Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Proposes a Strategic Expansion of Ethereum L1, L2

Summary: raise the blobs, work hard on interop and security, think about economics. See the post for more details on each topic. Ethereum's future is bright.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared his thoughts on strategies for Ethereum Layer 1 and Layer 2 expansion in a recent blog post. Buterin highlighted the importance of rollups in the scaling strategy, stating that they "are the primary technical aspect that people should be focusing on to continue to help advance Ethereum."

The Ethereum co-founder's blog post on strategies for L1, L2 expansion

In his blog post, Buterin outlined his views on several key impacts that are important to Ethereum users in the short and medium term. These include Ethereum's scaling strategy, increasing blobs, working to improve interoperability and security, and considering economics.

“We need to continue to build on Ethereum’s technical and social attributes, as well as its actual utility,” Buterin wrote. He added that Ethereum's goal is still the same as it was on day one: to build a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain.

Buterin noted that two major challenges faced by L2s are scale and heterogeneity. In the blog, he stated that a possible shortcut to scaling would be to largely abandon L2s, operating everything through L1, and drastically increasing the gas limit (which could be done either with multiple shards, or on a single shard). However, this shortcut would trade off the benefits of Ethereum's current social structure, which Buterin highlighted as being "very effective in simultaneously achieving different forms of research, development, and ecosystem building culture." As such, Buterin's preference is to continue scaling primarily through L2s.

The Ethereum co-founder also noted that Native Rollups are still an early stage idea and that more work is needed to make the native Rollup precompilation as flexible as possible.

Buterin proposed a multi-pronged strategy to cover all major possible sources of the value of ETH as a triple-point asset, which includes:

This multi-faceted approach ensures a balanced and sustainable strategy for ETH’s growth as a triple-point asset.