Vitalik: Ethereum has No Non-L2 Path for Scalability in Medium Term with ETH 2.0 Years Away

“Base-layer scalability for applications is only coming as the last major phase of eth2, which is still years away,” wrote Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in the Ethereum roadmap update.

But Buterin doesn’t like that crypto media is putting it out there. Buterin’s saying that the media “selectively sound-bites” him and he’s just going to ignore it all has been in response to a crypto community member‘s remarks on the co-founder “comments not helping ETH.”

On ”A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap,” Buterin proposed a full focus on the second layer method because the base layer is nowhere near becoming a reality yet.

Buterin may not like what the media is publishing, but it has been just his words. About a year back, he had also talked about scalability being a “big bottleneck” for Ethereum blockchain, which is “almost full” and “keeping people from joining.”

Over the past few months, the DeFi mania took over the Ethereum network sending the fees to an all-time high, breaking new records every month, pushing the small players out, and making it a big players game.

“The L1 is nearly unusable for many classes of applications, and there’s no non-L2 path that can get us to scalability in the short-to-medium term,” are exactly Buterin’s words this time.

He further talked about how the high fees on prediction platform Augur made it “very much “for the niche people and not for the world.”’

“If you are not convinced to go “all the way” on the “phase 1.5 and done” direction, there is a natural compromise path to take,” — which is to have a small number of execution shards and more data shards.

He has also been a staunch supporter of Layer 2 solutions, which he suggests building into the wallets like Metamask or Status. But more work needs to be done on cross-L2 transfers.

With most of the applications on layer 1, they would need to be migrated to layer 2 solutions. Some of the popular DeFi projects like Compound, Sunyetix, and Uniswap have already announced support for one such solution, Ethereum Optimism, which recently launched the first stage of their testnet.

Though there is “no choice” but to go with Layer 2 solutions, that will still take time.

Source: bitcoinexchangeguide.com; cointelegraph.com