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 huge enterprise again within the bull market of 2021, and even now, they proceed to assemble help from community customers who proceed to make use of these roll-ups. Now, Buterin has pointed to the potential of Layer 3 protocols on the community. Right here’s what he expects them to do.
Ethereum Layer 3 Protocols
In a put up, 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 put up: “Sadly, such easy conceptions of layer 3s hardly ever fairly work out that simply.” So what then could make a profitable Layer 3 protocol?
The bottleneck comes from the information that must be saved on the blockchain as transactions are processed. Layer 2s already do a great job of compressing the information wanted to retailer transactions on-chain however don’t remove the necessity to retailer knowledge on-chain. Given this, as soon as the information is already compressed as soon as to cut back its measurement, it’s not possible to compress it once more. Because of this it’s not 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 could be that they might have completely different functionalities from the already current Layer 2 protocols. So, the place an L2 could be centered on scaling, an L3 would go in direction of extra specialised performance like privateness. This discards the concept of desirous to ‘enhance’ upon the compression of Layer 2 and as an alternative provides L3s one thing new to work and concentrate on.
This custom-made performance can go in direction of something, actually. It will possibly go in direction of custom-made scaling the place functions might use compressed knowledge for particular functions in response to a specific knowledge format, doing computations utilizing one thing apart from EVMs, and so forth. Buterin additionally notes that the place Layer 2 options are for trestles scaling, Layer 3s may be for “weakly-trusted scaling (validiums).”
Layer 3s would additionally possible present higher operations for cross-chain transactions because the “three-layer mannequin permits a complete sub-ecosystem to exist inside a single rollup, which permits cross-domain operations inside that ecosystem to occur very cheaply, without having to undergo the costly layer 1.”
The Ethereum Layer 3 protocols are nonetheless very a lot an idea thought proper now, however the Ethereum founder factors to a framework that was proposed by Starkware as one which carries a number of promise. This extra subtle framework goes past the college 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 thought “if it’s carried out in the fitting method.”
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