Ethereum’s Future: L1 as Its Own Rollup and the Evolution of L2

"Are L2s eating away at L1's value?" "Is Ethereum losing its global composability?" During the two peak years of L2s, such anxieties permeated the entire Ethereum community.

At that time, in Ethereum’s scaling framework, L1 served as a stable but expensive settlement layer, while L2 acted as a cheap and efficient execution layer—indeed granting Ethereum more block space, yet gradually diminishing the cohesive experience of being “a single chain.”

Therefore, over the past two years, these issues have driven Ethereum to reexamine the relationship between L1 and L2.

On one hand, Ethereum L1 continues to increase the Gas Limit, advance statelessness, and implement zkEVM verification, no longer content to serve merely as a low-throughput settlement layer; on the other hand, community discussions have grown increasingly intense, beginning earlier this year when Vitalik explicitly stated that, as Ethereum mainnet’s own scaling capabilities improve, some of the assumptions underlying the five-year-old roadmap—which positioned L2s as the primary scaling solution—have changed (see further reading: Understanding Vitalik’s L2 Reflections: Moving Beyond Fragmentation, Correcting Course Toward Native Rollups in the New Phase).

Recently, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot has suggested that the long-term relationship between L1 and L2 needs to be reexamined, including how L2s should create value in the future, why finality needs to be significantly shortened, and whether L1 could itself become a kind of “its own Rollup” as proof systems gradually integrate into the mainnet validation process.

Although these perspectives are not yet equivalent to an established protocol roadmap, they provide a valuable lens for observation.

Ultimately, the issue Ethereum faces today is no longer just how to continue increasing block space, but how to reassign responsibilities among L1, L2, execution layers, and settlement layers as transactions, assets, and user states become distributed across an increasing number of execution environments.

To be frank, when the Ethereum scaling roadmap centered on Rollups was first established, the primary task of L2 was relatively simple: to provide more and cheaper transaction capacity for Ethereum.

Under the technological conditions at the time, this division of labor was very reasonable.

Since Ethereum validators must re-execute all L1 transactions, the mainnet’s throughput cannot be aggressively increased in the short term. Rollups, however, can execute transactions in batches off-chain and only submit compressed data or state commitments back to the mainnet, significantly reducing per-transaction costs while preserving certain Ethereum security properties.

Thus, scaling gradually evolved into two parallel paths: L1 remains restrained, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2 absorbs additional transactions, continuously reducing costs through blobs, data compression, and proof technologies.

But now, the premise of this division of labor has changed.

The Ethereum Foundation is re-integrating its protocol work in 2026, merging the previously relatively independent "scaled L1" and "scaled Blob" into a unified Scale roadmap, incorporating increased Gas Limit, expanded data availability, optimized execution clients, progress toward statelessness, and zkEVM attester client under a single scaling framework.

In other words, Ethereum no longer treats L1 and L2 scaling as separate tasks, but instead begins to reallocate execution, consensus, and data capacity from a holistic system perspective.

This shift does not mean Ethereum is preparing to abandon L2 or pull all activity back to the mainnet. Instead, it means L2s can no longer easily justify their long-term value solely on the basis of “faster transactions and lower gas fees.”

After all, if L1 itself can increase execution capacity by several orders of magnitude while maintaining security and decentralization, then ordinary EVM execution and low-cost block space will no longer be unique to L2s; what L2s need to provide will shift more toward differentiated demands that L1 struggles to unify, such as application-specific optimizations, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.

The Ethereum Foundation also clearly emphasized this point in its latest statement this year on the relationship between L1 and L2. Previously, the primary goal of L2 was to scale Ethereum, with differentiation and customization serving as secondary values; now, the focus is on delivering differentiated features while continuing to contribute additional scaling capabilities.

Correspondingly, L1 needs to become a sufficiently powerful, permissionless, and highly resilient global hub for settlement, shared state, liquidity, and DeFi.

This effectively shifts L2 from a unified technical category to a more complex continuous spectrum:

• At one end of the spectrum are Rollups that strive to inherit Ethereum’s security properties as much as possible, aiming to minimize multisig security committees, adopt open and permissionless proof mechanisms, and ensure users can still exit to L1 even if the operator ceases operations;
• In the middle position are execution environments that inherit certain Ethereum properties based on business needs, offering enhanced management privileges, independent sequencers, or specific compliance designs in exchange for improved performance, privacy, and operational flexibility;
• On the other end, it could be a chain that merely adopts EVM, uses Ethereum assets, or integrates with some cross-chain infrastructure, while remaining relatively independent in terms of security and settlement;

This is why it's said that Ethereum is not abandoning L2, but rather redefining its roles. Ultimately, over the past 3–5 years, L2 has primarily represented a scaling solution, but in the future, it is more likely to represent a set of execution environments that establish distinct security, settlement, and liquidity relationships with Ethereum.

However, as Ethereum scales into a system composed of numerous L2s, another longstanding issue is gradually emerging: an increasing number of L2s will inevitably fragment liquidity, account states, and user experiences.

This has been clearly evident in real-world usage over the past few years. For example, users may hold assets on one chain, use applications on another, and need to go to a third chain to complete transactions, resulting in different versions of the same stablecoin across networks and requiring the same account to manage different gas tokens, cross-chain bridges, and asset entry points.

Therefore, interoperability is becoming an increasingly important part of Ethereum's roadmap.

The Ethereum protocol team has focused its 2026 UX Improvement roadmap on two key areas: native account abstraction and interoperability, believing that addressing L2 fragmentation hinges on making Ethereum "feel like a single chain again"—a vision dependent on the maturation of intent-based architecture.

• Among these, the Open Intents Framework allows users to simply declare their desired outcome, such as “convert an asset on Chain A into USDC on Chain B,” while the underlying solver handles path calculation, gas advancement, execution, and fund rebalancing (see further reading: When “Intents” Become Standard: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Returns Web3 to User Intuition?).
• The further Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aims to build a trustless transport layer, targeting a user experience for cross-L2 transactions that is indistinguishable from single-chain transactions (see further reading: “Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Unlocking the ‘Last Mile’ to Mass Adoption”);

On the account side, EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade has enabled traditional EOA accounts to temporarily execute smart contract code, supporting transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and recovery mechanisms; subsequent native account abstraction solutions, such as EIP-8141, aim to further embed smart account logic into the protocol, making smart contract wallets the default account type and reducing reliance on additional Bundlers, Relayers, and intermediary services.

The L1 fast confirmation rule aims to provide a more secure confirmation signal within tens of seconds, before full finality is achieved, thereby reducing waiting times for applications in most normal scenarios. This directly benefits all cross-chain applications relying on L1 finality, which is significant for cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlements, and RWA asset trading.

The real bottleneck in many cross-chain interactions isn't whether a message can be sent, but when the target chain can be sufficiently confident that the state on the source chain won't be reversed.

A commonly overlooked point is that a transaction being included in a block does not equate to finality—from the user’s perspective, the transaction may appear successful within seconds, but for bridges, exchanges, lending protocols, and cross-chain solvers, they still need to assess the likelihood of a blockchain reorganization and determine whether it is safe to release assets on another chain or proceed with the next action.

This is why many cross-chain services today that appear to offer “instant settlement” do not actually wait for final settlement on the source chain; instead, solvers or liquidity providers front the funds. While this mechanism enhances user experience, it does not eliminate the underlying waiting time.

Ethereum’s long-term goal is to gradually reduce finality from minutes to seconds, but this is not a single, scheduled upgrade—it is a set of phased research initiatives, including decoupling finality voting from fork choice, optimizing the validator set, aggregating votes, improving network propagation, and gradually evolving the consensus protocol.

Overall, a good interoperability experience isn't about giving dozens of chains the same cross-chain button; it's about enabling different execution environments to trust each other's states more quickly and at lower cost.

If the shift in L2 positioning and reduced finality times still amount to readjusting the existing layering architecture, then another observation mentioned by Barnabé goes further, touching the very definition of L1 and L2: as proof systems integrate into Ethereum mainnet, L1 itself may eventually become a kind of "its own Rollup."

This sounds a bit counterintuitive.

After all, rollups are generally understood as scaling networks built on top of L1, executing transactions externally and having L1 verify the state results—so how could Ethereum itself, as the underlying consensus and settlement network, become its own L2?

To understand this perspective, it's necessary to first separate the concept of "Rollup" from its hierarchical context. In today's Ethereum, when a node receives a block, it must re-execute all the transactions within it, independently calculate the state changes, and verify whether the block complies with the protocol rules.

This model ensures that nodes can verify independently, but it also means the network’s overall processing capacity is constrained by the hardware capabilities of ordinary nodes. The greater the computational load in a block, the more hardware resources and time validators require to complete execution.

In the future, as real-time proofs and L1 zkEVM mature, transactions can still be computed by high-performance execution nodes, but ordinary validators may not need to re-execute each transaction themselves. For example, after completing the computation, execution nodes can generate validity proofs; other validators can simply verify these smaller, lower-cost proofs to confirm whether the state transitions are correct.

From the perspective of the relationship between execution and verification, this is indeed similar to Rollups, where a subset of participants handle high-performance execution, and the results are compressed into cryptographic proofs; broader consensus participants no longer repeat all computations but instead verify the proofs and confirm the final state.

Therefore, Barnabé’s statement that “L1 becomes its own Rollup” is better understood as a summary of this verification model, rather than suggesting that the Ethereum mainnet will be moved onto another underlying chain or “downgraded” to its own L2.

His point is that as proofs gradually replace redundant execution across all nodes, Rollup may no longer be just a name for a layer above L1, but instead become a more general architecture for execution and verification.

This will further blur the traditional boundary between L1 and L2.

On one hand, L1 can expand its execution capacity by leveraging zkEVM proofs; on the other hand, Native Rollups aim to enable L2 to directly call Ethereum protocol verification capabilities, allowing L1 to verify L2 state transitions in a more native and unified manner.

Today, different rollups typically need to build their own proof systems, verification contracts, upgrade mechanisms, and security committees. If the proof system fails, the protocol requires an urgent upgrade, or the operator becomes inactive, users often still rely on additional governance and trust structures. The long-term direction of Native Rollups is to incorporate part of the rollup verification logic as native Ethereum capabilities, enabling L2s to reduce their self-built security structures, more fully inherit L1’s state transition rules, and potentially eliminate the need for a security committee.

If we take one more step forward, when multiple L2s can access each other’s states through faster L1 confirmations, a unified proof mechanism, and synchronized composability, their relationship to the mainnet may no longer be connected by individual cross-chain bridges as they are today.

They are more like multiple execution domains under the same Ethereum consensus, some handling general financial activities, others focused on gaming, social, or payments, and some providing privacy or specialized compliance capabilities—each with distinct execution logic and product forms, yet all relying on a shared verifiable state, security foundation, and asset settlement system.

Of course, this is still a long-term direction.

But regardless of how these technologies ultimately manifest, they have gradually transformed the boundary between L1 and L2 from a clear architectural divide into a spectrum of security inheritance relationships.

The trend of the world is that after a long union, there must be a division; after a long division, there must be a union.

Ethereum once achieved global composability through a shared state; later, it separated execution via Rollups to gain greater capacity. Now, it needs to reconnect the separated assets, accounts, and applications without reversing its scaling achievements.

For average users, the ideal Ethereum should never be a network map composed of dozens of chains, different gas tokens, and cross-chain bridges. Where transactions are executed, which chain provides liquidity, and who ultimately settles them can gradually be handled by wallets, applications, and underlying protocols—but the trust assumptions, security boundaries, and exit pathways involved cannot be hidden alongside the user experience.

Therefore, L2’s ultimate role may not be to replace L1 or be outpaced by continuously scaling L1s, but rather to become a set of execution environments with distinct functionalities and performance characteristics, yet sharing security, liquidity, and state relationships.

In the past, Ethereum achieved greater capacity by separating execution.

In the next stage, let’s see whether, after being taken apart, it can still be reassembled into an Ethereum.