The Future of Ethereum's Layer 2 Ecosystem - The Daily Gwei Refuel #856 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Lego Refuel. We recap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm your host And the 4th of February 2026. All right everyone, let's get into it. So yes, another refuel a couple of days after the last one. And there is good reason for this. And if you remember, I said that I would be doing the refules weekly as kind of the regular cadence, but whenever there's something kind of major happening in the ecosystem, I would do one if uh you know outside of that schedule if I had something to say. And well, I have a lot to say today. So, for those of you who don't know the context around this, uh, Vitalik put out a tweet today about layer 2 and their role within the Ethereum ecosystem. Now, this tweet is so funny to me because it is the perfect

example of a raw shack test. Now, what I mean by that is essentially you can read this tweet in many different ways, right? It's a long tweet as Vitalik usually does these these long tweets, but you can read and interpret this tweet in many many different ways. And that's what I mean by it being a raw shack test because people are just seeing what they want to see. Uh, and because of this, there's been a lot of discussion around what Vitalik actually means by this. You know, are L2s dead? Are we only just doing scaling on the L1? Now, a lot of misconceptions going on here. So, what I wanted to do today, and I'm literally just going to be focusing on this tweet today. There's nothing else to kind of talk about today. Um, but what I want to do is I just want to run through this tweet line

by line essentially and kind of explain exactly what Vitalik is saying from I guess my interpretation of course, but also from just the words that he's putting out there because it's it has been funny to see all the reactions to this. You know, some people are doing victory laps being like, see, we told you that L2s aren't Ethereum and you know the L1 is Ethereum and we should just focus on the L1. Other people are interpreting it as well Vitalik's just basically saying that L2s shouldn't just focus on scaling they should differentiate themselves and do other things which is my interpretation but I'm going to get into that of course as well. Uh and then you know some people were saying that oh Vitalik said you know L2s aren't Ethereum which he literally doesn't say in this tweet um which which I found kind of funny as

well but anyway let's let's start off with the the kind of first line here where Vitalik basically says there have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum EOS Ethereum EOS system especially in the face of two facts and these two facts are L2's progress to stage two and secondarily on interop has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected and the L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and the gas limits are projected to increase greatly in 2026. So, let's focus on those two points here first. So, um I would agree with Vitalik in that the progress towards stage 2 has been a lot slower for the L2s than we would like. Uh and there is a lot of very good reasons for that. Uh even though we would love them to get to stage two, but there are a lot

of very good reasons for that. And obviously, we have the L2B website that allows us to track all of this, which I'll bring up on my screen now for you to kind of have a look here. Uh uh pretty much none of the major rollups are stage two. The the first stage two roll up is rank 18 here. Uh ZK Money V1, which is barely used, right? The rest of them are either stage zero or stage one. Now, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing because there's a nuance here. Like for example, arbitum one, stage one is is different to arbitum uh sorry, is different to base stage one uh based on the exit window here. Um and it's different to, you know, uh uh starknet stage one as well, right? they have different kind of um yellows in their pie here as you can see on on the L2B

website which you can go check out but yeah I agree with Vitalik when he says that you know progress on that has been slow and it has been slow on inrop as well uh for various different reasons you know there's nothing I think malicious here I don't think the L2s are not going towards stage 2 because of malicious reasons or because they're trying to be bad actors I think that the number one reason is because it's very very difficult to do that while factoring in things like security and development of the chain If you go straight to stage two, then the security assumptions are much greater than they would otherwise be. And your power to react to any kind of like I guess security incidents on that chain is greatly diminished because to be full stage two, you I I believe you require a

time lock on the security council, which you know isn't isn't great if there's like a critical bug, especially early on where the chance of critical bugs is probably much higher, right? And then on the interop side of things, again, I don't think this is malicious. I honestly don't think there's that much demand for native interrop or at least maybe demand is the wrong word here but I just don't think there's enough to kind of push people to want to do it from like a profit perspective like what's the business sense here because if you are arbitrum one or if you're based for example you have your ecosystem people are doing stuff on there uh and people are able to interrupt between you through bridging and bridging is really really fast these days yes there's there's uh obviously more trust assumptions there these bridges a lot of them are centralized

but you know users are using them So for these chains, they don't really have that huge drive to go be native natively interoperable and also the technology is not exactly there yet either. So those are just some of the reasons there. So I do agree with Vitalik that it has been uh slower and more difficult than originally expected to do these things. Um so there's no controversy there. Then he says you know the L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low and gas limits are projected to greatly increase in 2026. This goes into the whole discussion around kind of L1 scaling generally and the priority that we've put on the L1 over the last I guess 12 to 18 months now maybe more like 12 months. But the thing is is that L2s have been around as a concept for a very long time. Uh if you if you want to look

at like the roll-up ccentric road map that became a I guess thing in 2020 but L2s have been around before then. you know, we started off with things like uh state channels, then we did optimistic roll-ups, then ZK roll-ups, right? There's there's there's all these kind of things that have uh kind of happened over the years. Uh and it's been a very very long time there. And during that time as well, the L1 scaling wasn't prioritized because we had other things going on like the beacon chain, right? Getting proof of stake out the door, like the merge. There were there were just other big things happening at the time. But since we've put priority on on L1 uh and since we've kind of made a lot of headway with ZKVMs uh and other L1 scaling technologies there uh it's become clearer that the L1 can scale to

an extent and that we don't need the L2s for scale as much as we did previously. Does that mean that the L2s are dead or they're not needed? No, not at all. And I'll explain why as we progress through this tweet here. Um, but I also kind of find it funny that Vitalik says, you know, fees are very low. I mean, they are on L1, but at the same time, there's no guarantee they're going to stay that low. Like, yeah, they're low right now. They're not as low as L2 still. Uh, and they but they could go back up at any time. As soon as some demand comes in, they go they go back up. And yeah, we're going to increase gas limits in 2026 as well. Uh, but at the same time, it's not like a a 10x or an order of magnitude increase here. like in 2026, I think the

optimistic uh uh uh gas limit increase is to 180 million. Maybe we can get to 300 million, but I don't know. I don't think so. I think 180 million is like the the best case scenario here. We're at 60 million today. So, that's a 3x increase. And yeah, 180 million is more than a 3x increase from where we started at at 30 million, right? It's a 6x increase, but again, it's not an order of magnitude here over the L2s. And yeah, obviously the L1 is very different to the L2s. Like for example, Mega ETH went live recently and they did a stress test on their network and they're able to do tens of thousands of TPS, but Mega ETH is using offchain DA. They're not they're not using blobs, right? And and Mega ETH is still uh completely centralized. Uh and then there's lighter. Same same kind of thing there,

right? Lighter's using blobs, but lighter is not a general purpose uh chain. They have their own thing doing the perex thing. Like there's very there's differences here, right? But that is good. That's what we want. We want these L2s to be doing different things. We don't want them to just be just just be like scaling Ethereum. We want them to be doing things like differentiating themselves from Ethereum. That's that's the kind of whole whole point here. Um so yeah, while in it safe in it in itself L1 is scaling, I still believe that L1 is not going to scale enough to to meet the demands of the world. I think that we need L2s for that. Um on the scaling side, but also on the other side that I was just talking about, which I will get into again because Vitalic is talking about this here too. So then the next

part of his tweet he said, you know, both of these facts for their own separate reasons mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer make sense and we need a new path. I think this sentence is where a lot of people stopped reading and they read this and this is where the the ROS shack test comes in, right? They read this and instead of seeing what Vitalik is literally saying where he says the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense and we need a new path. I think people take this to mean that L2s are dead. we don't need we don't need L2s in Ethereum anymore when he's literally not saying that he is literally saying word for word he his actual words here is that the L2 role in Ethereum uh no longer

makes sense and we need a new path I take that to mean that L2s need to evolve out of what they are today and focus on what they're uh different you know focus on what they're good at outside of scaling right that's what I take this to mean and and and Vitalik follows up obviously with more of a tweet here which I'll which I'll read but I think this part of the tweet is where most people stopped reading because uh it's a long tweet and this is probably the part of the tweet where it comes up in your feed and you have to click like show more in order to read the rest of the tweet. Uh and of course people take this as as they will here. But then in the next part he's got a whole paragraph here where he kind of recaps the original vision of of of the

rollup ccentric road map. He says Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of Ethereum scaling is the existence of a large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum. that is block space where if you do things including with ETH inside that block space your activities are guaranteed to be valid uncensored unreverted untouched as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10,000TPS EVM uh where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge then you are not scaling Ethereum. I have my own interpretation of this as everyone does. I think that this is where a lot of the contention is also coming from where he says then you are not scaling Ethereum. I I think that's wrong because like in the strict sense of scaling L1 Ethereum and block space, yeah, you're not scaling L1 Ethereum on block space,

right? But he didn't say that. And I think that that's where again words can be misinterpreted. People can fill in the holes here. I'm filling in my own interpretation here, of course, but but what I kind of have always said is that I think the L2s are scaling Ethereum, but they're scaling Ethereum as an ecosystem, not scaling Ethereum L1 block space. It would be stupid to say that they're scaling Ethereum L1 block space. They aren't doing that because Ethereum L1 block space only exists on L1. L2s cannot sc do that unless they're native rollups. But then that's a very different definition as to what I'm defining as L2s here. What the I guess well understood definition is of L2s here. So when you look at it from that lens, I actually disagree with Vitalik here. I don't think that uh that they

are not scaling Ethereum. I think they are. They're just scaling the Ethereum ecosystem, not the L1 block space. But again, he didn't actually say this here. He just said Ethereum which I am assuming he means Ethereum L1 block space. Well then if he does mean that I agree with him but if he means it as like a broad uh kind of tent thing where he says that uh you know the Ethereum ecosystem then I disagree with that but yeah he didn't say that here which is unfortunate. I wish he would have been more specific here. Um but then he goes on in the next paragraph and he says this vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be branded shards because L1 itself is scaling and L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true branded shard would require. I've even seen at least

one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1. Not just for technical reasons around ZKVM safety, but also because their customers regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers, but it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not scaling Ethereum in the sense meant by the roll-up road map. But that's fine. And it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on the L1 with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. Again, another thing that can be interpreted in many different ways here. My interpretation is that uh you know what he's basically saying here is that you are not scaling Ethereum L1 block space, which you aren't. And you were never doing that if you were an L2 at stage zero, stage one

using offchain DA. You were scaling Ethereum. Yeah, you were scaling uh ETH as an asset. you were scaling the Ethereum ecosystem, but you weren't scaling Ethereum L1 block space. And I I don't think I've ever actually said that these L2s were doing that. Like, personally, um, if I have, then I was wrong to say that, but I don't think I've said that. I think I've always been pretty explicit about the fact that they're not scaling the L1 block space. To do that, you need to increase the gas limit on Ethereum L1 or you do things like ZKVM or native roll-ups, which are just coupled with the L1 to begin with. So, they're not even L2s. Like, they're literally part of the protocol. So when I when I read this, that's what that's what I kind of take from it. And at the same time, I take from it that, you

know, when he says that these some of these L2s want to just stay centralized for regulatory reasons, that again falls into the L2 vision for me. Maybe not the original strict rollup ccentric roadmap that Vitalic posted 5 years ago, but the L2 vision evolved on its own since then, right? And the L2 vision became more about expanding the Ethereum ecosystem out into customizable new chains that uh that can do whatever they want. They don't have to be decentralized and a lot of them won't be and that's fine because that's just what the business needs and I don't think anyone has ever actually pushed back against that. I don't think everyone is saying that no you know everything needs to be decentralized.

No, not at all. You can have centralized chains. People get value out of that all the time. I mean there are plenty of centralized chains out of out there that people get value out of and that's fine. I don't think that that takes away from the fact that L2s have and will continue to scale Ethereum the Ethereum ecosystem. I should be specific here. not L1 block space. So then he goes on to say, we should stop thinking about L2s as literally being branded shards of Ethereum with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties just the EVM as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum that each person or bot is free to care about or not care

about depending on their needs. This is the crux of the tw the the whole thing for me. This is basically Vitalik saying and TLDDR is that L2s are not obviously scaling L1 Ethereum block space and L2s are going to be their own thing. They're basically kind of um extending Ethereum's capabilities because they can have their own VMs, right? They don't have to have the EVM. They can have their own uh trade-offs with with centralization, decentralization. They can have their own uh ways of doing things, their own programming languages, stuff like that, right? But again, this is not new. This is something that's been talked about for years. I can go back and find newsletters and refills as early as probably 2021 where I spoke about this. And I think what this says more than anything is that Vitalik

doesn't spend much time on, you know, Twitter, doesn't spend much time in the thick of it in these conversations. He's definitely in his own bubble. And we're all in our own bubbles. But I think that this is just Vitalik not understanding that we already moved past his strict definition of L2s from way back in 2020. We moved past that. We evolved as a community. And I think the general understanding was always that L2s can do their own thing and we're happy with that. We're happy with businesses coming in and saying we're going to build an L2 on top of Ethereum. Yeah, it's not going to be decentralized. Yeah, it's going to look probably nothing like Ethereum, but it's still part of the Ethereum ecosystem. It taps into the Ethereum ecosystem. It taps into that liquidity.

So on and so forth. that that has always been what L2s have been to me. But I just find it weird that Vitalik would tweet this because it seems like he doesn't necessarily understand that the community already had this shared understanding of the L2s. And maybe that's just because, as I said, like he doesn't spend as much time in the in the public circles as as as I do and as I'm sure a lot of you do uh listening to this, but but yeah, that that again like he's literally saying what we all already think in my mind at least. That's again my interpretation of things. Um, but but yeah, that's that's how I kind of read this. But that's I think like the the complete summary of things here. And what I find funny is that again, this is what's been said for years. And then some people will take

this and run with it and say, "Oh, look, Vitalics, you know, saying that L2s are dead and we don't need L2s anymore and they should stop that we should stop thinking of them as being literally part of Ethereum and like we're not Ethereum." And I'm just like, I don't read it like that at all. I read it as Vitalik maybe not being up to date with the general understanding of of the community on L2s for one. Um, but also he's just reiterating the point that we've already been talking about for for many years now. But then he goes on to say, you know, what would I do if I were an L2? He says, I would identify a value ad other than scaling. Again, this is what the L2s have already been doing.

Like scaling is table stakes. I have said this for years. The L2 builders should understand that scaling is table stakes. You're not differentiating yourself from anything with just scaling. You need to go beyond that. And then Metallic gives some examples. Nonem specialized features VMs around privacy. Again, something I we've all been saying for years. Not new. Efficient specialized uh efficiency specialized around a particular application. Again, not new. We already have these live. Lighter is an example here. Efficiency specialized around purples of scaling that even greatly expand L1 will not do. Mega ETH, right? Like it's it's live. Like this is not new. A totally different design for non-financial applications, eg social

identity. Yeah. And AI. Yeah, we have had experiments around this. Farcaster being the, you know, the biggest one. Yeah, they've pivoted away from that, but that was that was done, right? Ultra low latency and other sequencing properties. Rise is doing that, you know, rise chain. Maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolutions or other non-computationally verifiable features. I can layer is all over that. Right. So everything that he's saying here is already being built or has been built or is live and has been live for years. So I don't know whether he's just giving examples to clarify for people or whether he literally doesn't know that these things exist. I I'm sure he knows that they exist, but this is not new.

Like and and L2s are already doing this. So I don't actually understand what he's really kind of trying to say here. Like is he saying that I want to see more of this? Sure, I'd love to see more of this as well. But yeah, I just felt it was weird that he would say this with the with where I would read interpret this as him implying that these things either don't exist today or aren't focused on enough, which I think they are. And obviously, you know, scaling is being the main talk of the town. Uh but but these things are already differentiated. They're already doing things different.

And then he says, you know, be stage one at the minimum. Otherwise, you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge. and you should just call yourself that if you're doing things with ETH or other Ethereum issued assets. This is maybe the it's funny when I think about this sentence in particular because I I don't disagree with this. I think that if you're stage zero, you you are pretty much like a separate kind of chain because you are just completely centralized. Uh, and I think I've argued this point in the past as well, but at the same time, I I don't know. Like I feel like it's not it's not a bad thing for these L2s to come or these I guess like you know, stage zero L2s which are basically L1's um to say they're part of the Ethereum ecosystem because what if

then they just get to to L1 sorry to to stage one um after stage zero which a lot of them have then why then is it permissible for us to start calling them L2s or start calling them part of the Ethereum ecosystem? I don't know. I feel like it alienates people by by doing that. And yes, okay, if we if there are stage zero L2s that are pretty much like scams and grips, we should call that out. But I I struggle to to kind of want to call out the stage zeros and say, "Oh, no, you're just an L1. Get to stage one, then we'll call you an L2." Because we we we push builders away by doing that, I think. And it's it's very like ideological purity testing, which I think we we needed to definitely get away from um to an extent with these

things. Uh, but yeah, I don't know. I I I can go either way on this. I'm not going to say I have a strong opinion on on either way here. I just don't think it's healthy to push people away. Um, especially people that are trying to do the right thing because those people are in short supply within crypto. Most people in crypto, unfortunately, are doing the bad thing. So, we shouldn't push people away just because they don't fit some strict definition that we put into a box of these things. We should definitely be transparent about it, which we are with L2 beat, but I don't think we should be shaming these chains just because they're not stage one from the beginning. At least that's my that's my kind of interpretation. And then he he says, you know, I would support maximum interropability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each uh L2.

Um I agree with this. I think that interropability is good is better but at the same time we already have good enough interrop even if like it's not maximally interrop uh with bridging uh and I think there's obviously additional trust assumptions there but users seem to be happy with that so again it's not a not a huge deal here so then he goes on to say from Ethereum side over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup pre-ompile particularly once we have enshrined ZKVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1 this is a pre-ompile that verifies the a ZKVM proof and it's part of Ethereum. So it auto upgrades along with Ethereum and if the pre-ompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard fork to fix the bug. So this is something that has been talked about for

a while. Native rollups. I mentioned it before. This has massive trade-offs, guys. And Vitalic basically names the trade-offs here. This native rollup would be limited by Ethereum. It cannot move faster than the Ethereum protocol itself. The Ethereum L1 protocol. It is part of the Ethereum L1 protocol. You get way less customiz customizability. You you get less scale as well. You can't do what you can do with L2s. For all intents and purposes, I actually don't think a native rollup is an L2. Again, this is a thing a definition kind of semantics argument here. But if a native rollup is part of the L1, can only be changed by an L1 hard fork, has a bug, and has to and the L1 has to fork to fix that bug, then for all intents

and purposes, it's part of the L1. It is not an L2. It is not another layer sitting on top of the L1. It is part of the L1 itself. So I would not call these things L2s. Maybe Valak does, but I just wouldn't, right? So I would put that into the bucket of L1 scaling. I actually wouldn't put that into the L2 bucket at all. Um, and then he says, you know, the native rollout pre-ompile would make full security council free EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is an EVM plus other stuff than the native rollout pre-ompile 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 letting you provide your own values to the lookup table that you would prove separately. So yeah, obviously like an L2 can still be built on top of this, but then it's not like a in my eyes a proper kind of native rollup. It is like a hybrid between a native roll up and and and and a typical L2 construction here, which again would just be an L2. So, there are different ways here and different trade-offs here. And it's all about the trade-offs always, guys. But again, like I don't think that this is something that is at odds with L2s either. I think that it's just another way to build on Ethereum, right? Um and then he finishes the tweet. Well, the second last paragraph here, he says, "This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous

composability." And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just extend the L1, figure out something new to add. I want to focus on that last sentence. Don't just extend the L1, figure out something new to add. I mean, we've they've already been doing this, guys. Like, like they're not just extending the L1. Like, a lot of the new L2s especially are not just generalized chains that do nothing different. Yeah. Okay. You could say like that arbitrum and bass, for example. They're the generalized EVM chains. They're extending the EVM. their, you know, their block space looks similar to Ethereum L1, but they are doing different things as well. The whole arbitrum ecosystem is doing different things. You know, they they're they've got their um whole arbitum orbit thing where people can build their own

chains like Robin Hood using their technology to build their own chains. They got stylus, you know, being able to to program not just using Solidity, but other languages. Uh Bass, I would I would say that they're um doing a lot more to kind of like push the limits of the EVM in terms of like scaling it as well. um and also informing the L1 of like how far we can go here. But they've also been experimenting with different use cases. I think base what they view the chain as is like just like the dumb pipes and then everything building on top is what they want to focus on. Like they did the creator coin stuff for a while. Eh, that didn't really pan out too much. They did the social stuff. Eh, kind of didn't pan out too much. They're doing the AI stuff which seems to be

doing really well right now. So, they are differentiating themselves there. OP mainet I've said for a while I think doesn't even have a reason to exist at this point. Um, I think that that is definitely what Vitalik's talking about here where it literally just extends the L1 EVM kind of block space to an extent. I mean, it doesn't literally, but like it it it in my mind it could go away and it wouldn't really affect much. Lighter is very different, right? They're a per app chain. Like they're not generalized EVM. They're a per app chain. Um, Starknet, they're doing their own thing. I mean, you guys know my view on Starknet. Been kind of bearish on that for a little while. Inc has kind of let me down. I think I I I expected more from them. Um Lana, I haven't really looked too too

deeply into what they're doing. I'm not going to comment on ones that I haven't looked too deeply into. Uh ZKYNC is pushing uh really hard on the ZKVM front. Um they're very involved with the L1 ZKVM stuff, the the getting the proving times down, stuff like that. Uni Chain using a bunch of different things under the hood uh for specific to like DeFi related activities like deck swaps. Um, and you can obviously look into that yourself if you want to. And there's a bunch of other L2s here. Obviously, Aztec doing the privacy stuff, so on and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, I completely agree with Vitalic. You know, don't just extend the L1. Figure out something new to add, but that's what a lot of the L2s have already been doing. Um, and I think they're going to continue to do that.

So, that's that's, you know, that's something that obviously has already been happening. There's no need for Vitalic to like say that and then all of a sudden it's going to start happening. It's already been happening on its own here. And then he finishes the tweet off by saying, "This of course means that some will add things that are trust dependent or backdoor or otherwise insecure. This is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make uh uh should be to make it clear to users what guarantees they have and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can. We've already been doing this. L2B like that's that's just one example of this." Like again, I don't know. Like I don't actually know the point of this tweet from Ital to be honest. Is he just like I don't know trying to get the word

out about this to people who otherwise would not have heard about this before? Um I I I I don't understand like because all of what he's said here is not new. Like none of this is new at all. None of this is is something that hasn't been happening for years at this point. I think all he's doing is reiterating what has already been talked about and what has already been largely consensus in the ecosystem for a while. And if that's the goal of this tweet, then okay, cool. Like that's that's fine. But but I also think that the the it's just weird that he would kind of post this the way he has and framed it the way he has without also saying that hey we're already doing all of this stuff. Good job guys. Uh you know you're already kind of doing what I

think should be done. This is great and here's how I kind of see it. But instead, he seems to have said all this stuff with the, I guess, like implicit notion of, "Hey guys, like you were doing everything wrong." Or maybe not everything wrong, but like, "Yeah, it's cool that we have L2s, but you should be focusing on this, this, and this." When they've already been focusing on that. So, yeah, it's rare for me to disagree with Vitalic on things and his approach on things. I don't like this approach. I I think that this is open obviously to FUD, and you've probably seen all of the FUD that's been going on um within the ecosystem. And even people who are not like fighters of Ethereum, like Ryan Sean Adams from Banklist, for example, he's he basically interpret this tweet to say what you're saying is L2s aren't

Ethereum. Agreed. I don't think that at all. And I think that Ryan and David were tooting this horn for a long time. And I think they're viewing this and their lens into this, and this goes back to the raw shack test thing, is that they're like, "Oh, we were saying this for a while, and this fits my mental model and my narrative and my bias. Uh, so I'm going to agree with this and I'm going to say I was right." And David came into the Daily Discord channel today and basically did that. He did like victory laps. He he was, you know, um coming in and basically saying we were saying this and we were gas lit and flooded. And then I I actually read those comments before I went and read Vitalik's tweet. And then I read Vitalik's tweet and I'm like nowhere in

this tweet does Vitalik say this. He doesn't say L2s aren't Ethereum. Literally, he says things that may allude to that, but then he adds nuance and adds context to this. And he also said in that in that paragraph which I I mentioned, he basically said what we've already all believed that L2s shouldn't just be scaling, they should be doing other things as well. They should be differentiating themselves. Again, something that I've been saying for years and many people in the ecosystem have been saying for years. So I I really think that this interpretation from Ryan is one that I very very disagree with. Um Ryan from Bankless.

But then there's there's Ryan Burkeman here who's a longtime Ethereum community member where he says each L1 plus L2 model has reached its steady state. L2 is a ve vehicle for control, customization, political scalability and of course tech scalability. L2s picked the level of decentralization that's right for them. But you can't be more decentralized than the underlying L1. I mean I completely agree with that. That's my I guess interpretation, my raw shack test and that all obviously fits my bias or because that's what I've been saying for for years anyway. But I I think that is the correct interpretation of of of things. I don't think it's correct to say that L2s aren't Ethereum.

And I think that such a semantically stupid argument that it just goes it makes us go in circles and shouldn't be something that we should even be debating to begin with. I think that we should just move on from that debate. It's so dumb. Like it it it it doesn't make any sense to debate this stuff. If you're building in the Ethereum ecosystem, you are Ethereum to me. You are part of Ethereum to me. And yeah, obviously you're not the L1 Ethereum protocol, but no one says that. they just say Ethereum and the just saying the word Ethereum has many interpretations as well. So you see how like words can be interpreted in many many different ways and it depends on the person depends on their already depends on their existing biases depends on the narrative narrative that they're trying to push so on and so forth like

every single Ethereum hater is going to take this tweet and I've already seen this happening on Twitter. They're going to take this tweet and they're going to say these things. I already can tell you what they're going to say and you're going to see this all over Twitter. They're going to say that, "Oh, look, you know, Vitalic was wrong and Ethereum leadership was wrong and they're pivoting to uh off of L2s and just scaling the L1 now. Oh, look, the scaling the L1 proponents were right." Then you're going to see people saying that, "Oh, L2s um are broken. They were never needed. L2 should just like shut down. L2 Vitalic saying that L2s are dead." So on and so forth, right? Those are going to be the two main things that you see people people saying here and people running victory laps around when that is not at all what Vitalik has

said. All he has said is that L2s to be the most strong to be to to play to their strengths should do different things to the underlying L1. Again, not something new, something that's been said for years now. And people completely agree with that. And now that we're scaling the L1 more, uh it means that there's less of a kind of pressure on the L2s to be the only scaling vehicle of Ethereum. So, what he is saying in in TLDDR is that L1 plus L2 equals Ethereum. We're doing both. We're doing both. We're scaling the L1. We're scaling L, you know, uh, Ethereum via L2s, but also we're doing uh other things at L2s, like what Ryan Burkeman said around customizability, political scalability, tech scalability, control,

all that sorts of stuff there. So, that's that's what I think is is kind of being said here. And I'm glad to see a lot of people actually understand that as well and are pushing back on people who are who are misinterpreting this tweet and misunderstanding this tweet. Um, which is which is really great to see. Uh but yeah, I'm I'm fully on board with that. I'm fully on board with doing all of this and I have for a while. I was I was once upon a time I wouldn't say like a scaling L1 bear uh and kind of thought it was maybe pointless to an extent um because remember I pushed back on increasing the gas limit. I think this was like 2 years ago or something like that. But then as things came into better view, as more focus was put in on

it, as more and more developers, core developers and researchers came out and said, "No, we can actually do this in a in a safe way while preserving the things that we love about Ethereum." I came around to that and I I think I said at the time I was wrong to be a gas bear. Um, and now I'm a gasimate bull. Like I'm one of the biggest gas limit bulls. But that doesn't take away from the fact that I think L2s are still needed to scale Ethereum. L1 is never going to scale enough to scale Ethereum. We need the L2s, but on top of that, we need the L2s in order to um make sure that we can have these businesses that want to come along and build their own chain building in the Ethereum ecosystem rather than going and building their own L1. Um and yes, Vitalik said that if

you're a stage zero, you're basically your own L1. There's different interpretations of that as well. I think that st, you know, it's funny because there's different kind of versions of stage one and stage zero. Like you can even see it on L2B here like arbitum one stage one as I said at the beginning is different to base stage one because of the exit window is different and and other ones have differences as well like starknet stage one is very different to arbitum and base stage one. So when you look at it from that perspective uh I think that's the right perspective to look at is just that there's a set of trade-offs here. The L we're doing the L1 and L2 thing. We're still I mean they're still part of like scaling blobs, right? and and and scaling blobs also is going to eventually have um an

effect on the L12 because of the fact that you've got um the L1 uh like native roll-ups I believe that can use uh blobs as well. Um and then I mean roll-ups or L2s aren't the only ones that can use blobs either. Like blobs can be used for various different things here. Um but yeah, that's my whole interpretation of of this tweet and I thought it was very important to do an episode just on this today because I'm seeing so many misinterpretations of this. I'm seeing so many silly takes on this. Um, but I'm giving my take. I'm giving my interpretation of things. And I would love to know if you guys agree with disagree with me. Um, probably in the Discord channel. The YouTube comments always a mess. I'm sure you guys see it.

It gets spammed with all this kind of um bot kind of scammy to token crap. I I I find it hard to read through the YouTube comments and get any kind of signal from it. So, if you want to discuss this further, please join the Discord channel if you haven't yet. We'll discuss it in there. Uh, and definitely don't try to discuss it on Twitter. Uh, like Twitter's just bad for the for these sorts of things. But that's my my whole interpretation of that there. But I think I'm going to end it there for today, guys, because that's all I really had to talk about. Um I think I'm going to let this stew for a little bit as well. Maybe I'll talk about this a bit more on um Monday's refuel because maybe there'll be more to talk about. But that'll be it for today. So thank

everyone for listening and watching. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. Give a thumbs up, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord channel, and I'll catch you all next week. Thanks everyone.