pm VS l2beat

Get involved in the next public testnet. Holešky testnet (Goerli successor) first launch coordination call June 15, targeting September genesis https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/803

Attend some All Core Dev meetings if you have doubts https://github.com/ethereum/pm

EIP4844 readiness checklist: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Breakout-Room/4844-readiness-checklist.md

Dencun upgrade with EIP4844 is likely later this year, which will bring lower cost Layer 2 transactions. Follow the readiness of EIP4844: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Breakout-Room/4844-readiness-checklist.md Prague + E starname upgrade is probably 2024, possibly focused on EOF, then followed by a Verkle tree focused upgrade, but none of this has been decided.

There's an EIP 4844 readiness checklist.

The live date for the Shanghai upgrade is likely to be April 12, occurring at epoch number 620,9536. This was announced during the All Core Developers Execution Layer #157 call on 16 March 2023.

On December 8, 2022, the Ethereum core team held an All Core Developers (ACD) meeting. The Ethereum team agreed to target March 2023 as the release date for Shanghai’s mainnet launch. However, this is a tentative date based on the assumption that the Zhejiang, Sepolia, and Goerli testnets are successful.

Shanghai is the next major upgrade for the Ethereum network, following the Merge in September 2022. Key highlights of what to expect include:

A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.

We are running & maintaining the site (https://l2beat.com). Our work is to look on the current Layer 2 deployments on Ethereum & show risks and statistics to the end user. Very interesting thing is that we are a public goods company trying to stay as objective as possible in the industry full of subjectivity. What I mostly like in this job is that I am a part of the project shaping how it looks, not only mindlessly taking someones orders.

Candidate:

Ecosystem fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. It leads to rapid development through competition. Different L2s are competing against each other to provide the best service and that has lead to a cambrian explosion of solutions. It's also a very effective way to explore the solution space, I'm sure many will disappear, others will get eaten, and at some point there will be consolidation. But all this seems like a good approach early on when tackling complex problems for which the ideal trade-offs are not entirely obvious. Explore as much of the solution space as possible and trim later on.

A perhaps more pernicious problem is liquidity fragmentation. Moving assets between L2s is a tedious friction that leads to fragmentation of liquidity. In that respect, zero-knowledge rollups present a big advantage as you can share liquidity between them as long as they share some zk-circuits that allow to prove statements to both chains. All this is being very actively worked on. And the technology behind it is short of fascinating. The typical HN audience would have a huge hard-on for it, if they didn't have such a strong preconception against crypto-anything.

If anyone is curious to learn more about L2s a good starting point is here: https://l2beat.com/

And if you want to see Ethereum scaling progress you can check it here: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

The next major upgrade to the protocol, slated for late this year or early 2024 (date is not finalized yet), will focus on scalability by making L2 activity veeery cheap.

These two links will give you a lot of the info you need to compare L2s: https://l2beat.com/ and https://www.growthepie.xyz/ - enjoy.

Source: https://l2beat.com

Thanks! l2beat.com is the best.

In addition to what others said, I always find https://l2beat.com useful to see a summary of the security assumptions behind the various L2s. Currently, all L2 need to be trusted to some extent as they are still quite in development.

Exponential.fi has good summaries and links to the projects. And https://l2beat.com is also great for judging L2s.

Take a careful look at https://l2beat.com