Vitalik strikes back: The industry is too comfortable, we don't need another copy-pasted EVM

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded today to his controversy over L2 comments from two days ago, but his tone not only did not soften; it became even more straightforward: the current L2 ecosystem is reenacting the old path of the DeFi era “crazy fork of Compound.” He bluntly stated that over the past few years, the entire industry has become “overly comfortable with existing templates,” heavily copying EVM, which has essentially led to stagnation in innovation or even dead ends.

Vitalik: We don’t need another copy-pasted EVM chain

Vitalik pointed out that many current L2 implementations are simply: creating a new EVM chain and then adding a cross-chain bridge with an optimistic mechanism that has a finality time of up to a week. In his view, this is like the endless fork of Compound protocols in the DeFi world: effective in the short term but exhausting creativity in the long run. He quite bluntly stated: we don’t need more copy-pasted EVM chains, nor do we need more new L1s.

Without truly secure, trust-minimized links to L1, it’s essentially another chain. If what you’re doing is “an EVM that isn’t securely connected to Ethereum,” the situation will only worsen. Vitalik pointed out that Ethereum L1 itself is scaling rapidly, and the speed is faster than most people imagine.

Background: Why the original mission of L2 is no longer valid

Vitalik revisited the original intent of the rollup-centric roadmap: Ethereum needs a large amount of blockchain space fully backed by L1 (full faith and credit) to ensure that transactions occurring within it cannot be rolled back, censored, or tampered with.

But the situation has now changed for two reasons:

L2 upgrades to Stage 2 are progressing much slower than expected, and some teams openly state that they may remain at Stage 1 forever. Some issues are not technical but regulatory and commercial, requiring retention of ultimate control.

Ethereum L1 itself is beginning to scale rapidly. Gas fees are extremely low, and from 2026, gas limits are expected to increase significantly.

Against this backdrop, Vitalik believes that treating L2 as branded shards is no longer realistic or necessary. If your asset security ultimately depends on multisig bridges, you’re not really scaling Ethereum; you’re just creating another chain.

Don’t just scale; add value

Vitalik clearly pointed out that if he were to create a new L2 today, the first step wouldn’t be to make it faster or cheaper, but to answer a fundamental question: what do you bring to the Ethereum ecosystem?

He listed some possible directions:

• Privacy-oriented VM / non-EVM design
• Highly customized efficiency for specific applications (e.g., prediction markets, trading)
• Extreme throughput or low latency that even scaled L1 cannot meet
• Completely new designs for non-financial applications (social, identity, AI)
• Ultra-low latency, special sequencing features
• Built-in oracles, decentralized arbitration, and other “non-pure computation verifiable” functions

Just making a cheaper EVM no longer justifies existence.

Are Layer 2 solutions truly part of Ethereum?

He targets those L2s that pretend to be very Ethereum but are actually quite independent, citing two types of application chains:

Deeply dependent on Ethereum applications: For example, prediction markets: issuance, settlement, and accounts on L1, with transactions executed on L2 / based rollup. This architecture cannot operate without Ethereum, maximizing composability and interoperability, making it entirely reasonable to call themselves Ethereum applications. This is the approach he advocates.

Institutional / organizational L2 (not Ethereum but still valuable): For example:

• Government systems
• Community platforms
• Games or large databases

By anchoring data state Merkle roots and STARK proofs on-chain, ensuring each update follows the rules, these are not trustless or neutral (rules can be changed at any time), but they provide verifiable algorithmic transparency, potentially opening new economic activities.

Ethereum-native Rollup pre-compiled modules become the new key

In terms of technical direction, Vitalik has recently become increasingly optimistic about a particular approach: Ethereum-native rollup pre-compiled modules.

The core concept is:

• Verified by Ethereum’s built-in ZK-EVM proof
• Automatically upgrade with L1
• If bugs occur, Ethereum will hard fork to fix (without needing a security committee)

This will make fully trust-minimized EVM verification cheaper, simpler, and standardized, while also strengthening interoperability and synchronous composability.

This article: Vitalik strikes hard: the industry is too comfortable, and we don’t need another copy-pasted EVM was first published on Chain News ABMedia.