With the completion of the Ethereum Merge, founder Vitalik Buterin has turned his consideration to different issues that might assist enhance the community. Ethereum Layer 2 protocols had been large enterprise again within the bull market of 2021, and even now, they proceed to collect help from community customers who proceed to make use of these roll-ups. Now, Buterin has pointed to the potential for Layer 3 protocols on the community. Here’s what he expects them to do.
Ethereum Layer 3 Protocols
In a submit, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delves into the concept of Layer 3 protocols which have been circling the house now. At first, the concept began that with the performance of the present Layer 2 protocols, it was potential to construct on them to offer much more scalability. Buterin refutes this in his submit: “Unfortunately, such simple conceptions of layer 3s rarely quite work out that easily.” So what then could make a profitable Layer 3 protocol?
The bottleneck comes from the info that must be saved on the blockchain as transactions are processed. Layer 2s already do a very good job of compressing the info wanted to retailer transactions on-chain however don’t remove the necessity to retailer knowledge on-chain. Given this, as soon as the info is already compressed as soon as to scale back its dimension, it’s unimaginable to compress it once more. This implies that it isn’t potential to get extra scaling by simply constructing a Layer 3 rollup onto a Layer 2 roll-up.
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The pure conclusion for a way Ethereum Layer 3 protocols would then work can be that they might have completely different functionalities from the already current Layer 2 protocols. So, the place an L2 can be targeted on scaling, an L3 would go in direction of extra specialised performance like privateness. This discards the concept of eager to ‘improve’ upon the compression of Layer 2 and as an alternative provides L3s one thing new to work and give attention to.
This custom-made performance can go in direction of something, actually. It can go in direction of custom-made scaling the place purposes may use compressed knowledge for particular purposes in accordance with a specific knowledge format, doing computations utilizing one thing aside from EVMs, and so on. Buterin additionally notes that the place Layer 2 options are for trestles scaling, Layer 3s might be for “weakly-trusted scaling (validiums).”
Layer 3s would additionally doubtless present higher operations for cross-chain transactions because the “three-layer model allows an entire sub-ecosystem to exist within a single rollup, which allows cross-domain operations within that ecosystem to happen very cheaply, without needing to go through the expensive layer 1.”
The Ethereum Layer 3 protocols are nonetheless very a lot an idea concept proper now, however the Ethereum founder factors to a framework that was proposed by Starkware as one which carries a whole lot of promise. This extra subtle framework goes past the varsity of considered simply stacking one other layer atop a Layer 2 and anticipating it to extend the compression. Buterin factors out that this can be a good concept “if it’s done in the right way.”
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