Article taken from this thread, made by me in Portuguese (BR).
With the increase in popularity and influx of users on the Ethereum network, costs have increased and the speed with which transactions are carried out has decreased. Then came the need for a work more focused on scalability.
The biggest problems to be solved are the slowness and high cost of sending transactions, which is quite common in what we call Layer 1 (first layer) of the Ethereum network, the Ethereum Mainnet.
Hence the solutions known to us as Layer 2, such as Polygon and Arbitrum, which mainly seek to make transactions faster and cheaper, but without giving up the security and decentralization of Layer 1.
These characteristics, security and decentralization, are essential for the functioning of a (real) blockchain, and they can be maximized with the reduction of entry barriers, both for users and for nodes (machines) validating the transaction.
Layer 2 solutions are called "off-chain solutions" because they are not tied directly to the Ethereum blockchain, but are just derived from it, adopting security and decentralization protocols similar to Mainnnet's.
In this model, we basically have transactions sent to this secondary layer instead of being submitted directly to the main network. Once this is done, these transactions are anchored on Ethereum Mainnet and become immutable.
Another type of off-chain solution is Rollups, which essentially consist of executing transactions outside Mainnet and then sending them to a block there.
The difference with Layer 2 is that since transactions are sent directly to a Layer 1 block, a different network is not needed and the original Layer 1 security and decentralization protocols are used directly.
Finally, we have solutions called Sidechains, which are basically blockchains based on EVM (Etherm Virtual Machine) that run independently of Ethereum Mainnet, such as Fantom and Skale.
But it's not over; the existence of off-chain solutions in this case implies the existence of on-chain solutions, there is one in particular called Sharding. This concept is not specific to blockchains, it is already well known in computer science.
Sharding is literally a fragmentation of the database to distribute the loading and validation of information, dividing Mainnet into 64 smaller networks. With low hardware requirements, the number of nodes increases (decentralization and security). Everyone wins.
However, this solution can only be implemented once the legendary Ethereum 2.0 becomes a reality, which God only knows when it will happen, but the devs have promised by the end of 2022.
References
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/
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