Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher
After the price of ETH hit a new low since May last year, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published a long article today reflecting on Ethereum's long-standing Layer2 strategy, planning to increase investment in the Layer1 direction, causing a sensational impact across the entire crypto industry.
Originally rollup-centric roadmap defined Layer2 as Ethereum-supported shards, providing trustless block space. In this article, Vitalik seems to have abandoned the "rollup-centric" scaling model he previously advocated, pointing out that while Ethereum's underlying scaling is proceeding, the decentralization speed of Layer 2 is "much slower than expected," and many Layer2s are either unable or unwilling to meet the trust guarantees required for true sharding.
"These two facts, for whatever reason, mean that the original vision of Layer2 and its role in Ethereum are no longer meaningful, and we need a new path," said Vitalik. From an external perspective, these statements suggest that Vitalik acknowledges the Layer2 narrative is almost outdated, and more focus in the future will be placed on scaling Layer1 itself.
Since the proposal of Layer2, it has become one of the most capital-favored and market-attention concepts in the crypto industry. Nearly a hundred Layer2 projects, such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, have emerged, raising over 3 billion US dollars in total. They have played a key role in scaling Ethereum and reducing user transaction costs, with multiple token FDVs consistently exceeding 10 billion US dollars.
However, under the strong competition of Solana's high-performance blockchain, the performance advantages of Layer2 have not been fully demonstrated, and the industry influence of its ecosystem projects has gradually declined. Currently, only the Base ecosystem remains active in the front line of the crypto industry, representing Ethereum Layer2 carrying the torch.
Mainly issued Layer2 token market capitalization and financing data Source: RootData
In addition, Layer2 outages still occur frequently. On January 11 of this year, Starknet experienced another outage after years of operation, and a post-incident report showed that a conflict between the execution layer and the proving layer caused a rollback of on-chain activities for about 18 minutes. In September last year, Linea was down for over half an hour. In December 2024, Taiko's mainnet experienced a 30-minute outage due to an ABI issue, indicating that they are still in an unstable state technically.
In fact, Vitalik previously proposed a framework for measuring the decentralization of rollups, which is carried out in stages, from Stage 0 (a centralized committee of trust can veto transactions), Stage 1 (smart contracts begin to have limited governance rights), to Stage 2 (representing full trustlessness).
Although nearly a hundred Ethereum Layer2 projects have been born, only a very few have developed to Stage 1. The Layer2 project Base, which Coinbase began incubating in 2023, did not reach Stage 1 until last year. This point has been repeatedly criticized by Vitalik in the past. According to L2beat statistics, among the top 20 Rollup projects, only one project has reached Stage 2, which is the product zk.money developed by the decentralized privacy protocol Aztec, but the product has already stalled in development. The other 12 projects are all in Stage 0, heavily relying on auxiliary functions and multi-signatures.
Vitalik pointed out that Layer2 projects should at least upgrade to Phase 1, otherwise these networks should be regarded as more competitive, vampire-like "Layer1 networks with cross-chain bridges."
Source: L2beat
In addition to corporate interests that may delay the decentralization of Layer2, Vitalik pointed out that there are also technical challenges and regulatory concerns. "I have even seen at least one company clearly state that they may never want to go beyond the first phase, not only for technical reasons related to the security of ZK-EVM, but also because their customers' regulatory requirements require them to have ultimate control," he said.
However, Vitalik did not completely abandon the concept of Layer2, but further broadened his view on what Layer2 should achieve.
"We should stop viewing Layer2 as Ethereum's 'branded shard,' along with the social status and responsibilities that come with it," he said. "Instead, we can see Layer2 as a complete spectrum, which includes chains fully trusted and credit-supported by Ethereum with various unique properties (such as not just EVM), as well as various options with different degrees of connection to Ethereum, from which everyone (or bot) can choose whether to pay attention to them based on their own needs."
Regarding future directions, Vitalik further suggested that Layer2 projects in competition should focus on added value rather than just scaling up. The development directions he suggested include: privacy-focused virtual machines, ultra-low latency serialization, non-financial applications (such as social or AI applications), application-specific execution environments, and throughput beyond what the next generation of Layer1 can support.
It is also worth noting that Vitalik again mentioned ZK-EVM proofs, which can be used to scale Layer1. This is a precompiled layer written into the base layer and "automatically upgraded with Ethereum."
In the past year, during the Ethereum Foundation's organizational restructuring and two network upgrades, Layer 1 has already become one of the most core strategies, with one of the goals being to gradually increase the gas limit through multiple iterations, allowing L1 to handle more native transactions, asset issuance, governance, and DeFi settlements without excessive reliance on L2. In this year's Glamsterdam upgrade plan, multiple improvement technologies are aimed at reducing manipulation and abuse related to MEV, stabilizing gas fees, and laying an important foundation for future scalability improvements.
In an earlier statement, Vitalik said that 2026 will be a key year for Ethereum to regain lost ground in self-sovereignty and trustlessness. The plans include simplifying node operation through ZK-EVM and BAL technologies, launching Helios to verify RPC data, implementing ORAM and PIR technologies to protect user privacy, developing social recovery wallets and time-lock features to enhance fund security, and improving on-chain UI and IPFS applications.
Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum will correct the compromises made over the past decade in node operation, application decentralization, and data privacy, refocusing on core values. Although this will be a long process, it will make the Ethereum ecosystem stronger.
Appendix: In response to Vitalik's article and views, many industry professionals have also expressed their own opinions. The following are some highlights excerpted by ChainCatcher:
Wei Dai (1kx Research Partner):
It's nice to see Vitalik discussing the hindsight mistakes of the rollup-centric roadmap. However, asking "If I were an L2, what would I do today?" misses the point.
The key is not in what Vitalik will do, but in what these L2 layers and application teams will do. L2 layers and their applications will always prioritize their own interests over Ethereum's interests. For L2 layers to reach the first stage or achieve maximum interoperability with Ethereum, it must be ensured that doing so is valuable.
For a long time, this issue has been defined as a security issue (L2 requires L1 to support functionality and CR). But in reality, what matters most is whether Ethereum's L1 can provide more users and liquidity for L2 and applications. (I think there is no simple solution, but the direction of efforts toward interoperability is correct.)
Blue Fox (a well-known crypto researcher):
Vitalik means that L2 has utilized L1, but in terms of value feedback or ecological feedback, L2 has not done it properly. Now L1 can scale by itself, without relying on L2 to achieve scalability. L2 either aligns with L1 (native rollup), or becomes L1.
What does this mean? Bad news for general L2, good news for L2 application chains, as we have consistently said before. L2 application chains can play creatively and feed value back to the ecosystem.
Jason Chen (well-known cryptography researcher):
As Ethereum itself scales, most notably with gas fees dropping to nearly the same level as L2s, and gas fees are expected to continue decreasing. Additionally, with ZK gradually being implemented, the speed will also become almost the same as L2s. Therefore, the current position of L2s is very awkward. Vitalik's tweet is essentially an official announcement that the phased historical mission of L2s to scale Ethereum from the beginning until now has been completed. If new narrative angles for L2s are not found soon, L2s will become products of a bygone era and be phased out.
For the project side, the biggest purpose of building an L2 is still to capture all the transaction fees themselves. However, for users, L2 has already lost its significance, as the gas fees and performance are not much different from the mainnet.
L2 was born on Ethereum and also perished on Ethereum; the struggle between the Zhou Son of Heaven and the feudal lords has also ended.
Haotian (well-known crypto researcher):
I have mentioned in my previous articles no less than 10 times that the general-purpose Layer 2 strategy no longer works, and each Layer 2 should transition to a specialized Layer 2, which is actually a kind of Layer 1. Unexpectedly, after Vitalik Buterin guided the long Stage 2 strategy alignment, many Layer 2s still became "sacrificial pawns."
Layer2, especially general-purpose Layer2, carries a heavy burden of development. Initially, it faced the technical path issue of aligning with Ethereum's security. Later, there was the regulatory problem of sequencer centralization after token issuance. Finally, it encountered the burden of "being disproven" due to poor ecosystem cultivation. The fundamental reason is that all Layer2 solutions initially relied on Ethereum's Layer1 for survival. When Ethereum realized its own difficulties and began to take the lead in evolving Layer1 performance, Layer2 lost all imaginative space for empowering Ethereum, leaving only burdens and troubles.