Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, talks about his ideas for layer 3 protocols

 

Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum's founders, says that layer-3 protocols would be used for something very different than what layer-2 protocols have been used for, which has been "scalability."

While Ethereum-based layer-2 solutions have focused on hyperscaling the network, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin thinks layer 3s will serve a very different purpose: providing "customized functionality."

In a post on September 17, Buterin talked about his ideas. He gave three "visions" of what layer 3s will be used for in the future.

The co-founder of Ethereum said that a third layer on the blockchain only makes sense if it does something different from layer 2s, which have mostly been used to improve scaling through Zero-Knowledge Rollup technology.

"A three-layer scaling architecture in which the same scaling scheme is stacked on top doesn't usually work well. Rollups on top of rollups, where both layers use the same technology, definitely don't."

But, said Buterin, "a three-layer architecture where the second and third layers serve different purposes can work."

One use case for layer three would be what Buterin calls "customized functionality." He is talking about privacy-based applications that use ZK proofs to send transactions that protect privacy to layer 2.

Another use case would be "customized scaling" for specialized applications that don't want to use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to do computations.

Buterin also said that layer three could be used for scaling that is "weakly trusted" with the help of Validiums, a technology that ZK can't break. Buterin said this could be useful for "enterprise blockchain" applications by using "a centralized server that runs a validium prover and regularly commits hashes to the chain."

But Buterin said that it's still not clear if layer-3 structures will be better than the current layer-2 model for building custom applications on Ethereum.

Layer-2 Vs Layer-3 Network Architecture. Source: StarkWare.

"One possible reason to choose the three-layer model over the two-layer model is that a three-layer model lets a whole sub-ecosystem live in a single rollup," Buterin said. "This means that cross-domain operations within that ecosystem can be done very cheaply without going through the expensive layer 1."

But Buterin said that building layer 3s might not improve the network because cross-chain transactions can be done quickly and cheaply between two layer-2s committed to the same chain.

Buterin's comments about possible use cases for layer 3 come as StarkWare's new recursive validity proofs may have solved Ethereum's scalability problems.

Declan Fox, the Product Manager at ConsenSys, a company that makes software for Ethereum, recently told Cointelegraph, "With recursive rollups and proofs, we can theoretically scale indefinitely."

These recursive proofs have been well tested in production. StarkWare co-founder Eli-Ben Sasson recently told Cointelegraph that its recursive proofs have rolled up as many as 600,000 NFT mints in a single transaction on Immutable X and that 60 million transactions could soon be on the way "with more engineering and tweaking."