Recent shifts in Ethereum’s landscape, with its L1 gas fees hitting a five-year low, have prompted many projects to reconsider deploying on the mainnet. This renewed scrutiny raises crucial questions about how solutions like Layer 2 (L2) aim to address the core challenges of scalability, security, and decentralization that define the blockchain trilemma. Vitalik Buterin’s explanation of this dilemma highlights a trade-off between these three elements. L2 solutions are designed to alleviate these limitations by maintaining security through state summaries on Ethereum’s mainnet, striving for decentralization in transaction ordering, and achieving scalability off-chain.
Various popular L2 solutions like Optimistic Rollups and Zero-Knowledge Rollups exist, but the Based-Rollup approach, spearheaded by projects such as Taiko, offers a distinct alternative. This method prioritizes reducing the power of L2 sequencers by allowing Ethereum’s mainnet to manage transaction ordering, thereby limiting their influence.