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With the completion of the Ethereum Merge, founder Vitalik Buterin has turned his consideration to different issues that might assist enhance the community. Ethereum Layer 2 protocols had been massive enterprise again within the bull market of 2021, and even now, they proceed to collect assist from community customers who proceed to make use of these roll-ups. Now, Buterin has pointed to the opportunity of Layer 3 protocols on the community. Here’s what he expects them to do.

Ethereum Layer 3 Protocols

In a submit, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delves into the thought of Layer 3 protocols which have been circling the area now. At first, the thought began that with the performance of the present Layer 2 protocols, it was attainable to construct on them to offer much more scalability. Buterin refutes this in his submit: “Unfortunately, such simple conceptions of layer 3s rarely quite work out that easily.” So what then could make a profitable Layer 3 protocol?

The bottleneck comes from the info that must be saved on the blockchain as transactions are processed. Layer 2s already do a superb job of compressing the info wanted to retailer transactions on-chain however don’t get rid of the necessity to retailer knowledge on-chain. Given this, as soon as the info is already compressed as soon as to cut back its measurement, it’s unattainable to compress it once more. This signifies that it isn’t attainable to get extra scaling by simply constructing a Layer 3 rollup onto a Layer 2 roll-up.

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The pure conclusion for a way Ethereum Layer 3 protocols would then work could be that they might have totally different functionalities from the already current Layer 2 protocols. So, the place an L2 could be targeted on scaling, an L3 would go in direction of extra specialised performance like privateness. This discards the thought of eager to ‘improve’ upon the compression of Layer 2 and as a substitute offers L3s one thing new to work and give attention to. 

This custom-made performance can go in direction of something, actually. It can go in direction of custom-made scaling the place functions might use compressed knowledge for particular functions in line with a specific knowledge format, doing computations utilizing one thing apart from EVMs, and many others. Buterin additionally notes that the place Layer 2 options are for trestles scaling, Layer 3s will be for “weakly-trusted scaling (validiums).”

Layer 3s would additionally probably present higher operations for cross-chain transactions because the “three-layer model allows an entire sub-ecosystem to exist within a single rollup, which allows cross-domain operations within that ecosystem to happen very cheaply, without needing to go through the expensive layer 1.”

The Ethereum Layer 3 protocols are nonetheless very a lot an idea thought proper now, however the Ethereum founder factors to a framework that was proposed by Starkware as one which carries numerous promise. This extra refined framework goes past the varsity of considered simply stacking one other layer atop a Layer 2 and anticipating it to extend the compression. Buterin factors out that this can be a good thought “if it’s done in the right way.”

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