Place/Date: - July 2nd, 2021 at 9:47 pm UTC · 3 min read Source: NEC (New Era) Despite being six years old today, Ethereum, in all its glory, is still facing issues like scalability and pocket-burning gas fees. The network can address these concerns via two options – sharding and Layer 2 (L2) solutions. Though the network is trying hard to incorporate a sharding scaling solution on ETH 2.0, it remains a distant dream as the team is far behind in terms of development. It leaves us with the second option, which is a Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution. An L2 solution runs on top of the main chain (Layer 1 or L1) of Ethereum. It exists on the Ethereum network as a smart contract and does not need changes to the base level protocol to interact. L2 solutions have different functions, like scaling payments, off-chain computation, or smart contracts. However, they all have one similar feature – to move most of the transactions off the chain. This allows L2 solutions to improve the transaction processing rate (TPS) while lowering the gas fee. As the Ethereum network gets congested and incurs high gas fees on even simple transactions, many L2 solutions have come up in the crypto space to solve the inherent issues.