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How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?

vitalik.eth.limo · 2,463 words · saved by 1 readers

One of the points that I made in my post two and half years ago on "the Endgame" is that the different future development paths for a blockchain, at least technologically, look surprisingly similar. In both cases, you have a very large number of transactions onchain, and processing them requires (i) a large amount of computation, and (ii) a large amount of data bandwidth. Regular Ethereum nodes, such as the 2 TB reth archive node running on the laptop I'm using to write this article, are not powerful enough to verify such a huge amount of data and computation directly, even with heroic software engineering work and Verkle trees. Instead, in both "L1 sharding" and a rollup-centric world, ZK-SNARKs are used to verify computation, and DAS to verify data availability. The DAS in both cases is the same. The ZK-SNARKs in both cases are the same tech, except in one case they are smart contract code and in the other case they are an enshrined feature of the protocol. In a very real technical s

Dark Mode Toggle How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding? 2024 May 23 See all posts How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding? One of the points that I made in my post two and half years ago on "the Endgame" is that the different future development paths for a blockchain, at least technologically, look surprisingly similar. In both cases, you have a very large number of transactions onchain, and processing them requires (i) a large amount of computation, and (ii) a large amount of data bandwidth. Regular Ethereum nodes, such as the 2 TB reth archive node running on th

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