Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered an important message about the Layer 2 ecosystem at the fourth Hong Kong Web3 Festival on April 20: copying Ethereum and making it more centralized is not a product; it is a mistake.
Speaking at the event, Buterin drew a distinction between two types of L2 projects. The first takes Ethereum, scales it up, and reduces decentralization in the process. The second starts by examining what applications actually need, identifies the off-chain components those applications require beyond Ethereum’s base layer, and builds specifically to meet those needs.
His verdict on the first type was, “The type of L2 that does not make sense is when you just take Ethereum, make a copy of Ethereum, make it 100 times bigger, make it more centralized, and you are done.”
What an L2 Should Actually Do
Buterin’s argument is rooted in how useful infrastructure gets built. Rather than starting with Ethereum and asking how to make it bigger, he argued that meaningful L2 development starts with applications and works backward.
“The type of L2 that I think makes sense is when you start to look through the applications, you ask what are the off-chain components that they need, what are the parts they need other than the Ethereum L1, and then you build,” he said.
Two Scaling Priorities
Alongside his critique of copycat L2s, Buterin outlined where Ethereum’s scaling focus needs to go next. The first priority is data scaling. The most recent Ethereum hard fork introduced PeerDAS technology, significantly improving the network’s ability to publish data on-chain. Buterin acknowledged the progress but was direct that the work is unfinished.
“We still need to push that further,” he said, signaling that data availability remains an active development priority rather than a solved problem.
The second priority is compute scaling. This is where Buterin’s argument becomes particularly significant for developers. “Scaling compute that is part of the Ethereum chain allows different applications to compose with each other, to talk to each other, without requiring intermediaries,” he said.
That composability is one of Ethereum’s defining architectural advantages. Compute scaling is what preserves it at a greater scale rather than fragmenting the ecosystem across isolated chains that cannot interact efficiently.
Why This Matters
The L2 ecosystem has grown, with dozens of chains launching on top of Ethereum’s security layer. Buterin’s Hong Kong comments suggest that not all of that growth represents genuine value creation.
Projects that replicate Ethereum’s structure without addressing specific application requirements are contributing noise rather than infrastructure. The ones that identify genuine gaps and build precisely to fill them are the ones he believes are worth building.
Related: Vitalik Buterin Outlines Ethereum’s New Mandate Focused on Privacy and Security
