According to Odaily, Vitalik Buterin recently published an article titled 'How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?' In the public discourse, 'Layer 2' and 'sharding' are often described as two opposing strategies for scaling blockchains. However, when you examine the underlying technology, you encounter a conundrum: the actual underlying scaling methods are entirely the same.
You have some data sharding. You have fraud prover or ZK-SNARK proofs. You have solutions for cross (rollup, shard) communication. The primary difference lies in who is responsible for building and updating these parts, and how much autonomy they have. A Layer 2-centric ecosystem is a very real technical sense of sharding, but in this type of sharding, you can create your own shards using your own rules. This is powerful and supports a great deal of creativity and autonomous innovation.
However, it also faces key challenges, especially in terms of coordination. For a Layer 2-centric ecosystem like Ethereum to succeed, it needs to understand these challenges and address them head-on, in order to reap as many benefits as possible from a Layer 1-centric ecosystem and get as close as possible to the best of both worlds.