Vitalik Buterin Sounds Alarm on Flimsy Layer-2 Security—’Weak Proofs Could Sink Ethereum’s Scaling Dreams’

Ethereum’s co-founder slams half-baked rollup security as L2 adoption surges. ’Fraud proofs shouldn’t be theoretical,’ he tweets—just as chains like Arbitrum and Optimism onboard millions.

Finance chuckle: TradFi would’ve patched this with a 12-month consulting contract and three PowerPoint slides.

Buterin illustrates why proof system matters

Buterin acknowledged Wang’s position, while illustrating a risk model where each Security Council member has an independent 10% chance of failure.

This includes potential safety issues, such as signing incorrect data, or liveness issues that resulted in their unavailability or unwillingness to sign data.

Buterin acknowledged that this model is imperfect due to real-world vulnerabilities, such as collusion or coordinated hacks, also known as common mode failures.

Considering this, he noted that moving to stage 2 earlier than modeled may sometimes be the better choice, especially as proof system quality improves.

Meanwhile, Buterin also proposed using multi-signature (multisig) setups with several independent systems to reduce the risk of a single point of failure in proof systems.

He argued that the probability of a protocol failure is closely tied to the strength of its proof mechanism, especially in advanced security stages.

The Ethereum co-founder warned that deploying a stage 2 model with a weak, stage-0-level proof system could be the worst-case scenario.