On February 4th, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted that with L1 scaling itself and L2 development slowing down, the original vision of Layer 2 and its role within Ethereum are no longer reasonable, requiring a new development path and positioning. This is not the first time Vitalik has contradicted things he heavily promoted in the Ethereum roadmap, especially regarding scalability.
Around 2017-2018, Vitalik strongly promoted Plasma (a sidechain/subchain solution), believing it to be the mainstay of Layer 2 extensions, capable of achieving high throughput while maintaining security, and even placing it high on his roadmap. Subsequently, Plasma encountered serious problems in practical implementation, including data availability and exit complexity. In his blog posts and tweets in 2020-2021, Vitalik admitted that Plasma was "less practical than Rollups in most use cases," and the roadmap essentially relegated Plasma to a "research direction" rather than a core path.
Around 2017, Vitalik tweeted that the idea of ordinary users verifying the entire history of the blockchain themselves was a fantasy. However, in early 2026, Vitalik admitted that his earlier idea was wrong, even designating 2026 as the year to "reclaim self-sovereignty and trustlessness," and planning to make it easier for ordinary users to run full nodes/verify data through ZooKeeper technology.
In the ETH2 roadmap from 2015-2020, sharding was considered the ultimate scaling solution, with plans to divide the blockchain into 64 shards, each handling transactions/states independently. However, with the rise of Rollups, Vitalik has repeatedly stated that sharding is no longer a necessary priority, and even that its necessity has been overestimated.
