Ethereum 2.0 Introduces Layer 2: From Transition Plans to Long-term Infrastructure

The Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain officially launched its genesis block on the evening of December 1. This marks an important milestone in Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS. However, factors such as the long rollout period, a changing roadmap, and high migration costs mean that this major upgrade still faces challenges.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum community has seen the emergence of various Layer 2 scaling solutions such as Rollup, Plasma, and Validium. Compared to the sharding emphasized in 2.0, these solutions may have advantages in terms of scalability, implementation cycle, and engineering difficulty. In the short term, Layer 2 seems to be a more attractive option and could even become an important part of Ethereum's long-term evolution.

The Ethereum core team has recently confirmed that the priority of the Layer 2 solution Rollup should be higher than that of the originally planned sharding. The main reason is that sharding will take at least 2-3 years to implement and can only provide a maximum of 64 times the TPS improvement for the network. In contrast, the Rollup solution can achieve an improvement of up to 100 times.

From a design perspective, Ethereum founder V believes that Layer 1 should remain simple, allowing for the construction of more complex Layer 2 functionalities on top of it. This means that Ethereum and Layer 2 may coexist for a long time, rather than being a short-term supplement. Currently, important applications like Uniswap and Synthetix have expressed support for Layer 2 solutions, further consolidating the position of Layer 2 within the ecosystem.

Currently, there are 6 main Layer2 solutions: state channels, sidechains, Plasma, Validium, ZKRollup, and Optimistic Rollup. They each have their own characteristics in terms of hosting, computation, storage, and proof mechanisms. For DApp projects, it is possible to choose a suitable Layer2 solution based on needs, and even use multiple solutions in the same scenario.

From community discussions, the Rollup series of solutions is most likely to receive widespread support. Among them, Optimistic Rollup has garnered attention due to the backing of DeFi giants such as Synthetix and Uniswap. However, interoperability issues between different Layer 2 solutions may affect the composability of DeFi, which is an important challenge that needs to be addressed.

Overall, as the Ethereum ecosystem becomes increasingly large, the difficulty of fundamental transformations is also rising. In this context, Layer 2 is likely to become an indispensable infrastructure in the long-term evolution of Ethereum.