Ethereum’s Buterin Presses for Faster L2 Withdrawals to Curb Bridge Reliance – Crypto News – Crypto News
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Ethereum’s Buterin Presses for Faster L2 Withdrawals to Curb Bridge Reliance Ethereum’s Buterin Presses for Faster L2 Withdrawals to Curb Bridge Reliance

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Ethereum’s Buterin Presses for Faster L2 Withdrawals to Curb Bridge Reliance – Crypto News

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Vitalik Buterin pushes for faster withdrawals, highlighting the challenge of improving speed while many users still rely on cross-chain bridges.

Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is entering a faster phase, and the network’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, wants the clock to tick in seconds, not days.

In an X post on Aug. 6, the Ethereum co-founder said that many major Layer 2 (L2) networks have now reached “Stage 1,” a milestone that marks their operational maturity on the network’s scaling roadmap.

According to analytics platform L2Beat, as of this week, all six rollups affected by recent Stage 1 requirement changes — Base, Optimism, Unichain, Scroll, Inco and Kinto — have completed the necessary upgrades and are now fully compliant.

The next objective, Buterin argued in his X post, should be to cut withdrawal times to under an hour in the short term and about 12 seconds in the medium term, changes he called more important than advancing to Stage 2.

Risky Dependency

Stage 1 is part of a multi-step framework for Ethereum rollups, a type of L2 scaling solution for Ethereum. The three-stage framework was first outlined in late 2022 on the Ethereum Magicians forum and later formalized by L2Beat, starting from experimental deployments, dubbed Stage 0, through operational but still improving systems, Stage 1, to fully trustless, fully verified rollups, known as Stage 2.

Buterin says achieving near-instant withdrawals requires replacing optimistic proof systems, which take multiple days to finalize, with validity, or zero-knowledge proof systems. As L2s develop faster withdrawal options, many users still seem to prefer cross-chain bridges to avoid lengthy delays.

Bridged assets on Ethereum. Source; DefiLlama

DefiLlama data show that Ethereum’s bridged TVL — the total value locked in bridge contracts moving assets across chains, not including Ethereum-based tokens — at around $500 billion, roughly twice the size of Ethereum’s native on-chain TVL, which measures assets locked directly in Ethereum’s own smart contracts such as DeFi protocols, staking, and lending, totaling about $245 billion.

The gap shows just how important bridges have become for moving liquidity around. It’s worth noting, however, that the bridged total includes multiple counts of the same assets, due to wrapped tokens and repeated transfers, which inflate the overall value.

Fundamental Security Limits

Additionally, cross-chain bridges still come with risks, as Buterin has often highlighted. In a January 2022 Reddit post, he explained that bridges connecting independent networks inherently increase risk because they rely on assumptions that may fail during network issues.

“The fundamental security limits of bridges are actually a key reason why while I am optimistic about a multi-chain blockchain ecosystem (there really are a few separate communities with different values and it’s better for them to live separately than all fight over influence on the same thing), I am pessimistic about cross-chain applications,” Buterin wrote.

For instance, if one blockchain suffers a 51% attack or undergoes a ledger reorganization, assets bridged to other chains could suddenly lose their backing or value. Buterin illustrated the problem by describing a scenario where moving 100 ETH onto a bridge on Solana to receive 100 Solana-WETH becomes risky if Ethereum suffers a 51% attack, leaving the Solana-WETH contract undercollateralized.

Now, Buterin proposes a “2-of-3” approach combining ZK proofs, optimistic proofs, and trusted execution environments to enhance both the speed and security of L2s in a bid to make them efficient enough that users won’t need to rely on cross-chain bridges.

Over the longer term, he envisions aggregating proofs from multiple rollups into a single submission on Ethereum’s mainnet, enabling near-instant cross-L2 asset transfers and solidifying Ethereum as the “default place to issue assets, and the economic center of the Ethereum ecosystem.”

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