all happens just in time for a wave of successful applications: various DeFi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, and novel projects like Worldchain (which now has 10 million users). Additionally, the “enterprise blockchain” movement, which was considered a dead end due to the failure of consortium chains in the 2010s, has also been revitalized with the rise of Layer 2, of which Soneium is a prominent example.

These successes also prove the social advantages of Ethereum’s decentralized and modular scaling approach : the Ethereum Foundation does not need to personally find all users, but has dozens of independent entities promoting it spontaneously. These entities also make vital contributions to the technology, without which Ethereum would not be what it is today. Because of this, we are finally approaching the "escape velocity".

Challenge: Capacity expansion and heterogeneity processing

Currently Layer 2 faces two main challenges:

• Expansion: The current "Blob space" is barely enough to support existing Layer 2 and its application scenarios, but it is far from enough to meet future needs.

• Heterogeneity problem: Ethereum’s original scaling vision was to create a blockchain composed of multiple shards, each shard being a copy of the EVM and processed by a small number of nodes. In theory, Layer 2 is the realization of this vision. However, there is actually one key difference: each shard (or group of shards) is created by different actors, is treated as a different chain in the infrastructure, and often follows different standards. This situation brings about composability and user experience issues for developers and users.

The first problem is an easy-to-understand technical challenge with a simple solution but difficult implementation: give Ethereum more “blob space.” In addition, Ethereum L1 can also alleviate pressure in the short term through moderate expansion and improvements in Proof of Stake, Stateless and Light Verification, storage, EVM and encryption technology.

The second issue is a coordination problem that has attracted widespread public attention. The Ethereum ecosystem is no stranger to cross-team collaboration on complex technical tasks — after all, we did The Merge. However, the coordination problem here is more challenging because the number of actors is larger, the goals are more diverse, and the process starts later. But even so, our ecosystem has solved many difficult problems in the past, and it can do the same this time.

A possible shortcut to scaling is to abandon Layer 2 and achieve a much higher gas limit directly through Layer 1 (either through multiple shards, or a single shard). However, this approach would sacrifice too much the strengths of Ethereum’s current social structure, which are extremely effective at integrating disparate forms of research, development, and ecosystem-building culture. Therefore, we should stay on course and continue to scale primarily through Layer 2 while ensuring that Layer 2 truly delivers on its promise.

This means the following:

• Layer 1 needs to accelerate the expansion of blob capacity.

• Layer 1 also needs to appropriately expand the EVM and increase the Gas limit to cope with activities that Layer 1 will still carry even in a Layer 2-dominated environment (for example, zero-knowledge proofs, large-scale DeFi, deposit and withdrawal operations, Special large-scale exit scenarios, key storage wallets, asset issuance, etc.).

• Layer 2 needs to continue to improve security. Layer 2 should provide the same security guarantees as sharding (including censorship resistance, light client verifiability, no embedded trusted parties, etc.).

• Layer 2 and wallets need to accelerate improvements and standardize interoperability . This includes chain-specific addresses, messaging and cross-chain bridge standards, efficient cross-chain payments, on-chain configuration, and more. Using Ethereum should be like using a single ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.

• Layer 2 deposit and withdrawal times need to be significantly reduced.

• Layer 2 heterogeneity is beneficial as long as basic interoperability requirements are met. Some Layer 2 will be based on rollups with minimal governance, running exactly the same copy as the Layer 1 EVM; some Layer 2 will try different virtual machines; other Layer 2 will be more like servers, using Ethereum to provide additional security for users . We need all types of Layer 2 covering this spectrum.

• We need to explicitly consider the economics of ETH. Even in a world dominated by Layer 2, ensure that ETH can continue to accumulate value and provide solutions for multiple value accumulation models.

Next, we discuss each topic in detail.

Scaling: Blob, Blob, Blob

In EIP-4844, there are 3 blobs per slot and the data bandwidth is 384 kB per slot. A simple estimate shows that this equates to 32 kB per second, with each transaction taking up about 150 bytes on-chain, so we can support about 210 transactions per second (TPS). According to data from L2beat, this estimate matches up almost perfectly.

Pectra, scheduled for release in March, will double the number of blobs to 6 blobs per slot.

Currently, Fusaka's goals are mainly focused on PeerDAS, and the plan is to only prioritize the implementation of PeerDAS and EOF. PeerDAS may increase the number of blobs by another 2-3 times.

The next goal is to continue to increase the number of blobs. When reaching 2D sampling, the number of blobs can be increased to 128 per time slot, and can be further increased in the future. Combined with improvements in data compression, on-chain TPS can reach 100,000.

The above is a restatement of the established roadmap until 2025. The key question is: How do we accelerate this process? My answer is as follows:

• More explicitly de-prioritize non-Blob functionality.

• Make it clearer that blobs are the target and prioritize relevant end-to-end R&D in talent acquisition.

• Let stakers adjust blob targets directly, similar to gas limits. This will allow blob targets to increase more quickly as technology improves, without having to wait for a hard fork.

• It is possible to consider more aggressive ways to increase the number of blobs faster by introducing more trust assumptions for low resource stakers, but we need to approach this with caution.

Improving Security: Proving Systems with Local Rollup

Currently, there are three phase 1 rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three phase 2 rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). However, most of the activity still occurs on phase 0 rollup (i.e., the multi-signature scheme). This situation needs to change. A big reason for the slower pace of change is that it is very difficult to build a reliable proof system and build enough confidence to rely solely on its security (giving up the "training wheels").

To achieve this goal, there are two paths:

• Phase 2 + Multiple Proof Systems + Formal Verification: Achieve redundancy through multiple proof systems and leverage formal verification (such as the "Verified ZK-EVM Project") to increase security confidence.

• Local Rollup:
  Integrate the verification of EVM state transition functions into the protocol itself, for example through precompiled contracts.

At the current stage, both paths need to be advanced in parallel. For "Phase 2

• multi-proof system + formal verification", the roadmap is relatively clear. Development can be accelerated by increasing collaboration across software stacks, which not only reduces duplication of effort but also improves interoperability as a by-product.

For native Rollup, this is still in the early stages , and more thought is needed in particular on how to maximize the flexibility of precompiled contracts. An ideal goal is to support not only a complete clone of the EVM, but also an EVM containing any changes, allowing a modified EVM Rollup to still use the local Rollup's precompiled contract, and only introduce custom proofs for its modified parts. ". This may involve the adaptation of precompiled contracts, opcodes, state trees, and other components.

Interoperability and standardization

The goal is to make the transfer of assets between different L2s and the application experience as smooth as the interaction between different "shards" in the same blockchain. At present, there is a relatively clear roadmap in this regard:

• Chain-specific address: The address should include account information on the chain as well as an identifier for the chain itself. For example, ERC-3770 is an early attempt, and now there are more complex designs, and even the L2 registry has been migrated to Ethereum L1.

• Standardized cross-chain bridges and message passing : There should be standardized ways to verify proofs and pass messages between L2s, and these standards should not rely on trust mechanisms like multi-signature bridges. An ecosystem that relies on multi-signature bridges is unacceptable. If this assumption of trust did not exist in sharding designs in 2016, it is unacceptable today.

• Speeding up deposit and withdrawal times: “local” message times should be reduced from weeks to minutes (the ultimate goal is one round of block times). This requires support for faster ZK-EVM provers and proof aggregation technology.

• Synchronously read L1 data from L2: such as L1SLOAD and REMOTESTATICCALL. These functions will greatly simplify cross-L2 interoperability and help implement keystore wallet functions.

• Shared sorting and other long-term efforts: Part of the reason Rollup-based designs are valuable is that they can implement functions such as shared sorting more efficiently.

As long as these standards are met, L2 can vary in terms of security, performance, and design models based on needs. For example, you can explore different virtual machines, ordering models, and scale versus security tradeoffs. But for users and developers, the security level of each L2 must be clear.

To move forward faster, cross-disciplinary organizations within the ecosystem can take on a larger share of the work, such as the Ethereum Foundation, client development teams, and mainstream application development teams. This will reduce coordination costs and make adopting the standard an easier decision as the development effort for each L2 and wallet will be reduced. However, as an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, L2 and wallets also need to strengthen the "last mile" development work to ensure that these features are truly put into the hands of users.

The Economics of ETH

We should adopt a multi-pronged strategy that covers all major possible sources of value for ETH as a three-point asset. Key components of this strategy may include the following:

• Broadly reach consensus to consolidate ETH as the main asset of the larger (L1 + L2) Ethereum economic system, support applications using ETH as the main collateral, etc.

• L2 is encouraged to support ETH and allocate a portion of the fees. This can be accomplished by burning some of the fees, permanently staking the fees and donating the proceeds to Ethereum ecosystem public goods, or a variety of other ways.

• Rollup-based designs are supported partly as a path for L1 to obtain value through MEV , but all Rollups should not be forced to be based on this design, because this is not suitable for all applications, and it cannot be assumed that this method alone can solve all problems.

• Increase the number of blobs, consider setting a minimum blob price, and consider blobs as another possible source of revenue. As an example, assuming that the average blob fee over the past 30 days remains unchanged (due to demand push) and the number of blobs increases to 128, Ethereum will burn 713,000 ETH per year. However, the demand curve is not necessarily so favorable, so that alone cannot solve the problem.

Conclusion: The road ahead

Ethereum has matured both in terms of technology stack and social ecosystem, leading us towards a more free and open future where hundreds of millions of people will be able to benefit from crypto-assets and decentralized applications. However, there is still a lot of work to be done, and now is the time to redouble our efforts.

• If you are an L2 developer, participate in the development of tools to allow blobs to scale more safely, develop code to extend EVM execution, and implement features and standards that make L2 interoperable.

• If you are a wallet developer, you also need to participate in contributions and implement standards so that the ecosystem can ensure a seamless user experience while maintaining the same security and decentralization features as Ethereum L1.

• If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively participate in these discussions; there are many areas that require deep thinking and brainstorming. The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each of us.