Key Highlights
- Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, recently stated that the original vision of L2s no longer makes sense, and it needs to be changed
- According to him, L1s have impressed everyone with incredible success in scaling
- On the other hand, the slow progress in L2s and interoperability has depleted users’ interest
In early February 2026, the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a very important statement on a detailed X post, where he said that “the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense.”
Have been following reactions to what I said about L2s about 1.5 days ago.
One important thing that I believe is: “make yet another EVM chain and add an optimistic bridge to Ethereum with a 1 week delay” is to infra what forking Compound is to governance – something we’ve done…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 5, 2026
In his statement, he mentioned two biggest points to support his view. He mentioned the slow progress in Layer 2 (L2) decentralization and interoperability. Apart from this, he highlighted the speed of scaling on Ethereum’s Layer (L1).
What was the Original Vision of Layer 2
The original concept of Layer 2 was holding a rollup-based roadmap with “branded shards” of Ethereum. These rollups are expected to be very efficient in handling execution and scaling. However, these rollups would still be dependent on the Layer 2 base layer for the main reasons, such as data and final settlement.
The main purpose of this Layer 2 was clear, as it was supposed to scale Ethereum without giving up the virtue of decentralization. This Layer 2 was supposed to increase block space under Ethereum’s “full faith and credit.”
As of now, this kind of L2s has been helping the network to avoid centralized multisig bridges that fail to extend the network.
How Layer 1 Surpassed Expectations in Scaling
Despite various plans and their focus on L2s, Ethereum’s main layer (L1) has grown incredibly well, surpassing their expectations of developers and the community.
One of the major reasons behind this progress was upgrades like Dencun. This upgrade in 2024 has rolled out “blobs” of data that impressively cut costs for rollup networks built on top of Ethereum.
This was not the only upgrade that changed the network. Another major upgrade took place in 2025, which is known as the Pectra upgrade. This has increased the network’s data capacity.
In the same year, the Fusaka upgrade in late 2025 made another big upgrade with huge achievements. This has doubled the network’s gas limit. This single change has increased Ethereum’s main processing power by an estimated 20% to 30%.
Developers are still constantly working on the network to enhance it. They have some plans for the future also. They are planning to increase the gas limit further. The purpose behind their plan is to keep transaction fees low, even when the network faces congestion.
Today, Ethereum’s base layer is also able to handle demand surges that would have once cost users tens of thousands of ETH in fees.
This kind of impressive scaling has forced other Layer-2 solutions to change their role. Now, they are not just a necessity for cheap transactions, but can now specialize as Ethereum itself provides more affordable and secure block space.
Layer 2 Progress with Turtle Pace on Decentralization
There are various stages of rollups based on their progress. These include stage 0, stage 1, and stage 2.
- Stage 0 – These are full training wheels, where security councils or multisigs control upgrades.
- Stage 1 – Another stage, which is limited training wheels, where councils can override, but proofs are valid.
- Stage 2 – There are no training wheels, which is fully permissionless with proof-based security.
A big part of Layer-2 networks has not achieved full security. Most of these L2s stay at Stage 0 and Stage 1, and these rely on the centralized safety council or operators to function. Generally, these L2s come with very slow progress, which requires advanced cryptographic proofs and total decentralization.
Apart from this, there are many L2s available in the market, which makes the entire ecosystem very complex. This makes it risky to move assets between different L2 chains. While there are many bridges available on the network, this area is still away from the connected ecosystem.
Conclusion: Why the Original Vision Breaks Down
The current ecosystem is filled with many “copy-paste” layer-2 networks. There are so many L2s available on Ethereum, and most of them are built with the same general-purpose technology that uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
These L2s are not focusing on unique features; instead, they are focusing on short-term user incentives. While they use the title of Ethereum, the equations have been changed as Ethereum’s own base layer has become significantly more scalable on its own.
“We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is “EVM plus other stuff”, then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the “other stuff” (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately),” Vitalik stated in the post on X.
This change has changed its original vision. When L1 could not handle demand, L2s were seen as important scaling solutions. Now that the base chain is more powerful, the pressure for every L2 to become a perfectly decentralized “branded shard” of Ethereum has lessened.
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