L2s are dangerous, as they can steal user funds & can even go down at any time! A clear consequence of their centralized design Betraying the cypherpunk principles they pretended to hold dear Here are 8 examples of major L2 failures! Exposing the real dangers of "L2 scaling"🧵 Starting with Linea on June 2nd, 2024, who "paused" their sequencer for over 90min! This was in response to a bug in the smart contract, demonstrating to everyone their absolute power over the Linea chain. Starknet had a 4hr outage on April 5th, 2024. Users were left in the dark about this for hrs, as the Starknet status page did not reflect this reality. Only later was it acknowledged that this was caused by a rounding error bug that caused multiple block reorgs. Optimism experienced a 2hr downtime on February 15th, 2024. This was due to a bug in the centralized sequencer; there were also multiple unsafe single-block reorgs. The cause of this outage has never been explained to this day. ZkSync went down for 4hrs on December 25th, 2024. Ironically, this took so long to resolve as the team was away for the Christmas holidays... The centralized operator made a mistake in the update calculation, which triggered a safety state that required manual intervention by the core team. The incident with Arbitrum on December 15th, 2023, went beyond a mere 1hr of downtime. This was caused by a syncing bug in the Ethereum Consensus client that the sequencer relied on. However, this also caused an imbalance in the gas pricing mechanism. The Arbitrum Foundation ended up stepping in & funding the shortfall in fees, saving the users in the process. Arbitrum went down again for nearly two hrs on June 7th, 2023. However, this time, it was not due to a failure of the centralized sequencer but of the batcher instead. As a bug caused the batcher to halt, this was fixed by restarting the batcher using an older version. ZkSync experienced another four hrs of downtime on April 1st, 2023. Ironically, the long time it took to fix this was again blamed on the team, this time for being in the same timezone & a failure of monitoring systems, as this was also caused by a single centralized database going down. Polygon was down for at least 5 hours on March 11th, 2022. This was caused by validators being unable to reach consensus after an upgrade to the consensus layer. Credits To: @bl4ckb1rd71 for his research, as I leaned heavily on his article for this thread, which goes into far more detail with most of these specific incidents; I highly recommend you check it out: blog.yacademy.dev/2024-08-19… In Conclusion: These examples represent only a tiny fraction of the total number of incidents with L2s, as all major L2s are totally centralized today & most often still rely on single servers for uptime. The ETH community has replaced the stability, decentralization & security of the L1 with this... A Faustian bargain, giving up on the user's security, often in return for L2 equity & tokens. You cannot convince me that this is the cypherpunk dream; it is a total perversion of that vision! Promising decentralization in some distant future does not cut it, as we have perfectly viable technologies to scale the L1 today instead. Large groups of people with a lot of money at stake will not act against their incentives by "decentralizing"; that makes no sense within the context of history & the humanities. Some of these L2s may never come back up after going down, permanently destroying user funds in some cases. A hostile centralized sequencer take-over could also potentially hold the entire chain hostage. This is all without even mentioning the admin keys that can literally steal all users for the top 20 L2s now! I hope that neither of these scenarios nor others ever happen, no matter how much that might validate this thesis. It is bad enough that this is even a real possibility... There are more worst-case scenarios like this that would be incredibly horrible if they ever happened. People are factually & objectively far safer using competing & scalable L1s compared to the embarrassment that the L2 ecosystem has become. So, for what it is worth, you have been warned!