Did Vitalik Buterin Just Kill Ethereum Layer-2s? Here’s What He Said
Vitalik Buterin is signaling a significant reframing of Ethereum’s layer-2 narrative: not the dying of rollups, however the finish of the concept L2s are shards whose main job is scaling the community. With L1 charges now low and fuel restrict projected to rise sharply in 2026, he argues the rollup-centric roadmap’s unique premise not matches the truth on the bottom.
Buterin opened his X post on Feb. 3 by pointing to 2 pressures which were constructing in parallel: L2s have moved to “stage 2” way more slowly than anticipated, and Ethereum mainnet is scaling in its personal proper. In his telling, these developments break the outdated psychological mannequin in each instructions.
“Ethereum must scale,” he wrote, recapping what he framed as the unique thesis. “The definition of ‘Ethereum scaling’ is the existence of enormous portions of block area that’s backed by the complete religion and credit score of Ethereum… block area the place, if you happen to do issues (together with with ETH) inside that block area, your actions are assured to be legitimate, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, so long as Ethereum itself capabilities. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM the place its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you aren’t scaling Ethereum.”
The punchline is blunt: “This imaginative and prescient not is sensible.” Buterin says L1 doesn’t want L2s to function “branded shards” if base-layer capability is increasing, and he’s more and more skeptical that many L2s both can or wish to meet the safety and management expectations that label implies. He pointed to no less than one L2 that, in his phrases, “might by no means wish to transcend stage 1,” citing not solely technical considerations round ZK-EVM safety but additionally customer-driven regulatory necessities that “require them to have final management.”
Ethereum Layer-2’s Need To Change
That’s not offered as an indictment a lot as a categorization shift. If an L2 retains final management, it might nonetheless be a legitimate product for its customers, Buterin instructed, but it surely shouldn’t be marketed as “scaling Ethereum” within the strict sense envisioned by the rollup-centric roadmap. In that context, he argues, “we must always cease desirous about L2s as actually being ‘branded shards’, with the social standing and obligations that this entails.”
Instead, he sketches a spectrum mannequin: some L2s might be tightly backed by ETH’s safety ensures, whereas others might be looser and extra non-obligatory relying on person wants. That spectrum framing implicitly makes room for app-specific chains, completely different belief fashions, and non-EVM environments—with out forcing them right into a single “rollup as shard” storyline.
For L2 groups, Buterin’s steering is easy: cease anchoring your identification on scaling alone. If you’re dealing with ETH or Ethereum-issued belongings, he argues “stage 1 on the minimal” issues; in any other case, you’re successfully working as “only a separate L1 with a bridge.” The actual differentiator, in his view, ought to be options and properties {that a} bigger L1 nonetheless received’t present—whether or not that’s specialised execution environments, privateness, sequencing traits like ultra-low latency, or non-financial use circumstances.
Buterin says he’s develop into “extra satisfied of the worth of the native rollup precompile,” particularly as soon as Ethereum has enshrined the ZK-EVM proof verification it “want[s] anyway to scale L1.” The concept is a protocol-level precompile that verifies ZK-EVM proofs and is handled as a part of Ethereum itself, which means it will “auto-upgrade together with Ethereum,” and if it shipped with a bug, “Ethereum will hard-fork to repair the bug.”
That final level is the subtext: he desires a path the place trustless verification and interoperability are simpler to attain and not using a “safety council,” and the place rollups can add customized options whereas nonetheless anchoring their EVM correctness on to Ethereum. He additionally tied this route to the prospect of synchronous composability: transactions that may safely span L1 and L2 liquidity with tight coupling, referencing ongoing analysis on combining preconfirmations with primarily based rollups and real-time proving.
Buterin’s conclusion leaves room for uncomfortable outcomes. A permissionless ecosystem will produce chains with “trust-dependent, or backdoored, or in any other case insecure” components, he wrote, calling that “unavoidable.” The job, as he frames it, is to make ensures legible to customers whereas strengthening Ethereum’s base layer, suggesting that the subsequent section of L2 competitors could also be much less about who “scales Ethereum,” and extra about who can credibly outline, and show, what they’re truly providing.
At press time, ETH traded at $2,256.