Polygon CEO says L3s are taking value away from Ethereum, sparking debate

If all layer 3s settled to one layer 2, Ethereum would capture no value, and its security would be at risk, argues Polygon CEO Marc Boiron.

Polygon CEO Marc Boiron has riled up debate on X over the weekend after arguing that layer-3 networks aren’t necessary to scale Ethereum and exist only to rob the mainnet of value.

On April 1, the Polygon CEO said that Polygon Labs, a layer-2 scaling network for Ethereum, does not work on layer 3s because they are not needed to scale existing networks.


“L3s exist only to take value away from Ethereum and onto the L2s on which the L3s are built,” he said.

However, Boiron’s comments didn’t go unchallenged. One respondent commented that layer-2s on Ethereum “ARE value on Ethereum,” to which Boiron replied in partial agreement, but adding:

I disagree that L2 value is Ethereum value. Just take this to the extreme. If all L3s settled to one L2, then Ethereum would capture basically no value, and, thus, Ethereum security would be at risk.

“Also, we don’t care what people do. They can build L3s on anything, including Polygon networks,” he continued before adding. “We just aren’t trying to suck all value onto Polygon networks instead of sharing with Ethereum its fair share.”

Boiron added that Polygon’s mission was to scale Ethereum when nobody else did it, when the right tech was ready, using parallelization of the EVM and with privacy. He argued that “L3s are not consistent with that mission.”

Layer-3 protocols are built on top of L2s to host application-specific DApps providing a range of solutions for scaling, performance, interoperability, customization, and costs.