Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum L2's Original Vision No Longer Applicable, New Paths Needed

Odaily News Vitalik.eth posted on the X platform, stating that there has been increasing discussion recently about the ongoing role of L2s within the Ethereum ecosystem. As progress towards L2s entering Stage 2 is far slower than expected, and L1 itself is scaling with a significant gas limit increase anticipated for 2026, this means the original vision of L2s as Ethereum's "branded shards" is no longer applicable, and new paths are needed.

Vitalik Buterin pointed out that L1 no longer needs L2s as branded shards, and L2s cannot or are unwilling to meet the properties required for true branded shards. He suggested that L2s should identify value-added points beyond just "scaling," such as privacy, application-specific efficiency, extreme levels of scaling, non-financial application design, ultra-low latency, and built-in oracles. If handling ETH or other Ethereum assets, L2s should at least achieve Stage 1 and support maximum interoperability with Ethereum.

Furthermore, Vitalik Buterin stated that over the past few months, he has become more convinced of the value of native rollup precompiles, especially after having the ZK-EVM proofs needed to scale L1. This precompile would make EVM verification without a security council feasible. He believes research should focus on how to design this precompile so that it can verify the EVM portion even when an L2 includes "EVM and other content." This would make achieving secure, robust, trustless interoperability with Ethereum easy and enable synchronous composability.