Vitalik Buterin Spotlights Ethereum Layer 2 Progress, Hints Next Milestone

Optimism (OP) has achieved a recent milestone that has led Vitalik Buterin to tout the wins that Layer 2 protocols on Ethereum have recorded in recent years.

Vitalik Buterin Lauds Victories Over Criticisms

According to OP Labs, Ethereum L2 Optimism recently implemented fault proofs into its smart contracts. The development team behind Optimism noted that it has now reached “Stage 1” of decentralization. Before coming to this conclusion, Optimism was placed side-by-side with a list of milestones articulated by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder.

The implementation makes it possible for users to independently initiate withdrawals “without involvement from any trusted third parties.”

Buterin saw this growth as an opportunity to laud the hurdles that Ethereum has scaled through. First, he acknowledged Optimism’s milestone, stating his wish that many other L2s come on board the “Stage 1” step.

The crypto innovator then shared a meme captioned “Ethereum: where yesterday’s FUD is today’s solved problems.” The accompanying graphic showed about six doors with a “FUD” detailed on each of them. Of the six doors, five have already been opened, implying that Ethereum has successfully surmounted them.

The FUD listed in the memes ranged from talks about the protocol’s inability to achieve several milestones. Markedly, the first highlighted impossibility for Ethereum was that the protocol will never launch. However, Ethereum launched as a platform on July 30, 2015, almost nine years ago. Also, critics say that Ethereum will never get past the DAO fork. But the protocol was hard forked barely one year after it launched.

The third FUD noted that “The merge will never happen”. Noteworthy, the Merge is the event that marked the transition of ETH from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm. This upgrade launched in September 2022 after months of rigorous development and testing.

Vitalik Buterin went on to recount all that the network has been through including the implementation of low fees amongst others.

Ethereum Focus on Sticking Out All FUDs

Meanwhile, the last door held three FUDs; “cross-L2 UX is not fragmented,” “running a full node takes too much space,” and “mev centralization/builder censorship.” Unlike the other doors that were opened, this particular door was closed showing that Ethereum is yet to achieve them.

Considering Buterin’s boldness to tout the network’s victories over nine years, the Ethereum team is arguably working on conquering the other FUDs that were listed.

Read More: ASI Token Launch Rescheduled To a Later Date, Here’s Why