What Is A Blockchain Layer?

A Layer is the architecture of the blockchain network and also a functional rule built on a particular protocol that determines its assessment and functional possibilities. As formally said, the blockchain has distributed ledgers with tremendous functions, protocol, nodes, and use cases built for easy accessibility.

Layers are part of the built functions of the Web 3.0 protocols developed for blockchain scalability with different consensuses, there are four classified rules of layers on the blockchain.

 

What is Layer 0?

Zero means nothing in the real world, but it’s a set of rules or data types on the computer program; data is derived from the hardware layers 0 built into the infrastructure. For a computer to distribute data it needs a framework or nodes that will facilitate the exchange, as it has been described that blockchain is a peer-to-peer network that performs data distribution, all data are requested from the layer which can be regarded as the client-server data.

 

What is Layer 1?

(L1) Is regarded as the main blockchain, the self-dependent digital technology, for example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana they can also be called based layers, Meaning they have third-party Integration capabilities by which protocols can be built on them such as a Decentralize application (Dapp) or tokens. 

The layer 1 blockchains have two consensus mechanisms which are known as the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-Of-Stake (PoS). The (PoW) mechanism is secure due to the high amount of blocks contained but has very slow scalability, for example, Ethereum is on the verge to move to (PoS) due to its slow mechanism.

What is Layer 2?

(L2) is a secondary blockchain that is dependent on L1 Source-code or Virtual Machine (VM) and continually engages with it, the real purpose of L2 is to either scale the L1 blockchain or be private, all data used in L2 is connected to the based layer, and are built with a strict mechanism to secure data from being manipulated on both networks, they are referred as the solution network for (PoW) blockchains.

An example of an L2 blockchain is the polygon network built on the Ethereum network, tokens or Dapps can also be built and hosted on top of a layer 2 blockchain.

On the Ethereum blockchain, L2 is referred to as Rollups for example the zk-rollup, all this mechanism is done through protocol Sharding.

The sharding mechanism effortlessly extracts data from Layer 1 blockchain, and breaks the entire its data into distinct datasets, for example, the blockchain network nodes are stored to a particular block, and the shade maintains a copy of the block in its set of data, therefore, provide proofs to the hardware and interact with it to process addresses, balances, and general information across the protocols, this mechanism enables the block validator to authenticate transactions in a subsequent order.

What is Layer 3?

(L3) is the application built to enable the click action of a decentralized application, it is a layer that determines how fast the first and second layers correspond, and the Interoperability of a blockchain or protocol can be seen on the built Layer 3 application built on it. There are numerous blockchain networks on Web 3.0 with distinct functions, some are built with good cross-chain interoperability for faster-scaling solutions, and Layer 3 uncovers the on-chain and off-chain capabilities of the second layer. 

In conclusion, layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains can have a wide range of other decentralized applications or protocols built on them and can be identified as an ecosystem project.