According to U.Today, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revisited his post about layer-3 scaling solutions on the X social media platform amid intensifying debates within the cryptocurrency community. Buterin noted that these solutions "don't magically improve throughput," but they can still be used for cost saving. However, he also mentioned that there are more efficient ways of cutting costs compared to layer-3s.
In his article published a year and a half ago, Buterin singled out three main visions for layer-3s: customized functionality for different use cases, customized scaling in various forms, and weakly-trusted scaling in the form of validiums, which are significantly cheaper compared to rollup but offer better security. At the time, he acknowledged that all of these three visions were "reasonable." He was skeptical of a three-layer scaling architecture with the same scaling scheme, but also added that a third layer could work if it has a different purpose. "Validiums on top of rollups do make sense, even if they're not certain to be the long-term best way of doing things," he said.
Buterin's recent comment came after some prominent community members started debating the viability of layer-3 solutions. Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO at Helius, recently opined that L3s were basically "centralized servers settling on other centralized servers." Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams criticized him, arguing that the Solana community should refrain from posting "arrogant takes on scaling." Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also weighed in on the debate, defending Solana's approach to scaling.