New Crypto VCs and Future of L3s

'L3 promises hyper scalability, better control of the technology stack for various needs, and privacy, while maintaining the security guarantees provided by Ethereum (L1).

The recursive concept it employs may be extended to additional layers for fractal layering solutions.'

'We can compress the article by Starkware down into three visions of what "L3s" are for:

1. L2 is for scaling, L3 is for customized functionality, for example, privacy.
   
   
2. L2 is for general-purpose scaling, L3 is for customized scaling.
   
   
3. L2 is for trustless scaling (rollups), L3 is for weakly-trusted scaling (validiums).'
   
   

Buterin also believes a third layer on the blockchain makes sense only if it provides a different function to Layer 2s, which have been used mainly to enhance scaling via zero-knowledge (zk) Rollup technology.

'There is clearly an important role to be played by "layers" of some kind that serve non-scaling needs like privacy, and there is clearly an important function of proof aggregation that needs to be filled somehow, and preferably by an open protocol.

But at the same time, there are good technical reasons to make the intermediary layers that connect user-facing environments to the layer 1 as simple as possible; the "glue layer" being an EVM rollup is probably not the right approach in many cases.

I suspect more sophisticated (and simpler) constructions such as those described in this post will start to have a bigger role to play as the layer 2 scaling ecosystem matures.'