Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko cast doubt on the decentralization and security of Ethereum’s layer-2 (L2) scaling network during a heated debate on Sunday.
Layer-2 scaling networks have a huge attack surface and code bases so large that they cannot be properly audited for software bugs. Yakovenko said user funds could also be transferred off L2, which relies on multi-signature custody, without users’ consent.
“The claim that Layer-2 inherits ETH security is false,” Yakovenko said during the debate. he argued:
“5 years into the L2 roadmap, wormhole on Solana ETH has the same worst-case risk as ETH on a per-base basis and ETH generates just as much revenue for L1 stakeholders. This is wrong no matter how you slice it.”
The conversation about Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling network continues, as developers, investors, and industry executives debate whether layer-2 networks benefit or harm the Ethereum layer-1 blockchain.
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Are there many Ethereum layer-2 networks?
According to L2Beat, there are 129 verified Ethereum layer-2 networks at the time of this writing, and 29 scaling networks that have not yet been reviewed by the site.
According to , there are approximately 10 times more L2s than needed in the blockchain industry.
Adrian Brink, co-founder of Anoma, a layer-1 blockchain protocol.
Igor Mandrygin, co-founder of Web3 and blockchain infrastructure provider Gateway.fm, argued that there can never be too many L2s.
Mandrigin said the explosion of the L2 network is a healthy sign for Ethereum indicating growth of the network and increased diversity in the ecosystem.
Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avel, a unified chain abstraction solution and Polygon layer-2 network, agrees, telling Cointelegraph that each Ethereum L2 represents a high-throughput blockchain, providing many high-throughput options to Ethereum.
However, according to Binance Research, the proliferation of these layer-2 networks is reducing revenues on the Ethereum base layer.
The researchers write that these networks are fragmenting liquidity and eating into revenues at the base layer due to lower transaction fees than transactions on the Layer-1 blockchain.
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