Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has taken to the X social media platform to revisit his post about layer-3 scaling solutions amid intensifying debates within the cryptocurrency community.
Buterin has noted that these solutions “don’t magically improve throughput,” but they can still be used for cost saving. That said, there are more efficient ways of cutting costs compared to layer-3s, according to Buterin.
In his article, which was published a year and a half ago, Buterin singled out three main visions for layer-3s: customized functionality for different use cases, customized scaling in various forms, and weakly-trusted scaling in the form of validiums, which are significantly cheaper compared to rollup but offer better security.
Back then, Buterin acknowledged that all of these three visions were “reasonable.” He was skeptical of a three-layer scaling architecture with the same scaling scheme, but the Ethereum co-founder also added that a third layer could work if it has a different purpose. “Validiums on top of rollups do make sense, even if they’re not certain to be the long-term best way of doing things,” he said.
The debate surrounding layer-3s
Buterin’s recent comment came after some prominent community members started debating the viability of layer-3 solutions.
Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO at Helius, recently opined that L3s were basically “centralized servers settling on other centralized servers.” “The audacity some of you have to call Solana centralized for YEARS just to use literal web servers settling on other centralized web servers is absolutely wild,” he added.
Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams was quick to criticize him, arguing that the Solana community should refrain from posting “arrogant takes on scaling.”
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has also weighed in on the debate. “Solana has had years and years of centralization fud because the hardware is expensive, when the alternative is literally honest majority multisigs,” he said.
