Author: DARREN KLEINE, Blockworks; Compiler: Songxue, Jinse Finance

Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base... the list of Layer2 solutions goes on and seems to be getting longer.

**Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko believes that most of the emerging Layer 2 (mainly on Ethereum) will not be a sustainable scaling solution in the long run. **

“They spread out the user base, so the user experience becomes very, very complex.”

On the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify/Apple), Yakovenko gave an example of his work at the Web2 company Dropbox. "We built a huge MySQL database for all the folders, because once we fragmented them, it became very difficult to create links between different users in different folders."

"Tracking consistency between two different databases is a headache. You have to sync everything through [layer-1]."

Sharding at a sufficiently large scale can cause "massive composability" and user experience issues, Yakovenko said. "You have to resync via [layer-1], which has the same cost." "It's very, very hard to deal with," he said.

Yakovenko uses the example of NFT to illustrate this problem. "You can't have an NFT in every rollup. It's really only bridged to one," he said. “If I want a specific NFT, the marketplace that sells it is the one I need to buy it from — and it can only exist in one of those marketplaces.”

Yakoveko explained that by creating different states, Layer-2 breaks the composability of specific NFT marketplaces. "That's the fundamental challenge [layer-2] faces."

**What if there is only one layer of Layer2? **

In theory, a single Layer 2 solution (rather than the various solutions that exist in the Ethereum ecosystem) would simplify the composability problem, Yakovenko said. **

"[Solana virtual machines] can run as many things in parallel as possible," he explained. "It's always going to add hardware capacity to meet demand."

“Then, you dump all the data into the darksharding,” he said, which ideally would be “a perfect implementation of the [data availability] layer trying to maximize its [data availability] system.”

"So you have a [Layer2] , a bandwidth-optimized system. That's basically what Solana is. He laughs. "Solana itself can execute all programs asynchronously, and then fork in a separate channel from the program execution. "

"All the forks are picked very quickly," he said, "and then these larger systems can execute programs. Then, if you want, you can do batch [zero-knowledge] verification. All these things It can be implemented on Solana."

Yakovenko noted that there are still “fundamental differences” between Solana and multilayer chain solutions. "Solana will not be required to do danksharding, because that really breaks the idea of global information synchronization."

"I don't want to fragment data availability," he said. "Although you may be able to increase the bandwidth, there are still trade-offs in reality."

Yakovenko believes in the need for a system that actively avoids asynchronous solutions. "When I presented it here," he said, "it was being observed in Singapore and Brazil and everywhere in the world, as fast as physics allowed, and it actually created value for the world."

The goal, Yakovenko explained, is to minimize "information asymmetries between any two players."

"It allows for a fair market," he said. "It's a core use case and you really can't optimize it with all the other systems."

"A single rollup can take up all the bandwidth at the data availability layer, whether it's Solana, Celestia, or Ethereum," he said. "I think a lot of engineers agree that the idea is a more efficient design."