Justin Bons Levels Serious Accusations Against Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling Solutions

Justin Bons, founder of Cyber Capital, sparked controversy by leveling serious accusations against Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions.

Justin Bons, the founder of Cyber Capital, has made some serious claims against Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions. He says that these L2s are fundamentally dangerous because they are centralized. This goes against the cypherpunk principles of Ether and puts users’ funds at risk.

Bons says that L2 operators have too much control over their networks. They can pause or shut down services at will. This is a problem because it goes against the decentralized ethos of Ether. He also accused these L2 networks of being able to “steal user funds.” This news comes as Sony is set to debut its Ethereum Layer 2 project, Soneium.

To back up his claims, Bons listed eight times when major Ethereum Layer 2 networks went down or had problems. He says that these incidents show how vulnerable these systems are. For example, he points out that the Linea network was paused for 90 minutes on June 2, 2024, because of a bug in the smart contract. This showed how much control operators have over these networks.

There were also times when Starknet, Optimism, ZkSync, Arbitrum, and Polygon had problems that caused their networks to go down for one to five hours each. Bons says that these incidents show a dangerous trend in which L2 networks.

Bons says that because Ethereum L2s are so centralized right now, they could steal user funds or even go offline for good. He also said that a hostile takeover of centralized sequencers could happen, which would hold entire networks hostage and have very bad effects on users.

Bons' criticism also goes beyond these specific incidents and looks at how Ethereum is scaling in general. He says that the Ethereum community has made a “Faustian bargain” by using L2 solutions to trade decentralization and security for scalability. He thinks this goes against the main ideas of blockchain and puts users at risk.

Bons also talked about the idea of “progressive decentralization,” which many L2 developers say will happen. The goal is to slowly give more control over Ethereum Layer 2 networks to the community. In the end, they want to get rid of the need for trust, like on Ether's mainnet. But Bons says that this promise of future decentralization isn't enough and doesn't make up for how centralized these networks are now.

People who support L2 solutions quickly responded to Bons' thread and said that his views were wrong. One user said that Bons was not thinking about progressive decentralization and how L2s, in their final state, would get most of their security from the Ethereum mainnet. The user said that L2s, even though they aren't perfect, are a better way to scale than making new L1 blockchains. They said that these blockchains might never be as safe or decentralized as Ethereum.

Bons agreed with some of the points that were made, but he still said that he didn't like the “promise” of future decentralization. He said that this was just an excuse for not using decentralized technologies that were already available. In the end, Bons said that scalable L1s would be able to make more money and be more decentralized and secure than Ethereum Layer 2 solutions.

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