Vitalik Buterin is signaling a serious reframing of Ethereum’s layer-2 narrative: not the loss of life of rollups, however the finish of the concept that L2s are shards whose major job is scaling the community. With L1 charges now low and gasoline restrict projected to rise sharply in 2026, he argues the rollup-centric roadmap’s unique premise not suits the truth on the bottom.
Buterin opened his X put up on Feb. 3 by pointing to 2 pressures which have been 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 previous 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 huge portions of block area that’s backed by the total religion and credit score of Ethereum… block area the place, when you 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. Should 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 smart.” 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 not less than one L2 that, in his phrases, “could by no means wish to transcend stage 1,” citing not solely technical issues round ZK-EVM security but in addition customer-driven regulatory necessities that “require them to have final management.”
Ethereum Layer-2’s Want To Change
That’s not introduced as an indictment a lot as a categorization shift. If an L2 retains final management, it could nonetheless be a legitimate product for its customers, Buterin urged, 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 should always cease occupied with L2s as actually being ‘branded shards’, with the social standing and duties that this entails.”
As an alternative, he sketches a spectrum mannequin: some L2s will be tightly backed by ETH’s safety ensures, whereas others will be looser and extra non-obligatory relying on consumer 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 steerage is easy: cease anchoring your identification on scaling alone. Should you’re dealing with ETH or Ethereum-issued property, 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, needs 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 grow to be “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 might “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 realize with no “safety council,” and the place rollups can add customized options whereas nonetheless anchoring their EVM correctness on to Ethereum. He additionally tied this course 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 based mostly 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.
Featured picture from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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