The co-founder of the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin recently gave clues into the purpose and structure of the Layer 3 protocol. His information bordered on the fact that although Layer 2 protocol plays big on scalability, the coming Layer 3 is planned on serving another purpose entirely.
Beyond Scalability
Solutions built on Ethereum’s layer 2 networks have been working toward the endless scalability of the network. The co-founder of the network is saying layer 3 solutions will do something entirely different. In brief, they will provide customized functions.
Vitalik Buterin made his view known via a post where he stated three goals of the layer 3 protocol when it comes into use in the future. Buterin stated in the post that having a third later would only be meaningful if it offers a set of functions from what is obtainable on layer 2. The layer has been utilized primarily to promote scaling through the ZK technology.
He said a layer 3 scaling structure that is made up of a stack of the same mechanism on itself will not be an idea that works well. Having rollups on each other that use the same kind of technology does not work. However, a structure that has the second and third layers performing different roles can work perfectly, he said.
According to the post, one of the uses of the layer 3 protocol would be customized functions. It makes a reference to applications that serve the private preferences of users while it uses the ZK to present the privacy settings.
Cheaper Operations
The second use of the layer 3 protocol is that would be able to customize scaling for special applications that might not want to make use of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine to carry out their computation.
The co-founder equally said that the layer 3 protocol could be used in the event of weak scaling via Validiums. This will be useful for blockchain apps used by enterprises when they use centralized servers that would run validium provers and then commit hashes to the chain.
Note that Buterin did not fail to say that it is not clear if the layer 3 structure is going to be more effective than what the layer 2 protocol provides in terms of building customized apps on the Ethereum network.
Buterin said that a likely argument in favor of layer 3 over layer 2 is that it would let a whole sub-ecosystem exist in one roll-up. This would then make it possible to have a cross-domain operation in that ecosystem at a cheap rate. This eliminates the need of going through layer 1 which is more expensive.