# Major Trends in the Layer 2 Ecosystem: Where We Are and Likely Upcoming Themes by Faina Shalts

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 08:15
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Mqdr3AvvuwM
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqdr3AvvuwM

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/major-trends-in-the-layer-2-ecosystem-where-we-are-and-likely-upcoming-themes/

The Layer 2 space moves at lightning speed. Just as we start to grasp a particular concept or protocol, changes and new ideas flood the ecosystem. It is exciting and fast-paced, but it can be difficult to maintain an accurate birds' eye view of current developments and upcoming themes. This lightning talk will quickly survey the Layer 2 field and make some predictions around what themes we are likely to see in the coming months.

Speaker(s): Faina Shalts
Track: Layer 2s
Keywords: Layer 2,Rollups,protocol development

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Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] because of the work that I do and because of the threads that I write I feel like I'm in a very unique position to talk about the themes in the layer 2 ecosystem and the trends that I'm seeing so I'm hoping to give you a bit of a bird's eye view of the layer 2 ecosystem today and what I'm seeing in the themes so to start with off-chain data off chain data in rollups is here to stay I think it's fair to say on the roll-up level we're seeing a push to give users a choice of off-chain data in ZK Roll-Ups that looks like validiums and volitions and for optimistic Roll-Ups that looks like arbitrum Nova and metastas optimistic data availability really the question you should be asking yourself when you're considering off-chain data for your dap is what does this mean for security what does it mean for my users funds and I think that there's a lot to consider there if we accept that off-chain data is here to stay then we should be thinking about ways to make those daps more secure despite the off-chain data some adapts to don't need all of their data on chain and those that might need more security there are some solutions one thing that I thought was really interesting was an article that actually came out today by paulinia who's someone on Twitter that I follow you may have heard of them suggesting that we have split security data sharding on Roll-Ups this is literally an idea that came out today so as far as new trends I expect to see some implementations of this sometime in the near future but definitely not right now but that should help with some of the security concerns around off-chain data and roll-ups uh we're also going to continue to see progress and Innovation on the bridging Fund in front we just saw Georgia's talk about some really interesting ideas about how we can have composability uh but some of the things that I want to talk about are how popular layer 2 Bridges right now are centralized and they keep the fees rather than sharing them with their users that's not really a paradigm that we like in the ethereum world we don't really like centralized operators we don't really like middlemen so I'm expecting to see that Paradigm being challenged one thing that we already are seeing hot protocol has announced that they're going to be more Community Centric so that's just one early example of sort of that shift that I think we're going to see we're also seeing really interesting work around ZK proofs to improve Bridge architecture we can use ZK proofs to verify so Suez Bridge created a proposal called the slush proposal doing just that we can also use ZK proofs to create like clients with ZK snarks which is a relatively new idea succinct Bridge wants to do that so that's what you should look up if you're interested in that so I would definitely keep an eye on ZK proofs within Bridge architectures as a way to improve those architectures and also in case you missed it l2b announced last night the release of their Bridge dashboard which is really exciting because I think the more information that we give to users about the security of the bridges that they want to use the more we can push Bridge protocols to work to increase security and also we're giving users that data so they can make the informed decision about which bridge is right for them when it comes to optimistic Roll-Ups we're going to see these protocols Branch out and really dive into Innovative optimizations I've called them optimistic optimizations which I think is kind of fun arbitrum Nitro and optimism Bedrock are both huge steps forward for the ecosystem yesterday at the roll-up Day event vitalik actually proposed several possible ways that we could decentralize provers and also diversify approvers and luckily for us both are both arbitrum Nitro and optimism better Iraq are already architected in a way that should allow for multiple provers and different types of approvers one of the cool things about both arbitrary Nitro and optimism Bedrock is that they're sort of Paving the way for allowing validity proofs within optimistic Roll-Ups which is really cool and something I would definitely keep an eye on Roll-Ups with layer 3 capabilities will honestly be able to eat up a lot of the market if they get off the ground with offerings like privacy daps permission dapps for institutions games and even creating space for alternative L1 chains to execute on top of the layer 2 and ultimately still settle on ethereum gaining ethereum security success here will depend largely on ecosystem support documentation and ease of use this is also kind of a new theme recursive proofs exist on starknet now but they're still pretty new and I haven't seen any actual implementations of layer threes yet if you have let me know I'd love to take a look but I do think layer threes will be part of the discourse in the coming months and years as all of the ZK Roll-Ups especially mature and go to mainnet speaking of ZK Roll-Ups ZK EVMS are likely to dominate the attention of the layer 2 space in the coming months ZK EVMS are really exciting and something a lot of us have been talking about for the past I don't even know how long honestly since Layer Two kind of became a thing and the reason they're exciting is because they are theoretically compatible with existing ethereum tooling making them much easier to use they allow for a shorter waiting time to exit to get finality and also because they use ZK proofs and we all love math uh well I do anyway and I think as these protocols enter mainnet the debate will turn to what counts as a true evm what is close enough what is evm compatibility and how much of it do we need for SDK evm to really operate the way that we expect it to we'll also be talking a lot more about the Innovative architectures and use cases that ZK EVMS allow ah so I'd say things are getting a little spicy in the cryptoverse around various DK Roll-Ups that are entering the ecosystem I posit that competition is good and I hope we can turn the spice into something constructive and eventually coalesce around some helpful standards I think we're sort of in that diverge converge area when it comes to ZK Roll-Ups and we're still on the diverge side but hopefully we'll get to converge soon and you know we're going to see a debate about how important zkevms are and that's also going to necessarily mean a discussion of how starknet's non-evm ecosystem Compares we'll see more comparison materials and discussions of how security decentralization Etc Compares between the two types of ZK roulette protocols there's no question in my mind that the ZK space is red hot right now and I expect ZK Roll-Ups to really take the stage going into 2023 if you had to pick one theme of anything that I've mentioned it's ZK Roll-Ups and probably zkevms in the near future so it turns out 7 minutes is not very long I'm literally being told right now my time is up so I did create a list of some more Trends to keep an eye on that I didn't really have time to dive into I'm particularly interested in the modular blockchain designs of protocols like Celestia and how they will relate to how those learnings can be taken into the layer 2 ecosystem and maybe make changes there so you might be thinking how on Earth can I stay on top of all of these ecosystem developments and the space moves really quickly and that's a valid concern so I've provided you with a list of some of the some of the Twitter accounts that I follow that have some great educational content I really recommend following these people it's the best place to start and then from there you can kind of see who they follow and what they're posting and become as educated as you want to be about the layer two space and how the ecosystem is growing so in conclusion Layer Two is here it is changing fast and it's bringing some of the most exciting Innovations imaginable to the ethereum ecosystem and again my name is feyna thank you all for your time sorry for going overtime and I hope that this Tapas educational thank you faino thank you so much