Yea the lightning network is terrible technology and Bitcoin maximalists proclaiming it's the future are doing a disservice to the whole industry. It is only s

Yea the lightning network is terrible technology and Bitcoin maximalists proclaiming it's the future are doing a disservice to the whole industry. It is only state channels - peer to peer links, and then making it work requires clients to figure out routes over those links themselves, which won't scale beyond a few million users. Ethereum L2s are their own network and usually EVM compatible so work exactly the same as Ethereum. They use the same wallet, tooling etc. Then every N minutes they post a proof of what happened + compressed transactions needed to reproduce what happened to Ethereum L1. It's easiest to think of them like zipping a bunch of transactions to post them to Ethereum. Currently they are about 10x as performant as Ethereum so cost 1/10th as much while still being fully secured by Ethereum. They are still super new only coming out less than a year ago. Optimism and Arbitrum are the biggest and currently they only have one sequencer which orders the transactions and posts batches to L1. Because there is only one sequencer transactions are basically instant and then are secured by Ethereum when the next batch of transactions is posted to it. Most of the major exchanges let you and ETH or stablecoins directly onto Optimism and Arbitrum. Zk-rollups are next gen tech where they post a zk proof of what happened to the layer 1 + compressed transaction data. They are more efficient than current L2s and more secure. The biggest ones coming soon are zkSync, Starknet, and Scroll. You can see all the L2s at https://l2beat.com https://l2beat.com and their current tps at https://ethtps.info https://ethtps.info Once Ethereum has data shards and nodes mostly store large blobs of L2 transaction data + check proofs instead of running all transactions this will be 100x - 1000x more efficient than today.