Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has a message for the crypto developer community: when building Layer 2 solutions, stop overengineering and start using the full power of Ethereum’s Layer 1.
In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), Buterin weighed in on a growing trend where alternative Layer 1 blockchains eventually evolve into Layer 2s. His take? That’s fine but developers should embrace Ethereum’s foundational features instead of trying to rebuild them from scratch.
Build Smarter, Not Harder
According to Buterin, future Layer 2s don’t need to be bloated with unnecessary infrastructure. Instead, they should focus on what L2s are really good at: sequencing transactions and generating cryptographic proofs like ZK-proofs or fraud proofs to validate execution.
“Reduce your logic to just being a sequencer and a prover (if based, just a prover) over the core execution,” Buterin advised.
He argues that developers should lean into Ethereum L1’s baked-in strengths such as:
- Security
- Censorship resistance
- Proof generation
- Data availability
By offloading these key features to Ethereum’s base layer, builders can keep L2s lightweight, efficient, and robust, rather than trying to duplicate efforts already solved by Ethereum’s architecture.
The Real-World Payoff
Vitalik didn’t stop at theory. He highlighted real-world examples where Ethereum L1’s properties have come to the rescue when something went wrong on an L2.
“We’ve already seen successful examples of the L1’s features protecting users’ rights if something on the L2 goes wrong,” he explained, underlining the practical security benefit of tying L2s closely to Ethereum’s foundation.
This philosophy is especially relevant in light of Buterin’s broader push for true decentralization not just buzzword-level marketing. At the recent Ethereum Community Conference, he criticized many so-called decentralized apps for relying on centralized front ends, calling them “straw houses.”
The Walkaway Test
To test whether a decentralized app is actually resilient, Buterin introduced what he called the “walkaway test”: would the app still work if the original team completely disappeared?
If the answer is no, the app likely isn’t as decentralized or secure as it claims to be.
Bottom Line
Buterin’s message is clear: L2 builders should ditch unnecessary complexity, embrace Ethereum’s L1 strengths, and build systems that are truly decentralized and durable.
In doing so, the Ethereum ecosystem can realize a long-standing dream: the fusion of trust minimization and efficiency that the blockchain space has been chasing since the early 2010s and now, finally, has the tools to achieve.
