Vitalik: Unless L2 can achieve "extreme scaling" or innovate, the original vision is no longer applicable.

On February 3rd, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted on social media stating, “As the Ethereum main chain (L1) scales itself and the Gas limit is significantly increased, the originally envisioned ‘brand sharding’ layer 2 (L2) is no longer necessary. L2 cannot fully meet the characteristics of ‘brand sharding,’ and some projects may even remain in phase 1 forever to satisfy regulatory requirements. Therefore, L2 should be repositioned, no longer solely focused on scaling, but providing unique additional features such as privacy-specific virtual machines, application-specific efficiency, extreme scaling, social/identity/AI and other non-financial application designs, as well as low latency or built-in oracles. Best practices for L2 include: maintaining at least phase 1 standards (otherwise it is essentially an independent L1 with bridging), and achieving interoperability with Ethereum as much as possible, while exploring integration with native Rollup precompiles (ZK-EVM verification) to enable secure, trustless cross-chain operations and composability synchronization. Users should clearly understand the guarantees provided by L2, and the L2 ecosystem will present a diversified set of options: chains that fully rely on Ethereum’s trust and credit, as well as chains with varying degrees of association, each focusing on different functions or application scenarios, truly achieving innovative additions rather than merely extending L1.”