What exactly is Layer 2 is a dispute within the Ethereum community?

Author: Faust, geek web3

On August 25, L2BEAT, a well-known Ethereum Layer 2 research institution, stated that it will change the name of Optimistic Chain to Optimium (OP Rollup that does not use ETH as the DA layer), which is highly differentiated from OP Rollup. At the same time, L2BEAT also added a "Show rollups only" button on the homepage of the website, allowing viewers to hide the relevant information of Validium and Optimium, and directly distinguish Rollup from those expansion networks that do not use ETH to achieve DA (data availability).

L2BEAT even said that it will soon be able to "remove" the TVL data of Validium and Optimium in the visual dashboard of the total Layer2 TVL, and only display the TVL data of Rollup.

This approach is very interesting. Just two weeks ago, on August 10, Dankrad, a member of the Ethereum Foundation and the creator of Danksharding, expressed his opinion on "What is Layer 2", saying that a modular blockchain that does not use ETH as a DA layer is not a Rollup, so it is not a Layer 2 . He also named Validium (ZK Rollup, which does not publish DA data in Ethereum) in the comment area of the tweet, saying that it has security flaws.

Dankrad’s controversial remarks triggered heated discussions in the Ethereum community, including members of major Layer 2 projects, and many outsiders began to think deeply about the nature of Layer 2: What exactly is “Layer 2”?

In fact, this is a question of different opinions and it is difficult to make a final decision. Just like the conflict between the Catholic Church and Protestants in the 16th century, different stakeholders will have different opinions when considering it from their own standpoints. But for this phenomenon similar to the conflict of religious schools, mainstream public opinion will still value the official statement of the Ethereum Foundation. Even if a hundred people have a hundred different opinions, people are still more willing to believe the most authoritative statement (the Catholic Church has The most authoritative interpretation of the Bible).

But on the official website of Ethereum—ethereum.org on the Layer 2 page, you can see that they do not have a particularly precise and strict definition of "what kind of projects are Layer 2 and what kind of projects are not Layer 2", and even directly write "Currently there is no official definition of Layer2". But in some paragraphs, there is the following statement: "Sidechains and Validium extend Ethereum in a similar way to Layer 2...but with different trust assumptions..." "Sidechains and Validium doesn’t get security or data availability from Ethereum.”

The above statement seems to imply that expansion solutions other than Rollup, such as Validium and Optimium, are not Layer 2, but combined with the previous sentence "There is currently no official definition of Layer 2", these two statements become difficult to agree with each other. In this regard, I even asked Chatgpt 4 to analyze the official thoughts of Ethereum, and the answer I got was as follows:

Obviously, although the Ethereum official intends to distinguish Validium, side chains and Layer 2, it does not directly say that "Validium is not Layer 2", and this slightly ambiguous attitude may be to encourage expansion projects in the ecosystem to propose various solutions to bring about innovation. However, once a radical and decisive attitude is used to deny Validium or Optimium, it will inevitably hurt the feelings of the relevant project parties and dispel their enthusiasm (after all, many projects come to the Ethereum ecosystem for the name of Layer 2).

However, Dankrad, who is a member of the Ethereum Foundation, has now made it clear that Validium is not Layer 2. Although this attitude is clear, it is more like "releasing the air", and other core members of the Ethereum Foundation have not followed up with Dankrad. The "new measures of L2BEAT" mentioned above can easily make onlookers feel the "subtle" stance of the Ethereum community. Although the foundation has not formally and strictly “delisted” expansion plans other than Rollup, this series of signs inevitably reminds people of certain possibilities.

In this regard, a developer from a non-Rollup expansion project believes that L2BEAT has committed dogmatism to a certain extent, and is somewhat obedient to authority on the issue of "orthodoxy". He pointed out that not using ETH as the DA layer but introducing other mechanisms to ensure high security can incorporate more innovative factors into the Layer 2 system. Although in extreme cases, non-Rollup expansion solutions will indeed cause problems, the probability of this is extremely low. Even exists only in theory rather than practice. But now L2BEAT and even Dankrad’s “different view” of non-Rollup projects is actually killing the innovation and inclusiveness of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Of course, because this developer is a stakeholder, he will inevitably express his position on his own; while the Ethereum community and even the Ethereum Foundation stand in the position of safeguarding Ethereum’s own interests and values, and will not treat people or things. It may be "absolutely fair", and both sides are in a situation where "the authorities are confused and the bystanders are clear", which leaves some ambiguous issues.

For example, Dankrad said "Plasma and state channels... are Layer 2" while "delisting" Validium.

But in fact, in the official Ethereum website, you can see the following statement: "However, the existence of validity proofs provides Validium with a higher security guarantee than other pure off-chain expansion solutions (Plasma and side chains)." ( In fact, aside from the few extreme cases where the off-chain DA layer launches data withholding attacks and refuses user withdrawals, Validium is indeed more secure than Plasma. And many technicians have made it clear that Plasma is outdated. It should not be counted as Layer 2 for a long time)

Obviously, this actually contradicts what Dankrad said. In order to avoid the influence of personal subjective speculation, the author of this article directly uses Chatgpt4 to analyze these seemingly "contradictory" paragraphs. It can be seen that Chatgpt4 also believes that Dankrad's remarks are in conflict with the above remarks from the Ethereum official website.

So, here comes the key question, why is there such a phenomenon of logical inconsistency and self-contradiction? In this regard, the author found a passage in Vitalik's personal blog on January 5, 2021, and then took this sentence as one of the materials and handed it over to chatgpt4 for analysis.

At the same time, the author of this article processed all the sentences submitted to Chatgpt4 for analysis more precisely, marked the subject of each sentence, and added a key assumption: it is known that Vitalik is the leader of the Ethereum Foundation, and Dankrad is A member of the Foundation, he didn't want to deny Vitalik's point of view. And Vitalik once said: "The three major types of layer-2 scaling are state channels, Plasma and rollups..."

As a result, very interesting results emerged, as shown in the figure below.

The results of this analysis clearly show the words: "avoid conflict with Vitalik's point of view". "And it shows that if Dankrad doesn't want to deny Vitalik's point of view, he may be more inclined to use terms and definitions that are consistent with Vitalik or at least do not conflict. Of course, this result is based on the fact that the Ethereum official website has pointed out that Validium is more powerful than Plasma. Strong security guarantee, and Vitalik once said: "The three main types of Layer2 are state channel, Plasma and Rollup", but Dankrad does not want to deny Vitalik's point of view based on these three materials.

The analysis results shown in the figure below are more interesting. It is directly believed that Dankrad did not comprehensively compare the security of Validium and Plasma, but emphasized the difference between Plasma and Validium when off-chain data withholding occurs.

Later, the author repeatedly asked Chatgpt to analyze the above materials, and used the conclusions obtained above and the key materials used in the previous round of inference as materials for a new round of analysis, and then handed it over to Chatgpt for further iterative inference, and obtained a relatively stable result.

The last sentence of the conclusion is more interesting, saying that "His purpose seems to be to clarify the classification of technologies, rather than to comprehensively compare the security of Validium and Plasma."

So far, Chatgpt's analysis has come to an end. Looking back at the materials and inferences listed above, it is obvious that Dankrad did not objectively and comprehensively analyze the difference in security between Plasma and Validium, although when he distinguished whether the two are "Layer 2", he aimed at the security of a specific situation to analyze.

As for the purpose of doing so, what Chatgpt pointed out: "It seems to be to clarify the classification of technologies, rather than comprehensively compare security" is also quite intriguing. As for when the Ethereum community and even the foundation will make a serious and high-profile response to the issue of Layer 2 orthodoxy, it is still unknown.