Ethereum (ETH) creator Vitalik Buterin says that starting next year, he will only publicly mention layer-2 projects that he believes are en route to optimal decentralization.
Addressing his 5.4 million followers on the social media platform X, Buterin says that in 2025, he plans to only publicly name L2s that are in “stage 1” or above, referencing a previous blog post detailing the different phases of decentralization.
In the November 2022 blog post titled “Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels,” Buterin said that L2s are either in stage 0, 1 or 2 in terms of decentralization.
Buterin says “stage 1” means the project should have a running fraud-proof or validity-proof scheme, plus certain upgrade requirements and multi-sig overrides.
Nearly two years later, Buterin says he only wants to promote L2s in stage 1, regardless of what he has invested in or what his industry friends are working on.
“It doesn’t matter if I invested, or if you’re my friend; stage 1 or bust.
Multiple ZK-rollup teams have told me they’re on track to be stage 1 by year-end. I’m excited to see that happen!
Of course, we should not throw away training wheels because we’re actually confident that the proof systems are secure; that would be irresponsible. But stage 1 (75% threshold on council to override the proof system, 26%+ of council must be outside the rollup team) is a very reasonable moderate milestone. The multisigs I’m in have not had a single liveness failure in years, let alone 26%.
The era of rollups being glorified multisigs is coming to an end. The era of cryptographic trust is upon us.”
The Ethereum co-founder hasn’t yet named any specific L2s that he says are sufficiently decentralized.
The largest is currently Polygon (POL), with a market cap of $2.67 billion.
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