Vitalik Buterin: Layer 2 Is the Only Safe Way to Scale Ethereum and Preserve Decentralization

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has recently described Layer 2 as the future of Ethereum scaling and the only safe way to scale Ethereum while decentralization, which is the core of blockchain, remains unaffected.

Buterin said this in a speech today at the 2021 Shanghai International Blockchain Week. According to Buterin, Ethereum 2.0 roadmap offers scalability and the earlier phases of the upgrade are already approaching, but base layer scalability for applications will come at the last major phase of the upgrade.

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Urgent Need to Make Ethereum More Scalable

During his speech, Buterin admitted that Ethereum needs to be more scalable urgently. He, however, pointed out that the execution of sharding would take a long time.

Layer 2 solutions that have been launched include Polygon Hermez, Loopring, ZKSync, Optimism, and Arbitrum One. According to Buterin, the current cost of transferring ETH on Polygon Hermez is $0.25 compared to 6.84 on Ethereum, making scalability on the blockchain more urgent.

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Buterin noted:

The Ethereum ecosystem is all-in on rollups as a scaling strategy for the near and mid-term future… optimistic rollups, which are simpler and easier to build were likely to be preferred in the short-term.”

Ethereum co-founder added that ZK rollups, which were more complex but had strong security, were likely to be preferred in the long term. He said enterprise applications could also leverage ZK rollups when it is ready. This, he said, will make users enjoy low fees without the need to have a separate private blockchain.

Buterin admonished application developers to actively work on moving to rollups as quickly and safely as possible. He added that Non-financial applications, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Ethereum Name Servers (ENS), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), light-clients could also move to rollups, in order to reduce transaction fees for users.

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Describing the necessity of sharding execution, Buterin said:

“Ethereum scaling is not just an idea, but a clear roadmap where many pieces of that roadmap have either been developed or already been released or are well in progress.”

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