Ethereum community doesn’t need to ‘justify the inadequacies of the present’ when building the future, Vitalik Buterin says
2024-10-29

Vitalik Buterin addressed criticism of Ethereum’s current Layer 2 user experience, often seen as fragmented and complex, by stating that “Ethereum people should not feel a need to justify the inadequacies of the present” while they build for the future.
On Monday, Camila Russo, founder of DeFi media platform The Defiant, wrote on X that she loved Ethereum and its community, but they need to stop minimizing the bad experience of Layer 2. “If you're a crypto native, it's bad. More than bad, it's PAINFUL. That's if you already use crypto. If you're a newbie... it's unacceptable. Simply unusable,” Russo said.
Transacting on Ethereum now often means navigating across multiple Layer 2s. For example, users might find a mint on one chain, an airdrop farm on another, receive stablecoins on different chains, and so on. Russo said that using just one chain or having multiple chains within a single ecosystem is not enough; seamless interaction across all Layer 2s and the mainnet is essential for usability. 
While technical solutions like account abstraction exist, they are largely unimplemented by wallets and protocols, limiting their impact on user experience, Russo added. “Improving Ethereum UX will require cross-ecosystem coordination. That's already hard. But it's going to be impossible if everyone deludes themselves by saying, ‘It's not that bad.’ Listen, it's bad.”
Responding early Tuesday, Buterin argued that needing to justify current inadequacies was a natural thing to gravitate toward when feeling “powerless” to build the future. “But we are building the future,” the Ethereum co-founder insisted, highlighting his prior essay on a potential cross-Layer 2 interoperability roadmap.
Cross-Layer 2 interoperability improvements aim to make the Ethereum ecosystem feel unified by reducing reliance on centralized elements and simplifying cross-chain transactions. Proposed solutions include standardizing chain-specific addresses, payment requests and keystore wallets, allowing assets to move across Layer 2s more seamlessly while reducing gas costs.
Achieving simpler cross-Layer 2 interactions requires both technical and community collaboration to establish consistent standards but will ultimately create a cohesive experience across Ethereum's Layer 1 and its Layer 2s, he wrote. “If we are serious about the idea that Layer 2s are part of Ethereum, we need to make using the Layer 2 ecosystem feel like using a unified Ethereum ecosystem.”
‘The Surge’
The section Buterin highlighted was from his earlier blog on “The Surge,” part two of five essay installments this month, covering possible futures of the Ethereum protocol.
In The Surge post, Buterin said that the rollup-centric roadmap, which emerged as a convergence between sharding and Layer 2 protocols, will continue to be the network’s key scaling strategy but still faces unique challenges.
“Our task is to bring the rollup-centric roadmap to completion, and solve these problems, while preserving the robustness and decentralization that makes the Ethereum Layer 1 special,” he said.
Buterin emphasized the need for Ethereum to scale significantly, with a goal of 100,000 transactions per second across Layer 1 and Layer 2s, and also explored other solutions focusing on further developing data availability sampling and scaling Ethereum’s base layer.
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