Vitalik believes that the L2 scaling roadmap should be persisted, but L2s need to fulfill their commitments, such as contributing a certain amount of revenue to support ETH.

• Original Title: Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond
• Original Author: Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum
• Original Compilation: Odaily

Recently, Ethereum's performance in this cycle has sparked widespread discontent, with community members expressing disappointment at the inaction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), and even some leading projects in the Ethereum ecosystem have begun to question the Ethereum Foundation, seemingly with a "palace coup" mentality.

The founders of several well-known projects have spoken out, expressing their concerns about Ethereum's future direction:

The founders of Synthetix and Infinex believe that the EF should require L2s (Layer 2 networks) to use their revenue to buy back ETH, thereby increasing the demand for ETH and increasing its value.

The founder of Curve believes that the EF should immediately abandon the L2 strategy.

The founder of Aave has released "12 measures to save the EF" and called on the foundation to take swift action to address the current predicament.

The most intense voice comes from the founder of Wintermute, who believes that Ethereum may be in a "death spiral".

Faced with strong criticism from the ecosystem's cornerstone projects, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin finally spoke up today, announcing that a "toll" will be levied on L2 networks.

Details can be found in the articles "Enumerating the Seven Sins of Ethereum, Who Can Play the 'Salvation Symphony' for It?" and "Leading Projects Collectively 'Siege the Palace', Ethereum Foundation Unmoved".

This reform could become a critical juncture in Ethereum's future development, and it also allows us to see how Ethereum will meet new opportunities and challenges through self-adjustment.

The following is Vitalik's original text, compiled by Odaily.

Ethereum's goal has not changed from the very beginning: to establish a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain platform. This is a free and open platform for decentralized applications, with principles that are in line with GNU + Linux, Mozilla, Tor, Wikipedia, and many other great free and open-source software projects (which can now be called the spirit of regeneration and crypto-punk).

Over the past decade, Ethereum has also developed a feature that I greatly appreciate: in addition to innovations in cryptography and economics, Ethereum is also an innovation in social technology. The Ethereum ecosystem as a whole demonstrates a more open and decentralized way of collaboration. Political philosopher Ahmed Gatnash described his experience at Devcon this way:

...This allowed me to glimpse what an alternative world might look like - a world with almost no barriers and no connection to traditional systems. Here, the status quo system is subverted, and the highest-status people are the geeks who focus on independently solving the problems they truly care about, rather than those who play games to climb the ladders of traditional institutions and accumulate power. Here, almost all power is soft power. I found it beautiful and very inspiring - it made me feel that in such a world, anything is possible, and that such a world is actually within reach.

Technical projects and social projects are inherently intertwined. If at time T you have a decentralized technical system, but it is maintained by a centralized social process, then you cannot guarantee that your technical system will still be decentralized at time T+1. Similarly, social processes are also sustained in various ways by technology: technology attracts users, the ecosystem created by technology provides retention incentives for developers, technology enables the community to be grounded and focused on building rather than just socializing, and so on.

After a decade of effort, under the joint governance of technological and social attributes, Ethereum has exhibited another important feature: Ethereum can provide practical services to people on a large scale. Millions of people use ETH or stablecoins as a store of value, and even more people use these assets for payments: I am one of them. Ethereum has efficient and practical privacy tools that I use to pay for VPN services to protect my internet data. It also has ENS, a robust decentralized alternative to DNS and a broader public key infrastructure. In addition, Ethereum has easy-to-use decentralized Twitter alternatives and DeFi tools that provide hundreds of millions of people with higher-yielding and lower-risk assets than traditional finance.

Five years ago, I was reluctant to discuss the use cases of the latter, mainly because the infrastructure and code were not yet mature. At that time, we had just experienced the large-scale, painful smart contract hacking incidents of 2016-2017, and if there was a 5% chance of losing 100% of the yield each year, then a 7% annualized yield rate would be meaningless compared to a 5% annualized yield rate. In addition, transaction fees were too high to enable the large-scale application of these tools. Now, these tools have proven their resilience over time, the quality of auditing tools has improved, and we have more confidence in their security. We know what not to do. L2 scaling technologies are playing a role, and transaction fees have been at very low levels for nearly a year.

We need to continue to strengthen Ethereum's technological and social attributes as well as its practicality. If we only have the former without the latter, we will become an increasingly ineffective "decentralized" community, only protesting the "unethical and wrongful actions" of mainstream institutions, without being able to provide better alternatives. If we only have the latter without the former, we will be no different from Wall Street's "greed is good" mentality, and many people joined the Ethereum community to get away from this mentality in the first place.

This duality of technology and practicality has many far-reaching implications. In this article, I want to focus on one specific aspect that is crucial for Ethereum users in the short and medium term: Ethereum's scaling strategy.

The Rise of Layer 2

Today, our path to scaling Ethereum is through Layer 2 protocols. Compared to the early experiments in 2019, Layer 2 in 2025 has made a huge leap: They have achieved critical decentralization milestones, are protecting billions of dollars in assets, and have increased Ethereum's transaction capacity by 17x, while reducing fees by the same magnitude.

All of this has happened just in time to ride a wave of successful applications: various DeFi platforms, social networks, prediction markets, and novel projects like Worldchain (now with 10 million users). Moreover, the "enterprise Blockchain" movement, which was considered a dead-end in the 2010s due to the failure of consortium chains, has been revived with the rise of Layer 2, with Soneium being a prominent example.

These successes also prove the social advantages of Ethereum's decentralized and modular scaling approach: The Ethereum Foundation did not need to find all the users themselves, but had dozens of independent entities proactively driving the technology. These entities have also made crucial contributions to the technology, without which Ethereum could not have achieved its current success. As a result, we are finally approaching "escape velocity".

Challenges: Scalability and Heterogeneity

Layer 2 currently faces two main challenges:

• Scalability: The current "Blob space" is barely sufficient to support the existing Layer 2 and their use cases, but far from enough to meet future demands.

• Heterogeneity issue: Ethereum's original scaling vision was to create a Blockchain composed of multiple shards, each a copy of the EVM, processed by a small set of nodes. In theory, Layer 2 is the realization of this vision. However, in practice, there is a critical difference: Each shard (or set of shards) is created by different participants, seen as distinct chains in the infrastructure, and often follow different standards. This introduces problems for developers and users in terms of composability and user experience.

The first problem is a technically understandable challenge, with a simple but difficult-to-implement solution: providing more "Blob space" for Ethereum. Additionally, Ethereum L1 can still alleviate the pressure in the short term through moderate scaling, as well as improvements in Proof of Stake, Stateless and Light Verification, storage, EVM, and cryptography.

The second problem, however, is a coordination challenge that has already garnered widespread public attention. The Ethereum ecosystem is no stranger to cross-team collaboration to accomplish complex technical tasks - after all, we completed The Merge. However, the coordination problem here is more challenging, as there are more participants, more diverse goals, and the process started later. But even so, our ecosystem has solved many difficult problems before, and can do so again this time.

One potential shortcut for scaling is to abandon Layer 2 and achieve much higher Gas limits directly through Layer 1 (whether through multiple shards or a single shard). However, this approach would sacrifice too much of the current social advantages of Ethereum's architecture, which have been highly effective in integrating diverse research, development, and ecosystem-building cultures. Therefore, we should stick to the current path, continuing to scale primarily through Layer 2, while ensuring that Layer 2 truly delivers on its promises.

This means the following:

• Layer 1 needs to accelerate the expansion of Blob capacity.

• Layer 1 also needs to moderately expand the EVM and increase the Gas limit to cope with the activities that will still be carried on Layer 1 even in a Layer 2-centric environment (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs, large-scale DeFi, deposit and withdrawal operations, special large-scale exit scenarios, key storage wallets, asset issuance, etc.).

• Layer 2 needs to continuously improve security. Layer 2 should provide the same security guarantees as sharding (including censorship resistance, lightweight client verifiability, no embedded trusted parties, etc.).

• Layer 2 and wallets need to accelerate improvements and standardize interoperability. This includes chain-specific addresses, message passing and cross-chain bridge standards, efficient cross-chain payments, on-chain configurations, etc. Using Ethereum should be like using a single ecosystem, not 34 different blockchains.

• Layer 2 deposit and withdrawal times need to be significantly reduced.

• As long as basic interoperability needs are met, heterogeneity in Layer 2 is beneficial. Some Layer 2 will be based on governance-minimized Rollups, running identical copies of the Layer 1 EVM; some Layer 2 will experiment with different virtual machines; others will be more server-like, leveraging Ethereum to provide additional security guarantees for users. We need to cover the full spectrum of Layer 2 types.

• We need to explicitly consider the economics of ETH. Even in a Layer 2-dominant world, we must ensure that ETH can continue to accrue value and provide solutions for various value accrual models.

Next, we will discuss each topic in detail.

Scaling: Blob, Blob, or Blob

In EIP-4844, each slot has 3 Blobs, with a data bandwidth of 384 kB per slot. A simple calculation shows that this amounts to 32 kB per second, with each transaction taking about 150 bytes on-chain, so we can support around 210 transactions per second (TPS). According to L2beat data, this estimate is almost spot on.

Pectra, scheduled for release in March, will double the number of Blobs to 6 per slot.

Fusaka's current focus is mainly on PeerDAS, with plans to prioritize only PeerDAS and EOF. PeerDAS may further increase the number of Blobs by 2-3 times.

The next goal is to continue increasing the number of Blobs. When reaching 2D sampling, the number of Blobs can be increased to 128 per slot, with further potential for expansion. Combined with improvements in data compression, on-chain TPS can reach 100,000.

The above is a restatement of the established roadmap for 2025. The key question is: how can we accelerate this process? Here are my answers:

• More clearly deprioritize non-Blob functionalities.
• More clearly state that Blob is the target and make Blob-related peer-to-peer R&D a priority for talent recruitment.
• Allow stakers to directly adjust the Blob target, similar to the Gas limit. This will allow the Blob target to increase more quickly with technological improvements, without waiting for hard forks.
• Consider more aggressive approaches, such as introducing more trust assumptions for low-resource stakers to increase the number of Blobs faster, but we need to be cautious about this.

Improving Security: Proof Systems and Native Rollups

Currently, there are three Stage 1 Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Ink) and three Stage 2 Rollups (DeGate, zk.money, Fuel). However, most activity still takes place on Stage 0 Rollups (i.e., multi-signature schemes). This needs to change. One key reason for the slow progress is that building a reliable proof system and establishing sufficient confidence to fully rely on its security (abandoning the "training wheels") is extremely difficult.

To achieve this goal, there are two paths:

• Stage 2 + Multi-Proof Systems + Formal Verification: Achieve redundancy through multiple proof systems and enhance security confidence through formal verification (e.g., "Verified ZK-EVM projects").

• Native Rollups: Integrate the verification of EVM state transition functions into the protocol itself, for example, through pre-compiled contracts.

Currently, both of these paths need to be pursued in parallel. For "Stage 2 + Multi-Proof Systems + Formal Verification", the roadmap is relatively clear, and progress can be accelerated through strengthening software stack collaboration, which not only reduces duplication of work but also serves as a byproduct to improve interoperability.

For native Rollups, this is still in the early stages, and more thought is needed on how to maximize the flexibility of pre-compiled contracts. An ideal goal is to support not just full EVM clones, but arbitrary EVM modifications, allowing modified EVM Rollups to still use the native Rollup's pre-compiled contracts by "introducing a custom verifier" for the modified parts. This may involve adapting pre-compiled contracts, opcodes, state trees, and other components.

Interoperability and Standardization

The goal is to make the experience of asset transfer and application usage between different L2s as seamless as interactions between "shards" within a single blockchain. Currently, there is a relatively clear roadmap in this area:

• Chain-Specific Addresses: Addresses should include on-chain account information and a chain identifier. For example, ERC-3770 is an early attempt, and more sophisticated designs are now available, even moving the L2 registry to Ethereum L1.

• Standardized Cross-Chain Bridges and Message Passing: There should be standardized ways to verify proofs and pass messages between L2s, and these standards should not rely on trust-based mechanisms like multi-sig bridges. An ecosystem dependent on multi-sig bridges is unacceptable. If such trust assumptions were unacceptable in the 2016 sharding design, they are unacceptable today.

• Accelerate Deposit and Withdrawal Times: "Native" message times should be reduced from weeks to minutes (ultimately, a single block time). This requires faster ZK-EVM provers and proof aggregation technology.

• Read L1 Data from L2: Features like L1SLOAD and REMOTESTATICCALL would greatly simplify cross-L2 interoperability and also help enable key management wallet functionality.

• Shared Ordering and Other Long-Term Work: Part of the value of Rollup-based designs is that they can more efficiently achieve shared ordering and other functionalities.

Within the constraints of meeting these standards, L2s can differ in security, performance, and design models as needed. For example, exploring different virtual machines, ordering models, and tradeoffs between scale and security. But the security level of each L2 must be clear to users and developers.

To accelerate the progress, cross-functional institutions within the ecosystem can take on a larger share of the work, such as the Ethereum Foundation, client development teams, and mainstream application development teams. This will reduce coordination costs and make the adoption of standards an easier decision, as the development workload for each L2 and wallet will be reduced. However, as an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, L2 and wallets also need to strengthen the "last mile" of development work to ensure that these features are truly delivered to users.

The Economics of ETH

We should adopt a multi-pronged strategy to cover all the major potential sources of value for ETH as a three-point asset. Key components of this strategy may include:

• Broad consensus to solidify ETH as the primary asset of the larger (L1 + L2) Ethereum economic system, supporting applications that use ETH as the primary collateral.

• Encourage L2 to support ETH and allocate a portion of fees. This can be achieved through burning a portion of fees, permanently staking fees and donating the proceeds to Ethereum ecosystem public goods, or adopting other various methods.

• Support Rollup-based designs as one path to capturing value on L1 through MEV, but should not mandate that all Rollups be based on this design, as it does not apply to all applications, and we cannot assume that this alone can solve all problems.

• Increase Blob quantity, consider setting a minimum Blob price, and treat Blob as another potential revenue stream. For example, if the average Blob fee over the past 30 days is maintained (driven by demand) and the Blob quantity increases to 128, Ethereum will burn 713,000 ETH per year. However, the demand curve may not be so favorable, so this alone cannot solve the problem.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Ethereum has already achieved maturity in the technology stack and social ecosystem, leading us towards a more free and open future where hundreds of millions of people will benefit from crypto assets and decentralized applications. However, there is still a lot of work to be done, and now is the time to redouble our efforts.

• If you are an L2 developer, participate in the development of tools to safely scale Blobs, develop code to expand EVM execution, and implement functionality and standards to make L2 interoperable.

• If you are a wallet developer, you also need to participate and implement standards to ensure that the ecosystem maintains the same security and decentralization as Ethereum L1 while providing a seamless user experience.

• If you are an ETH holder or community member, actively participate in these discussions; there are many areas that need in-depth thinking and collective wisdom. The future of Ethereum depends on the active participation of each of us.

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This article is reprinted from Odaily