Vitalik recently posted a rather uncharacteristic and provocative tweet, arguing that Layer 2 chains that use Ethereum as a settlement layer should no longer be viewed as shards that make up the Ethereum brand. What does Vitalik's ideal vision for L2s look like, which L2s stand to benefit from this narrative shift, and what was he really trying to say?
The Conditions Vitalik Set for L2s
Vitalik argued that L2s should strive to provide value beyond what Ethereum already offers, rather than settling for the value of scalability and branding alone. He outlined several categories of what he would build if he were an L2 team.
Condition 1: Privacy-focused features or a non-EVM virtual machine
Condition 2: Specialization for a specific application
Condition 3: Extreme scaling at a level that not even L1 can achieve
Condition 4: Adoption of an entirely different design for non-economic applications such as social, AI, or proof of identity
Condition 5: Extremely low latency and specialized sequencing
Condition 6: Built-in oracles, decentralized dispute resolution, or non-computationally-verifiable features
Which chains fit these conditions?
The chain that likely came to everyone's mind the moment they saw Vitalik's tweet.
Condition 3: In a recent seven-day stress test, MegaETH demonstrated scalability that surpassed the total transaction count of all major chains combined, averaging 15.5K TPS with a peak of 55.2K TPS.
Condition 5: Currently maintaining latency at the 10ms level on mainnet. A competitive sequencer rotation mechanism backed by economic collateral is planned for extremely low-latency sequencing. Additionally, MegaETH plans to introduce "Proximity Markets," a unique auction market using $MEGA where winners gain a physical proximity advantage to the sequencer, enabling faster information access.
Condition 6: Through a collaboration with Chainlink, MegaETH is set to be the first in the industry to launch with a real-time on-chain data stream oracle natively embedded within the chain.
Condition 2: These are rollups specialized for perpetual DEXs. Lighter, in particular, is the most successful case among Ethereum appchains.
Operating at a respectable speed of 2,700 TPS, Lighter has generated approximately $118B in futures trading volume over a 30-day period, along with nearly $6M in profit, establishing itself as the second-largest perp DEX behind Hyperliquid.
Beyond Lighter, perp DEX rollups built on StarkWare's technology, such as EdgeX and Paradex, are also posting strong results. This is highly encouraging and aligns well with the type of rollup Vitalik described.
Condition 4: An unusual use case that aims to build an on-chain reputation layer.
To aggregate application activity across diverse environments, Fluent has implemented a "Blended Execution Environment" that supports atomic interactions across multiple VMs including EVM, SVM, and Wasm.
Condition 4: Abstract has secured a distinctive gaming ecosystem and placed heavy emphasis on easy onboarding for Web2 users. While its low-level tech stack follows zkSync's zkStack, Abstract has aggressively leveraged account abstraction, making it the largest use case for account abstraction wallets.
Condition 1: Aztec boldly abandoned EVM equivalence to pursue privacy functionality and charted its own path. Instead of the EVM's account-based model, Aztec is designed around a UTXO model, which is better suited for the level of privacy it aims to achieve.
On the other hand, Arbitrum and Optimism, the flagship L2s that have tirelessly worked toward reaching Stage 2 status, may have felt considerable alienation from Vitalik's tweet. Of course, their technical efforts carry great historical significance in that they have motivated other chains to strive for at least Stage 1 compliance. Users on these chains still enjoy the best economic protections among rollups, which positions them favorably for institutional adoption and similar use cases. However, given the substantial and sustained effort these chains have invested in reaching Stage 2, it is regrettable that they may have lost the window of time during which they could have allocated resources more freely toward ecosystem development.
That said, no chain has ever thrived simply because it was a rollup with no distinguishing features. Each chain has independently built its own ecosystem strategy and worked to differentiate itself. Their success or failure has always hinged on user adoption, not technical advancement alone. Rather than approaching Vitalik's tweet from the lens of individual rollups and speculating on which chains will rise or fall, the focus should be on what this means for Ethereum itself: that Ethereum has come to value the added value generated through higher-order applications more highly than the one-dimensional fees derived from block space consumption. His tweet also reveals a clear intention to aggressively expand current blockchain use cases, which are heavily concentrated in economic protocols like DeFi, into non-economic applications.
