Original Title: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond

Original Author: Vitalik Buterin

Original Translation: Fu Ruhe, Odaily Planet Daily

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

The founders of several well-known projects have successively voiced their concerns about the future direction of Ethereum:

· The founders of Synthetix and Infinex believe that the EF should require L2 (Layer 2 networks) to use their revenue to buy back ETH, thereby increasing ETH demand and boosting its value.

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

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

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

Facing strong questioning from cornerstone projects in the ecosystem, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin finally spoke out today, announcing a "toll" on the L2 network. You can find more details in "The Seven Sins of Ethereum, Who Can Play the 'Salvation Symphony' for It?" and "Leading Projects Jointly 'Force the Palace,' Unmoved by the Ethereum Foundation."

This transformation is likely to become a key milestone in Ethereum's future development, showing us how Ethereum adapts to new opportunities and challenges. Below is Vitalik's original text, curated by Odaily Star Daily.

Ethereum's goal has not changed since day one: to build a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain platform. It is a freely open platform for decentralized applications, embodying principles similar to GNU + Linux, Mozilla, Tor, Wikipedia, and many other great free and open-source software projects (now known as the rebirth and cypherpunk spirit).

Over the past decade, Ethereum has also developed a feature that I greatly appreciate: in addition to cryptographic and economic innovation, Ethereum is also an innovation in social technology. 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 allowed me to catch a glimpse of what an alternative world might look like—a world with almost no barriers, divorced from traditional systems. Here, social hierarchies are upended, and the most esteemed members of society are the geeks who are focused on independently solving problems they deeply care about, rather than those playing the game to climb the ladder of traditional institutions and accumulate power. Here, almost all power is soft power. I found this to be beautiful and very inspiring—it makes you feel that in such a world, anything is possible, and such a world is actually within reach.”

Technical projects and social projects are inherently intertwined. If at time T you have a decentralized technical system, but it is backed by a centralized social process, then you cannot ensure that your technical system will still be decentralized at time T+1. Similarly, social processes are also upheld by technology in various ways: technology attracts users, the ecosystem brought by technology provides incentives for developers to stay, technology grounds the community, focusing on building rather than just socializing, and so on.

After a decade of effort, under the combined governance of technology and social attributes, Ethereum has demonstrated another important quality: Ethereum is able to provide practical services to people at scale. Millions of people use ETH or stablecoins as a savings method, and more people use these assets for payments: I am one of them. Ethereum has efficient, practical privacy tools that I use to pay for VPN services to protect my internet data. It also has ENS, a robust decentralized alternative for DNS and wider public key infrastructure. Additionally, Ethereum hosts easy-to-use decentralized Twitter alternatives and DeFi tools that offer millions of people higher-yield, lower-risk assets compared to traditional finance.

Five years ago, I was reluctant to discuss the latter's use cases, primarily because the infrastructure and code were not yet mature. At that time, we had just experienced those large-scale and painful smart contract hacks in 2016-2017, and if there was a 5% annual probability of losing 100% of returns, then a 7% annualized return would be meaningless compared to a 5% annualized return. Additionally, transaction fees were too high to enable the widespread application of these tools. Today, these tools have proven their resilience over time, the quality of audit tools has also improved, and we are becoming increasingly confident in their security. We now know what things cannot be done. L2 scaling solutions are at work, and transaction fees have remained extraordinarily low for almost a year.

We need to continue to enhance Ethereum's technological and social properties as well as its usability. If we only have the former without the latter, we will degenerate into an increasingly ineffective "decentralized" community, only protesting against mainstream institutions' "unethical and wrongful behavior" without truly providing better alternative solutions. If we only have the latter without the former, we will be no different from Wall Street's "greed is good" mindset, and many people joined the Ethereum community to break free from this mindset.

The duality of this coexistence of technology and practicality has many far-reaching implications. In this article, I want 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

Today, the path we are taking to scale Ethereum is through Layer 2 protocols. The Layer 2 in 2025 has made a significant leap compared to the early experiments of 2019: they have achieved crucial decentralization milestones, are safeguarding billions of dollars in assets, and have increased Ethereum's transaction capacity by 17 times while reducing fees by the same magnitude.

All of this is happening right at the wave of a successful application trend: various DeFi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, and novel projects like Worldchain (which now has 10 million users). Additionally, the once-stalled "enterprise blockchain" movement of the 2010s, deemed a dead end due to private chain failures, has found a new lease on life with the rise of Layer 2, with Soneium being a prominent example.

These successes also demonstrate the social advantage of Ethereum's decentralized and modular scaling approach: the Ethereum Foundation does not need to personally onboard all users but has dozens of independent entities driving the initiative. These entities have also made critical contributions to the technology, and without them, Ethereum could not have achieved what it has today. It is for this reason that we are finally approaching "escape velocity."

Challenge: Scaling and Heterogeneity Handling

The current Layer 2 faces two main challenges:

· Scaling: The current "Blob Space" barely manages to support the existing Layer 2 and its use cases but is far from sufficient to meet future demands.

· Heterogeneity Issue: Ethereum's initial scaling vision was to create a blockchain consisting of multiple shards, with each shard being a replica of the EVM handled by a small set of nodes. In theory, Layer 2 is the realization of this vision. However, in practice, a key difference exists: each shard (or group of shards) is created by different participants, considered as separate chains in the infrastructure, and typically follows different standards. This situation brings about challenges for developers and users in terms of composability and user experience.

The first issue is a straightforward technical challenge with a simple solution but significant implementation difficulty: provide Ethereum with more "Blob Space." Additionally, Ethereum L1 can alleviate the pressure in the short term through moderate scaling and improvements in proof of stake, statelessness, light verification, storage, EVM, and cryptographic technologies.

The second issue is a coordination problem that has garnered widespread public attention. The Ethereum ecosystem is no stranger to cross-team collaboration to accomplish complex technical tasks—after all, we achieved The Merge. However, the coordination challenge here is more daunting due to a larger number of participants, diverse goals, and a later start to the process. Nevertheless, our ecosystem has overcome many difficult challenges in the past and can do so again this time.

A potential shortcut for scaling is to forgo Layer 2 and achieve a much higher gas limit directly through Layer 1 (whether through multiple shards or a single shard). However, this approach would excessively sacrifice the advantages of Ethereum's current social structure, which have proven highly effective in integrating various forms of research, development, and ecosystem-building cultures. Therefore, we should stick to the existing path, continue primarily scaling through Layer 2, while ensuring Layer 2 truly delivers on its promise.

This implies the following:

· Layer 1 needs to accelerate expanding Blob capacity.

· Layer 1 also needs to moderately scale the EVM and increase the Gas limit to handle activities that Layer 1 will still carry even in a Layer 2-centric environment (such as zero-knowledge proofs, large-scale DeFi, deposits and withdrawals, specific large-scale exit scenarios, key storage wallets, asset issuance, etc.).

· Layer 2 needs to continue to enhance security. Layer 2 should provide the same security guarantees as sharding (including censorship resistance, light client verifiability, absence of embedded trusted parties, etc.).

· Layer 2 and wallets need accelerated improvement and standardized interoperability. This includes chain-specific addresses, message passing and cross-chain bridge standards, efficient cross-chain payments, on-chain configurations, etc. Using Ethereum should feel like using a single ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.

· Layer 2 deposit/withdrawal times need to be significantly reduced.

· Heterogeneity in Layer 2 is beneficial as long as basic interoperability requirements are met. Some Layer 2s will be based on Rollups with minimal governance, running exact replicas of the Layer 1 EVM; some Layer 2s will try different virtual machines; and some Layer 2s will act more like servers, leveraging Ethereum to provide additional security for users. We need various types of Layer 2 solutions across this spectrum.

· We need to explicitly consider the economics of ETH. Even in a world where Layer 2 dominates, we must ensure that ETH continues to accrue value and provide solutions for various value accrual patterns.

Next, we will delve into each topic in detail.

Scaling: Blob, Blob, or Blob

In EIP-4844, each slot has 3 Blobs, with a data bandwidth of 384 kB per slot. A simple calculation suggests this is equivalent to 32 kB per second, with each on-chain transaction taking up approximately 150 bytes, allowing us to support around 210 transactions/second (TPS). According to L2beat's data, this estimate is almost spot on.

The upcoming Pectra release scheduled for March will double the number of Blobs per slot to 6.

The current focus of Fusaka is primarily on PeerDAS, with plans to prioritize the implementation of PeerDAS and EOF only. PeerDAS may increase the Blob count by another 2-3 times.

The next goal is to continue increasing the Blob count. When reaching 2D sampling, the Blob count can be increased to 128 per time slot, with the potential for further increases in the future. Combined with improvements in data compression, the on-chain TPS can reach 100,000.

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

· Clearly lower the priority of non-Blob functionalities.

· Emphasize more clearly that Blob is the target and list related peer-to-peer development as a priority for talent recruitment.

· Allow validators to directly adjust the Blob target, similar to Gas limits. This will enable the Blob target to increase more rapidly with technological improvements without waiting for a hard fork.

· Consider more aggressive approaches to increase the Blob count faster by introducing more trust assumptions for low-resource validators, but we need to approach this cautiously.

Enhancing Security: Proof Systems and On-Chain Rollup

Currently, there are three Stage 1 Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three Stage 2 Rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). However, most activities still occur on Stage 0 Rollup (i.e., multi-signature schemes). This situation needs to change. One significant reason for the slow pace of change is that building a reliable proof system and establishing enough confidence to fully rely on its security (abandoning the "training wheels") is very challenging.

To achieve this goal, there are two paths:

· Stage 2 + Multi-Proof System + Formal Verification: Achieve redundancy through multiple proof systems and enhance security confidence through formal verification (e.g., "Verifiable ZK-EVM project").

· On-Chain Rollup: Integrate the verification of the EVM state transition function into the protocol itself, for example, through precompiled contracts.

At the current stage, both of these paths need to proceed concurrently. The roadmap for "Stage 2 + Multi-Proof System + Formal Verification" is relatively clear. Accelerated development can be achieved through strengthened collaboration within the software stack, reducing duplication of work and improving interoperability as a byproduct.

For Native Rollup, this is still in the early stages and particularly requires more thought on how to maximize the flexibility of precompiled contracts. An ideal goal is to support not just a complete clone of the EVM but also to support an EVM with arbitrary changes, allowing a modified EVM Rollup to still utilize the precompiled contracts of the Native Rollup, only modifying part of it through "introducing custom verifiers." This may involve adaptations of precompiled contracts, opcodes, state trees, and other components.

Interoperability and Standardization

The goal is to make the experience of transferring and applying assets between different L2s as smooth as interacting between different "shards" on the same blockchain. Currently, there is a relatively clear roadmap in this regard:

· Chain-specific addresses: Addresses should include both on-chain account information and an identifier for the chain itself. For example, ERC-3770 is an early attempt, and there are now more complex designs, even migrating the L2 registry to Ethereum L1.

· Standardizing Cross-Layer Bridges and Message Passing: There should be a standardized way to verify proofs and pass messages between L2s, and these standards should not rely on trust-based mechanisms like multi-signature bridges. An ecosystem relying on trust-based assumptions is unacceptable. If this trust assumption did not exist in the 2016 sharding design, it is also unacceptable today.

· Accelerating Deposit and Withdrawal Times: The time for "local" messages should be reduced from weeks to minutes (with the ultimate goal being one block time). This requires faster ZK-EVM provers and support for proof aggregation technology.

· Reading L1 Data from L2: For example, L1SLOAD and REMOTESTATICCALL, these features will significantly simplify cross-L2 interoperability and help enable functionalities like key management wallets.

· Shared ordering and other long-term work: One valuable aspect of Rollup-based designs is their ability to more efficiently implement shared ordering and similar functionalities.

While meeting these standards, L2s can differ in terms of security, performance, and design models according to their needs. For example, exploring different virtual machines, ordering models, and trade-offs between scale and security are valid. However, the security level of each L2 must be clear to users and developers.

To accelerate progress, cross-industry 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, making the adoption of standards an easier decision as the development workload for each L2 and wallet will decrease. However, as an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, L2s and wallets also need to enhance the development work at the "last mile" to ensure these features truly reach the hands of users.

Ethereum Economics

We should adopt a multi-faceted strategy to cover all major potential sources of value for ETH as a triple-point asset. Key components of this strategy may include:

· Achieving widespread consensus, solidifying ETH as a primary asset of the larger (L1 + L2) Ethereum economy, supporting applications relying on ETH as the primary collateral, and more.

· Encouraging L2 support for ETH and allocating a portion of fees. This could be achieved through burning a portion of fees, permanently staking fees and donating proceeds to public goods within the Ethereum ecosystem, or through various other means.

· Supporting Rollup-based designs, partly as a pathway for L1 to capture value from MEV, but not mandating that all Rollups follow this design, as it may not be suitable for all applications, and it cannot be assumed that this alone will solve all issues.

· Increasing the Blob count, considering setting a minimum Blob price, and using Blob as another potential revenue stream. For example, suppose the average fee for Blob over the past 30 days remains constant (driven by demand) while the Blob count increases to 128. In that case, Ethereum would burn 713,000 ETH per year. However, the demand curve may not always be favorable, so this alone cannot solve the problem.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

Ethereum has matured in terms of its technical stack and social ecosystem, leading us toward a freer and more open future where billions will benefit from crypto assets and decentralized applications. However, there is still much work to be done, and now is the time to redouble our efforts.

· If you are an L2 developer, engage in tooling to securely scale Blob, develop code to expand the EVM's execution, and implement features and standards that enable L2 interoperability.

· If you are a wallet developer, similarly contribute to and implement standards that keep the ecosystem secure while ensuring a seamless user experience that upholds the same security and decentralization ethos as Ethereum L1.

· If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively engage in these discussions; there are many areas that require deep thought and collaboration. The future of Ethereum relies on the active participation of each and every one of us.

Original Article Link