Does Solana Need L2?

The discussion was more advanced than I expected.

Good morning.
Mitsui from web3 researcher.

Today we will discuss "Does Solana Need L2?"I will discuss the following: Solana, like Ethereum, has almost no L2 market.Therefore, I will introduce the background, the significance of its existence and the few but existing players, and discuss the future.

🟢Does Solana need L2?
🔴Some say Solana needs L2
📈The difference between Application Chain and L2
💬Solana L2's future considered

🟢Do we need L2 for Solana?

As a prerequisite, this article will only give a brief overview.It would be very long if I started explaining the details of the technology, so the purpose of this article is to provide a quick overview of the discussion on the "Solana L2 market".I have included references at the very end, so if you would like to look into it in more depth, please feel free to do so.

Now, let me begin.

First of all, I would like to talk about Solana's direction.In conclusion, Solana does not promote L2 and never will.Solana here refers to the chain project as a whole, or more specifically to the intentions of Solana Labs and the Foundation, which promote Solana, and the vision of the Solana chain.

On January 5, 2024, Solana co-founder Yakovenko posted on X about Solana's L2 build.

https://x.com/aeyakovenko/status/1743132883697410186

In summary

• Anyone can build an L2 on Solana.

• However, the purpose of Solana is to synchronize global atomic state machines as fast as the laws of physics allow.

• While innovations such as sidechains, data availability verification bridges, and zero-knowledge proof Validium are welcome innovations, they are only external to L1 and do not extend the atomic global state machine.

• Solana continues to directly extend Layer 1, with an emphasis on enhancing a single virtual machine instance on Layer 1 with only future hardware upgrades.

In crazy simple terms, this is a clear statement that "Solana will enhance L1 itself anyway," and while he mentioned L2 innovations, he denied that they are only external to L1 and therefore do not enable atomic transactions.

The reason Ethereum needs L2 in the first place is because Ethereum is slow and expensive; Solana is fast and cheap, so the argument is that L2 is not needed.Of course, at the current stage of performance, Solana can also jam transactions, so scalability needs to be addressed, but the direction to address this is to extend L1, not L2, etc.

(I think there may be other perspectives on the speed issue between Ethereum and Solana, such as dispersion, but I won't discuss that here.)

It has been announced that ZK compression will be introduced to Solana as recently as June 2024, which will greatly increase Solana's scalability.

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🔴Some say that Solana needs L2

While the above explanation was an opinion of the overall direction of the Solana chain, some operators argue that L2 is necessary.