L3s — the Ultimate Scaling Dream

Up on Melancholy Hill, there's a plastic tree. Are you here with me? Just looking out on the day of another dream - Gorillaz

So, we all know the hype around Ethereum L2s. The L2 races are in and we have a few fantastic candidates around the roll-up space. These L2s are going to determine the future of Ethereum whether we like it or not. At least when it comes to scaling Ethereum.

Vitalik himself mentioned how roll-ups are essential to the success of Ethereum in his recent post - The three transitions

Don’t be so easily excited about layer2s because there is something more interesting going on with L2s. The new dog in town is an L3. Yup, you heard it right - we are now talking about L3s in the scaling space.

So, what the f*ck is an L3? Let’s talk about an L3 with an example, shall we? - Arbitrium’s Orbit.

Recently Arbitrium has made a lot of cool changes to its tech stack with the release of its new layer2 execution environment - Nitro. There are four big ideas for Nitro:

1. closer compatibility with EVM and geth

2. lower fees through call data compression

3. separation of execution from proving

4. sequence first, and make deterministic execution thereafter

   
   

Furthermore, they have released Stylus - the new programming paradigm around L2.

So, why do Nitro and Stylus manner you ask? Well, because they allow for L3s to happen! Just the way, Ethereum (L1) is able to make L2s (Arbitrium, Optimism, Fuel) happen. L2 SDKs, new programming paradigms, and execution environments will make L3 happen. Make sense?

Orbit chains in Arbitrium are a great example. They are blockchains that can be deployed on top of Arbitrium - Nova | One | Goerli (test) networks. These L3 chains can take advantage of both L2’s scaling and L1’s (Ethereum) security properties. They can be highly customizable based on the need of devs, institutions, companies, and others seeking to build Dapps or blockchains.

In my opinion, L3s are where we would finally be able to see Dapps such as decentralized Uber, Airbnbs, Youtube, and all and everything that works well in Web 2.0. Except it will be Web 3.0