您现在的位置是：首页 新闻资讯 链资讯链资讯

Vitalik calls for Layer 2: Return to support ETH under heavy public pressure

梦中人 2025-04-25 02:06:06 链资讯已有人查阅

导读Vitalik We believe that we should continue to adhere to the L2 expansion route, but L2 needs to fulfill it...

Vitalik We believe that we should continue to adhere to the L2 expansion route, but L2 needs to fulfill its commitments, such as contributing a certain amount of revenue to support ETH.

Title: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond Author: Vitalik Buterin, Co Founder of Ethereum Translation: How to Go, Odaily Daily

Recently, Ethereum's performance in this cycle has sparked widespread dissatisfaction, with community members expressing disappointment at the inaction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). Even some leading projects in the Ethereum ecosystem have begun to question the EF, seemingly with a sense of "pressure palace".

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 L2 (second layer network) should be required to use its revenue to repurchase ETH, thereby increasing the demand for ETH and enhancing its value.

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

Aave The founder of EF has released "12 Measures to Save EF", calling on the foundation to take swift action to address the current predicament.

A more intense voice comes from the founder of Wintermute, who believes that there is a possibility of a "death spiral" in Ethereum.

Faced with strong doubts from the Ecological Foundation project, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin finally spoke out today and announced that he will impose a "toll fee" on the L2 network.

Details can be found in "Counting the Seven Deadly Sins of Ethereum, Who Can Play the 'Divine Song of Salvation' for It?" and "Leading Project Collective 'Persecution', Ethereum Foundation Unaffected.

This transformation may become a key node in the future development of Ethereum, and also shows us how Ethereum can embrace new opportunities and challenges in self adjustment.

The following is the original text of Vitalik, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.

The goal of Ethereum has not changed since day one: to establish a global, censorship resistant, permissionless memory blockchain platform. This is a free and open platform provided for decentralized applications, based on the principles of GNU Linux Mozilla、Tor、 Wikipedia, as well as many great free and open source software projects, are in line with the spirit of regeneration and cryptographic punk.

In the past decade, Ethereum has also developed a feature that I greatly admire: in addition to innovations in cryptography and economics, Ethereum is also a social technology innovation. The Ethereum ecosystem as a whole demonstrates a more open and decentralized way of collaboration. Political philosopher Ahmed Gatnash described his experience at Devcon as follows:

This gave me a glimpse into what an alternative world could look like - a world with almost no barriers and no connection to traditional systems. Here, the social standard status system has been overturned, and those who enjoy the highest social status are the geeks who focus on independently solving the problems they truly care about, rather than those who play games to climb the ladder of traditional institutions and accumulate power. Here, almost all power is soft power. I think this is beautiful and very inspiring - it makes people feel that anything is possible in such a world, and that such a world is actually within reach.

Technical projects and social projects are essentially intertwined. If you have a decentralized technology system at time point T, but it is maintained by a centralized social process behind it, then it cannot be guaranteed that your technology system will still be decentralized at time point T 1. Similarly, social processes are maintained by technology in various ways: technology attracts users, the ecosystem it brings provides retention incentives for developers, technology keeps communities grounded, focused on building rather than just socializing, and so on.

After ten years of effort, under the joint governance of technology and social attributes, Ethereum has demonstrated another important characteristic: it can provide practical services to people on a large scale. Millions of people use ETH or stablecoins as a savings method, and more people use these assets for payments: I myself am one of them. Ethereum has an efficient and practical privacy tool that I use to pay VPN fees to protect my Internet data. It also has ENS, a robust decentralized alternative for DNS and broader public key infrastructure. In addition, there are easy-to-use decentralized Twitter alternatives and DeFi tools on Ethereum, providing millions of people with higher returns and lower risk assets than traditional finance.

Five years ago, I was unwilling to discuss the usage scenarios of the latter, 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 attacks of 2016-2017, and if there was a 5% chance of losing 100% of our annual returns, then a 7% annualized return rate would be meaningless compared to a 5% annualized return rate. In addition, the transaction costs are too high to achieve large-scale application of these tools. Nowadays, these tools have proven their resilience over time, and the quality of audit tools has also been improved. We have increasing confidence in their security. We know what things cannot be done. L2 expansion technology is playing a role, and transaction costs have remained at a very low level for nearly a year.

We need to continue enhancing Ethereum's technological and social attributes as well as its practicality. If there is only the former without the latter, we will become an increasingly ineffective 'decentralized' community, only protesting against the 'unethical and wrong behavior' of mainstream institutions, but unable to truly provide better alternatives. If there is only the latter without the former, we will be no different from the Wall Street mentality of 'greed is a good thing', and many people join the Ethereum community with the intention of getting rid of this mentality.

The duality of technology and practicality has many profound impacts. In this article, I would like 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

Nowadays, our path to expanding Ethereum is through the Layer 2 protocol. Layer 2 in 2025 has made a huge leap compared to early experiments in 2019: they have reached key decentralization milestones, are protecting billions of dollars in assets, and have increased Ethereum's trading capacity by 17 times while reducing fees by the same amount.

All of this happened just in time for a wave of successful applications: various DeFi platforms, social networks, predictive markets, and novel projects such as Worldchain (which now has 10 million users). In addition, the "Enterprise Memory 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, with Soneium being a prominent example.

These successes also demonstrate the social advantages of Ethereum's decentralized and modular scaling methods: the Ethereum Foundation does not need to personally search for all users, but rather dozens of independent entities spontaneously push forward. These entities have also made crucial contributions to technology, without which Ethereum would not have achieved its current success. That's why we are finally approaching 'escape velocity'.

Challenge: Scalability and Heterogeneity Handling

Currently, Layer 2 faces two main challenges:

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

Heterogeneity issue: The initial scaling vision of Ethereum was to create a memory block chain consisting of multiple shards, each shard being a replica of EVM processed by a small number of nodes. In theory, Layer 2 is the realization of this vision. However, there is actually a key difference: each shard (or group of shards) is created by different participants, viewed as a different chain in the infrastructure, and typically follows different standards. This situation brings about issues for developers and users in terms of composability and user experience.

The first issue is an easy to understand technical challenge, with a simple solution but high implementation difficulty: providing more 'Blob space' for Ethereum. In addition, Ethereum L1 can also alleviate pressure in the short term through moderate expansion, as well as improvements in proof of stake, stateless and light verification, storage, EVM, and encryption technologies.

The second issue is a coordination problem and has attracted widespread public attention. The Ethereum ecosystem is not unfamiliar with cross team collaboration to accomplish complex technical tasks - after all, we have completed The Merge. However, the coordination issue here is more challenging because there are more participants, more diverse goals, and the process starts later. But even so, our ecosystem has already solved many difficult problems in the past, and this time it can also be achieved.

One possible shortcut for scaling is to abandon Layer 2 and directly implement much higher gas limits through Layer 1 (whether through multiple shards or a single shard). However, this approach would sacrifice too much of the advantages of Ethereum's current social structure, which are highly effective in integrating different forms of research, development, and ecosystem building cultures. Therefore, we should stick to the current path and continue to primarily expand through Layer 2, while ensuring that Layer 2 truly fulfills its promise.

This means the following:

Layer 1 needs to accelerate the expansion of Blob capacity.

Layer 1 It is necessary to moderately expand the EVM and increase the Gas limit to cope with the challenges even in environments dominated by Layer 2, Layer 1 Activities that will still be carried out (such as zero knowledge proofs, large-scale DeFi, deposit and withdrawal operations, special large-scale exit scenarios, key storage wallets, asset issuances, etc.).

Layer 2 requires continuous improvement in security. Layer 2 The same security measures as sharding should be provided, including anti censorship, lightweight client verifiability, absence of 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, rather than 34 different memory blockchains.

The deposit and withdrawal time for Layer 2 needs to be significantly shortened.

As long as the basic interoperability requirements are met, the heterogeneity of Layer 2 is beneficial. Some Layer 2 will run replicas identical to Layer 1 EVM based on governance minimization Rollup; Some Layer 2 will try different virtual machines; Other Layer 2 will be more like servers, utilizing Ethereum to provide users with additional security protection. We need to cover various Layer 2 layers of this spectrum.

We need to clearly consider the economics of ETH. Even in a world dominated by Layer 2, it is important to ensure that ETH can continue to accumulate value and provide solutions for multiple value accumulation modes.

Next, we will discuss each topic in detail.

Expansion: Blob、Blob、 Still Blob

In EIP-4844, each slot has 3 Blob and the data bandwidth is 384 kB per slot. A simple estimate suggests that this is equivalent to 32 kB per second, with each transaction occupying approximately 150 bytes on the chain, so we can support around 210 transactions per second (TPS). According to L2beat's data, this estimate is almost completely consistent.

Pectra, scheduled to be released in March, will double the number of Blob to 6 per slot.

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

The next goal is to continuously increase the number of Blob. When reaching 2D sampling, the number of Blob can be increased to 128 per slot, and it can be further increased in the future. Combined with improvements in data compression, on chain TPS can reach 100000.

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

Lower the priority of non Blob features more clearly. Clearly state that Blob is the target and prioritize the related peer-to-peer research and development as a talent recruitment priority. Let the pledger directly adjust the Blob target, similar to gas restrictions. This will enable Blob targets to increase faster with technological improvements without waiting for a hard fork. We can consider a more aggressive approach by introducing more trust assumptions to low resource stakers to increase the number of Blob more quickly, but we need to be cautious about this.

Improving Security: Proving System and Native Rollup

Currently, there are three types of Rollup for Stage 1 (Optimism, Arbitrarum, Ink) and three types of Rollup for Stage 2 (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). However, most of the activities still occur on Rollup at stage 0 (i.e. multi signature scheme). This situation needs to be changed. One important reason for the slow process of change is that building a reliable proof system and establishing enough confidence to fully rely on its security (abandoning 'training wheels') is very difficult.

There are two paths to achieve this goal:

Phase 2 Multiple Proof System Formal Verification: Redundancy is achieved through multiple proof systems, and formal verification (such as the 'Verified ZK-EVM Project') is utilized to enhance security confidence.

Native Rollup: Integrating the validation of EVM state transition functions into the protocol itself, such as through precompiled contracts.

At present, both paths need to be advanced in parallel. The roadmap for 'Phase 2 Multi proof System Formal Validation' is relatively clear, and can be accelerated by strengthening collaboration in the software stack. This not only reduces repetitive work, but also enhances interoperability as a byproduct.

For native Rollup, this is still in its early stages, and more thinking is needed on how to maximize the flexibility of precompiled contracts. An ideal goal is to support not only complete clones of EVMs, but also EVMs with arbitrary changes, allowing modified EVM Rollup to still use native Rollup precompiled contracts, with only the modified parts' introducing custom provers'. This may involve adaptation of precompiled contracts, opcodes, state trees, and other components.

Interoperability and Standardization

The goal is to make the transfer of assets between different L2 and the user experience of applications as smooth as the interaction between different "shards" in the same memory 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 the identifier of the chain itself. For example, ERC-3770 It is an early attempt, and currently there are more complex designs, even migrating the L2 registry to Ethereum L1.

Standardized cross chain bridges and information transmission: There should be standardized methods to verify proofs and transmit information between L2, and these standards should not rely on trust mechanisms such as multi signature bridges. An ecosystem that relies on multiple signature bridges is unacceptable. If this trust assumption did not exist in the sharding design of 2016, it would still be unacceptable today.

Accelerate deposit and withdrawal times: The time for 'native' information should be reduced from weeks to minutes (with the ultimate goal of one round of block time). This requires faster ZK-EVM provers and support for proof aggregation technology.

Synchronize reading of L1 data from L2, such as L1SLOAD and REMOTESTICALL, will greatly simplify interoperability across L2 and facilitate the implementation of key repository wallet functionality.

Shared sorting and other long-term work: Part of the value of Rollup based designs is that they can more efficiently implement functions such as shared sorting.

Under the premise of meeting these standards, L2 can vary in terms of security, performance, and design models according to requirements. For example, different virtual machines, sorting models, and trade-offs between scale and security can be explored. But for users and developers, the security level of each L2 must be clear.

In order to advance 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 standards a easier decision, as the development workload for each L2 and wallet will decrease accordingly. However, as an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, L2 We also need to strengthen the development of the 'last mile' feature in the wallet to ensure that these features are truly implemented in the hands of users.

The Economics of ETH

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

Broad consensus has been reached to consolidate ETH as the primary asset of the larger (L1 L2) Ethereum economic system, and to support applications that use ETH as the primary collateral.

Encourage L2 to support ETH and allocate a portion of the fees. This can be achieved by destroying a portion of the fees, permanently pledging the fees, and donating the proceeds to the Ethereum ecosystem's public goods, or by using various other methods.

Support Rollup based design, partially as a path for L1 to obtain value through MEV, but should not force all Rollup to be based on this design, as it is not applicable to all applications, and it cannot be assumed that this approach alone can solve all problems.

Increase the number of Blob, consider setting a minimum Blob price, and consider Blob as another possible source of revenue. For example, assuming the average cost of Blob over the past 30 days remains unchanged (due to demand push) and the number of Blob increases to 128, Ethereum will destroy 713000 ETH annually. However, the demand curve may not necessarily be so favorable, so this alone cannot solve the problem.

Conclusion: The Future Path

Ethereum has matured in its technology stack and social ecosystem, leading us towards a more free and open future where hundreds of millions of people will benefit from encrypted assets and decentralized applications. However, there is still a lot of work to be done, and now it is time to double the effort.

If you are an L2 developer, participate in the development of tools to make Blob more securely scalable, develop code to extend EVM execution, and implement features and standards that enable L2 interoperability.

If you are a wallet developer, you also need to contribute and implement standards to ensure a seamless user experience while maintaining the same security and decentralized features as Ethereum L1 in the ecosystem.

If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively participate in these discussions; There are still many areas that require in-depth thinking and brainstorming. The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each and every one of us.

Original text link

This article is authorized to be reproduced from Odaily Daily Planet