Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced concerns about the “complexity” of Layer 2 solutions.
Honestly I’m about 3x less confident in the “simplify L1 even at the expense of more complicated L2s” concept than I was five years ago. The challenge is that when you can trade off between L1 bug risk and L2 bug risk, it’s not actually clear that the latter is better!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 21, 2024
“Honestly, I’m about three times less confident in the concept of simplifying ‘L1 at the expense of more complex L2s’ than five years ago,” he stated.
Buterin called for a balanced development of different layers to mitigate risks and prevent bugs.
According to him, an L1 blockchain can recover relatively quickly from a consensus failure, but errors in L2 networks pose risks of irreversible loss of funds for users.
Offering an alternative approach, Buterin suggested adding more complex features to first-layer networks. This would reduce the burden on scaling solutions, allowing them to remain “fairly simple.”
Previously, the Ethereum co-founder identified ZK-Rollups as the primary L2 network expected to surpass Optimistic Rollups.
In November 2023, Buterin published an essay recalling the Plasma technology and discussing its application in current scenarios. He proposed using the solution alongside ZK-SNARK.
In February 2024, he highlighted the advantages of Verkle trees for blockchain scaling.