An excellent developer must learn to set aside ego, Vitalik's reflections on Ethereum's scalability have never ceased
BlockBeats News, February 4th, Ethereum founder Vitalik yesterday tweeted that with the slow progress of L1's self-expansion and L2 development, the original vision of Layer 2 and its role in Ethereum is no longer viable, requiring a new development path and positioning. This is not the first time Vitalik has denied something he once heavily promoted on the Ethereum roadmap, especially in terms of scalability.
· Around 2017-2018, Vitalik vigorously promoted Plasma (a sidechain/plasma chain solution), believing it to be the mainstay of Layer 2 scaling, capable of achieving high throughput while maintaining security, even placing it high on the roadmap. Subsequently, Plasma encountered serious issues in practical implementation, including data availability and exit complexity. In his blogs and tweets in 2020-2021, Vitalik admitted that Plasma is "less practical than Rollup in most cases," and the roadmap essentially downgraded Plasma to a "research direction" rather than a core path.
· Around 2017, Vitalik on Twitter referred to the idea of ordinary users fully verifying the entire blockchain history themselves as a fantasy. However, in early 2026, Vitalik admitted that his past ideas were wrong, even positioning 2026 as the year to "reclaim self-sovereignty and trustlessness," planning to make it easier for ordinary users to run full nodes/validate through ZK technology.
· In the ETH2 roadmap from 2015 to 2020, sharding was viewed as the ultimate scaling solution, planning to divide the blockchain into 64 shards, with each shard independently processing transactions/state. However, following the rise of Rollup, Vitalik has repeatedly stated that sharding is no longer a top priority, even suggesting that the necessity of sharding was overestimated.
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