Vitalik Buterin Wants Rollups To Reach Stage 1 Decentralization By Year-End

Updated: 29 March 2024

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed raising the bar as to what is considered a rollup within the Ethereum ecosystem, and suggested developers achieve a higher level of decentralization by the end of 2024 to avoid getting left behind.

“By the end of the year, I think our standards should increase and we should only treat a project as a rollup if it has actually reached at least stage 1,” he said in a Mar. 28 blog post.

This is after Buterin said in November 2022 that any network that has made enough progress in improving its scalability and decentralization, but is not yet fully decentralized, has reached stage 1 status. Achieving full decentralization would upgrade the network to Stage 2.

Vitalik Buterin Says Very Little Rollups Are Actually Decentralized

The call to make rollups less centralized by the end of this year follows an earlier observation by the Ethereum co-founder. He uncovered that there are only five Layer-2 projects that have reached either stage 1 or stage 2 decentralization, citing L2beat data. Meanwhile, only Arbitrum is fully EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible, Buterin added.

Going beyond scaling, applications that are built today need to be built with "2020s Ethereum" in mind. Here's what this means: pic.twitter.com/AmOnwizRHT

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 28, 2024

With regards to Ethereum itself, scaling efforts have gone from a “zero-to-one” problem to an incremental problem, Vitalik wrote. Work towards scaling the Ethereum network will now focus on increasing blob capacity and improve inefficiencies within the application layer, he said in the post.

Developers Will Build The Necessary Foundation To Transition To Stage 2

Next up on Ethereum’s development roadmap is the implementation of data availability sampling. This upgrade is aimed towards increasing blob capacity to 16MB per slot. Developers will also explore ways to optimize Layer-2 solutions through techniques such as optimistic execution and data compression, while also looking into how they can improve the network’s overall security.

After these developments are complete, developers “can cautiously move toward stage 2: a world where rollups truly are backed by code, and a security council can only intervene if the code provably disagrees with itself,” Buterin added.