Vitalik Buterin lost confidence in second-tier scaling solutions

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum platform, confessed that he was beginning to lose faith in second-tier blockchain scaling solutions such as Lightning Network or still under development by Plasma.

"As time goes by, I'm becoming more and more pessimistic about Tier 2 solutions for moving data beyond the main blockchain. Vlad Zamfire is right: they are difficult to create, they require too many rationales regarding the incentives at the application level, and they are hardly brought to a single form," he writes on Twitter.

Buterin previously advised the creators of Plasma and worked closely with Lightning Network developer Joseph Poon. Now, however, he claims "Data retention is the biggest risk that needs to be addressed with incentives. It's hard to make them look good, because they require special justification for the beneficiaries. The situation with Plasma is aggravated by the fact that it is possible to make changes in the invoices without the consent of the recipient, because it is impossible to assume that honest users know their last state.

As Trustnodes points out, Buterin deliberately emphasizes that it is a "second-tier solution for moving data outside the main blockchain", as his pessimism does not apply, for example, to Zk-Snark-based scaling solutions, which are largely devoid of such problems.

The idea of using Zk-Snarks for scaling has only started to be actively developed this year. Potentially, developers will only need to copy a few lines of code to embed the solution into their decentralized applications.

The idea is to track the movement of funds in smart contracts by creating a kind of mini-sidches. The end result will be the compression of transactions by embedding them in the sidechain, which will reduce the amount of data stored in the main chain.

"At the blockchain level, you can simply implement an interactive verification game to determine who created the incorrect state. The game will motivate defenders so much that you don't even have to think about who will be stimulated enough to protect them," confirms Buterin.

Previously, it was noticed that Buterin had withdrawn from the preparations for the next Ethereum update.