Ethereum as a Platform for L2s | Tomasz Stańczak - Ethereum Foundation

All right. So, our next talk we're going to dive a little bit deeper into L2s and using them as a platform uh or Ethereum as a platform for them. And Tamas, our co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation is going to be talking with you. So, let's give him a nice round of applause. And off to Tamas.

Hi everyone. That's um I think the main main job of the Ethereum Foundation is to give me a clicker at the moment actually. Um where is a clicker? There's no clicker of course. Okay.

Um all right. So the main job of the internet foundation for the L2s is to to make sure that this topic feels simple. And I don't think it was the simplest topic. It is actually one of the hardest topics. makes this talk actually uh very challenging to to present everything like we we demand from ourselves to deliver clarity and I would like to talk about it how we try to do it.

So, Ethereum as a platform for L2s. Um, so I was thinking about how how I was trying to set up uh Ethereum Foundation for talking about L2s when I when I joined last year and we realized that it was at the time when there was lots of concerned voices about what's the relationship between L2s and L1's uh are L2s helping scaling parasitic are they not paying fees? Are they not using blobs? Are they using DAS? What is really an L2?

Are they going to stage two, stage one, and so on? And I said um a foundation should continue being brave. It means that whenever there is a question from public you always answer that question and you try to be transparent. Well you are transparent. Uh you have to be confident always about the Ethereum mainet future and the sense that you don't get nervous about Ethereum mainet future by looking at L2s LL ones and thinking oh this all makes me stressful.

It's like if you have that confidence about Ethereum mainet and you focus on the future of Ethereum mainet and everything else should stem out of it. So if you do it right on Ethereum manage if you deliver the value the block space if you if you tell that this is the platform for L2 to use then then you're not stressing about what L2s are doing whatever they're doing you're fine um you deliver value and quality so you deliver really really high quality mainet and it means you build a platform that whether it is a D5 application on O2 or any retail user on agent they will always want to build on top of that platform um understand the challenges So here I mean that if you look at L2's building on Ethereum, you think about all their limitations and challenges. So you build this very very deep empathy for the builders that decided to follow some routes maybe roads set up by uh by major thought leaders like it will be vital researchers or some some other people decided to follow the path of L2 and you start thinking of what their limitations are what they're fighting with uh how they limited by funding by the resources talent and so on and their ideas and where they decided to take trade-offs on the innovation versus uh perfect execution and so on. If you if you have this understanding then you can deliver better platform and and once again build more of this confidence and remove remove all the stress and emotions negative emotions. Um stay excited stay excited about the innovation from L2us.

So whenever something is coming either through the application layer or or through agents even if it's if it's broken it feels like experimentation and while you have already Ethereum as a production environment and it works for the institutions in in many aspects uh you still also understand that Ethereum is a platform for a lot of experimentation and innovation and then you continuously excited also about the failing attempts whether from L2s or other applications and once again you remove the negative emotions because it's always a positive emotion They're experimenting, they're exploring, they're helping us to innovate. Uh you're not thinking they're wasting the VC money or they're wasting the uh the users money. You think they're actually spending money on research, on innovation, and so on. Um and be clear and this is this is difficult, right? So we we demand from ourselves to be clear about what what we think is a stage one, stage two, good rollup, bad rollup, base rollup, what really is the roll-up future and so on.

And for the last few months we really struggled to be clear. That's why we creating the um the platform team and the communications team is working with the platform team in details to keep communicating what we think the future of the rollups is especially as we keep producing a bit of like confusing content that can come from me from Vitalik from Joshu uh from the O2s themselves from various researchers. So uh there's a lot of effort at the foundation to improve that quality uh clarity. And the last thing is that I think that we should respect users and assume that users are actually knowing what they're doing even if they're losing money that uh even if they're making uh choices to go for risky risky L2s for not stage two L2s for strange bridges and so on then you think many of the users that are losing money are actually experimenting with the chain and you just keep forgetting about that. Sure, there'll be users that are that are failing because of the security issues.

But once again, if you come back to that idea of deliver value and quality that you're securing everything and you're doing everything that you can to make sure that you clarify the those risks that you educate the risks and instead of preventing user from something and uh and being consistently angry and emotional about L2 is doing things differently than you expected, you just say users know what they're doing if we are doing good job of coordinating, educating, explaining, clarifying uh and delivering quality for the L1 so they can always escape if it's needed. and and this was my approach and that's why I was always um very very excited about the L2s wanted to share their message wanted to show what they're building uh and remove the negative emotions of L2's actually causing trouble because I think it's not the role to to improve Ethereum actually that this was my approach and the role should be to to succeed and whenever L2 was coming to have a conversation about the strategy on Ethereum. I was saying what can we do for you? How can Emperorium be better platform for O2s? They would explain like what they explain, what they what they need, what doesn't work and so on.

When they asked me what can we do for you, I was always hopefully I was always saying one sentence, please succeed like go and win. And this drives my vision on the L2s and L2. Uh now there's lots of slides that I'll rush over because this is that confusing part. I want to show you various uh various conversations ideas what happens in the L2 world. So the platform team Joshua Dolph just announced it recently.

If you if you go to the tweet, you can go also to the blog post. It's Ethereum blogs. It will tell you what the platform team will try to do and they'll be communicating consistency and uh their task with that clarity. Um then we started organizing events to bring together researchers and engineers and this is the first one at the network school. It was over 70 people from over 20 O2s.

Uh so we want to keep generating that positive energy of working on the things together and once again ideally nobody who was there heard that they have to do something for Ethereum but they've heard this is what Ethereum is doing. This is how we try to explain clarify what we're doing and u please keep telling us what what we can do better. Um and maybe some intro. Obviously like L2 beat is is the place that we consistently go to for saying this is one part of the clarity. We work with L2 beat.

We support L2B. L2B creates uh very very sophisticated frameworks for assessment of the stages of the centralizations of rollups and we send their enterprises and we tell them this is how you can learn about the L2s and I think that clarity the risk framework's ability to assess the assets and L2s and all the different infrastructure is a critical critical aspect of how we can build the uh financial markets and safety and security on those chains if we assume the users are not stupid. If we say that if we delivered good education and tooling that the users will use that tooling to assess the risk and they will decide what risks they want to change to to to pick and that that risk selection for me is particularly important aspect because very often when we say on a one we introduce different levels of state or data availability because not everything requires the same level of security and if not everything requires the same level of security we can give that a selection either to developers or to users and I think that users very often actually are very sophisticated ones as like traders, institutions and so on. Sometimes you have retail users and then developers are users a bit of a platform. Uh so a few other categories that introduce maybe confusion but also the topic is complex because we gave the space for innovation to L2s.

So the two experiment with different DAS uh with different levels of security UX uh EVMs, nonems and so on so on and uh L2B provides that uh decentralization stages like the what type of uh what type of guarantee is the design of the infrastructure of the L2 can give you for uh for assets on that chain and I think it becomes more and more important to track the assets rather than the chain entirely itself and the L2 bit is building some infrastructure for that as well. Maybe I'll speak about it more. Um here's some of the discussion I said I think the only thing that matters is what once can do for dim reser sorry for its users. uh L2 is among them. But people would say look no you have to start taking decisions emotional decisions maybe to to chase them off and um and these are this like fundamental splits in the Ethereum ecosystem like do you want to continuously create negative emotions around L2s that are not doing things as you think would be pure or you create positive emotions around the L2s that are trying innovating and experimenting uh because here actually James is experimenting himself with signant and and I say we should be clear about asking not what the one can do for L2s but what the so I'm showing you that if I set some uh some strategy here there are definitely voices that are exactly opposite and that's what introduces a lot of complexity and obviously inviting the entire community to think about this very deeply of which way we're thinking about it because this should be input also for the for the platform team how they should talk about platform and I I think that a lot of positive energy we can also see at Denver that's one of the examples when we had Jesse and Austin talking about the uh base and probably agentic AI and so on uh bass created a lot of distribution uh for the agentic AI and much of the win perceived win of Ethereum as a platform in the agentic AI in the last two weeks or so four weeks uh is through that collaboration sure many others were very active But bass particularly was um super successful on capturing the 804 and agentic AI and so on and being very vocal in social media to attract users and developers.

Uh foundation itself also delivered a lot of fantastic effort there. Um now here obviously there was recently this uh tweet from Vitalik that was showing how the strategy of the Ethereum uh protocol changes with the vision of altus. So, so Vitalik was referring to the original vision of scaling Ethereum for the O2S which is more a bit like branded shorts as he would say. So this the technology would be exactly the same with uh with EVMS um but but it would scale and and we transition and say this will be done through the native rollups and Lucadono shows the threeear road map for native rollups. Um but the the existing L2s probably are chasing different routes and and it's okay they don't have to scale Ethereum anymore because L1 scales Ethereum.

I think they do deliver obviously a lots of value and I don't think Vitalic really negates that that the T2 deliver a lot of value. I think I have like 20 more slides and 30 more seconds. So I just skip and pick whatever one one item I would like to mention because I think those first one or two slides were the most important for what I wanted to talk about. Uh so here we have a example of Cella moving from L1 to L2 and becoming really strong partner in the Ethereum ecosystem for much of the payment networks and identity solutions in Zik. Here I have some references on how different L2s refer to Ethereum.

Um I wanted also to uh to say that when we talk about scaling we still have in the protocol road map a lot of updates like Fusaka and what's going further for increasing like the blob counts and supporting L2 is much better. Um and here you see actually what's happening mainet is really really cheaper now but I think that we'll be scaling the demand and usage through the agentic AI through many other demand aspects. So the scaling will always be needed with different with different risk levels. Huh. I really mist timed it this time like crazily.

Okay, I'll uh I probably will have to record one day like the much longer version. But uh the first slide was so important for me that I'm happy that we focused on it more. So, thank you so much and uh yeah, talk to all of you later.