Vitalik Buterin said the original vision for Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling model “no longer makes sense,” arguing that many L2s have failed to meaningfully decentralise or inherit mainnet security.
Buterin said Ethereum’s base layer is now scaling more effectively through gas limit increases and upcoming native rollups, reducing the need for L2s to act as the network’s primary scalability engine.
“Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path,”
Buterin wrote in a post on X.
He criticised L2 designs that rely on multisig bridges, saying systems that execute transactions offchain without full Ethereum security are not truly scaling the network.
“If you create a 10,000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum,”
Buterin said.
Instead, he suggested L2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Starknet should focus on specialised use cases like privacy, identity, finance, social applications or AI.
Buterin said future Ethereum scaling will rely heavily on native rollups and further gas limit increases, which directly expand mainnet throughput while preserving Ethereum’s security guarantees.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $2,261.56.