Vitalik Buterin Doubles Down on Layer 2s for Scaling Ethereum Ecosystem

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a Jan. 23 blog post that Layer 2s continue to be the best way to scale Ethereum.

Buterin emphasized Layer 2’s role in reducing transaction costs, increasing capacity, and ensuring ETH remains the cornerstone of the ecosystem.

L2s “have reached key decentralization milestones, they are securing billions of dollars of value,” he said, adding that L2s are currently scaling Ethereum’s transaction capacity by 17x, and reducing fees by the same metric.

Buterin vouched for raising the blob count to strengthen Ethereum’s role as the network’s primary economic driver. Blobs, introduced via EIP-4844, allow Ethereum to handle data for L2s more efficiently. Buterin said the goal is to reach 100,000 transactions per second through upcoming upgrades like PeerDAS and 2D sampling.

Addressing the heterogeneity issues, Buterin said, “The early vision for how Ethereum could scale involved creating a blockchain that contains many shards, each shard being a copy of the EVM that gets processed by a small fraction of the nodes. L-2s are, in theory, an implementation of exactly this approach.”

Buterin also proposed mechanisms like L2 protocols allocating a percentage of fees to Ethereum’s public goods, ETH-based fee burning, and optimizing blob pricing to maintain ETH’s value.

Why Not Layer 1?

Buterin addressed that one option can be to leave L2s altogether and choose to focus on scaling Ethereum mainnet, or Layer 1. However, that path will come at the cost of a much higher gas limit and compromise many benefits for the current social structure.

Therefore, the Ethereum ecosystem should continue to work and scale primarily through L2s, added Buterin.

In an X post on Jan. 24, Buterin said, “L2s have made great progress, and this is a testament to Ethereum's ecosystem and development philosophy working in action.”