Last November, my friend bought a ticket to go to Mexico for 150$.

The same day, he interacted with an Ethereum smart contract and it costed him the same price.

It’s on this day that I deeply understand how true was the ETH-as-digital-oil narrative.

We burn oil to make moves in the physical world the same way we use ETH to do stuff in the Metaverse.

Oil price and Ethereum gas fees are thorny issues we’ve been talking for months at the moment.

Yet, while the oil situation seems not to have short term solutions, it’s quite different for our favorite Blockchain.

Let’s talk about one of the scaling solution our beloved community have been working on for years - Layer 2.

Until recently, most dApps were using the Ethereum Mainnet to compute, process and publish transactions. But as each block size is limited, all those data processed on this single distributed computer - the Ethereum Virtual Machine* - were overcongesting the network, increasing gas prices and slowing transaction confirmations.

You can visualize this congestion in real time on this website: Txstreet

Let remind that we are 4.6 bn Internet users and only 5m Blockchain users so, to achieve their deep desire - recreate a permissionless, decentralized, distributed and secured internet - developers had to think on how to scale Ethereum.

Roll-ups are the most off-chain elegant scaling solutions: all the transactions are processed out of the Ethereum blockchain and are only published on it, in a highly compressed form.

They change the essence of Ethereum, making the main blockchain just a data availability layer where you can check its state but where no more computation is done.

This leads to more space in blocks, so no more congested and expensive network.

Actually, it follows the same paths as the end of the twentieth century and the offshoring of many factories.

Until Layer 2 mainstream adoption, running your Decentralized Application was like getting your manufacture on the champs elysées.

It’s not viable, you actually just want to sell on the champs Elysées. You don’t wanna have your plant on the most expensive avenue of the world.

It the same with blockchain industry: data on Ethereum, computation on roll ups.

So Ethereum, in the layer 2 vision, is just a layer for showing data. Not processing on it.

It’s just a store front.

The store front where every web3 builders want to display his works.

Louis Vuitton has their main store on the most beautiful avenue of the world, but they outsource the production where it’s cheapeast to make their business scalable.

So does Ethereum.