In his post, Buterin explained that the Ethereum network would need to break new ground on several key issues, such as data availability sampling, improving data compression, making layer 2 networks sufficiently “trustless,” and improving the user experience between blockchains.
He explained that developing Ethereum rollups to be trustless — much like the Ethereum mainnet — had not gone further due to concerns around there being “bugs in the code.”
Buterin said Ethereum “needs” trustless rollups so that some L2s could “inherit Ethereum’s core properties” and allow for more robust scaling over time.
Ethereum also needs to scale
Buterin also noted the need to scale the Ethereum base chain so it can keep up with demand.
“If L2s become very scalable and successful but L1 remains capable of processing only a very low volume of transactions, there are many risks to Ethereum that might arise.”
Buterin said the most “simple solution” would be to increase Ethereum’s gas limit but noted that this introduces centralization risks due to the increased costs incurred by stakers.
Improving Ethereum’s user-experience
“If we are serious about the idea that L2s are part of Ethereum, we need to make using the L2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem,” he said.
Buterin explained that allowing layer 2 networks to communicate more easily with one another in the back end would reduce the technical strain on the users.
Such improvements would see layer 2 users send tokens from one chain to another without the headache of manually bridging or swapping them into a native token to pay gas.
The rollup-centric roadmap
Historically, Ethereum’s development was based on the long-standing ETH 2.0 roadmap, which planned to scale Ethereum monolithically using “sharding” — something that looked roughly like 64 Ethereum blockchains all running together in unison.
“Now our task is to bring the rollup-centric roadmap to completion, and solve these problems, while preserving the robustness and decentralization that makes the Ethereum L1 special,” wrote Buterin.
