L2 "Recalibration": When L1 Becomes Its Own Rollup, What Is Ethereum's Endgame?
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L2 "Recalibration": When L1 Becomes Its Own Rollup, What Is Ethereum's Endgame?
When L1 starts scaling directly and L2 shifts to differentiated execution, how to recompose Ethereum.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: imToken
"Is L2 cannibalizing the value of L1?" "Is Ethereum losing its global composability?" During the two years when L2 was at its peak, such anxieties almost permeated the entire Ethereum community.
In the Ethereum scaling framework at that time, L1 was a stable but expensive settlement layer, and L2, as a cheap and efficient execution layer, indeed gave Ethereum more block space, but gradually lost the complete experience of being "one chain."
Therefore, over the past two years, these questions have been driving Ethereum to re-examine the relationship between L1 and L2.
On one hand, Ethereum L1 continues to increase the Gas Limit, advance statelessness and zkEVM verification, no longer satisfied with being just a low-throughput settlement base; on the other hand, community discussions have become increasingly intense, starting with Vitalik stating early this year that as the Ethereum mainnet's own scaling capabilities improve, some premises of the roadmap formulated five years ago, which viewed L2 as the primary scaling method, have changed (Further Reading: "Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflection: Farewell to Fragmentation, Correction Towards Native Rollup in the New Stage").
Recently, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot further stated that the long-term relationship between L1 and L2 needs to be re-examined, including how L2 should create value in the future, why finality needs to be significantly shortened, and whether L1 could also become a kind of "self-Rollup" as proof systems gradually enter the mainnet verification process.
Although these views do not yet equate to a confirmed protocol roadmap, they provide a very valuable observational entry point.
Ultimately, the problem Ethereum faces today is no longer just how to continue increasing block space, but rather how L1, L2, execution layers, and settlement layers should redefine their division of labor after transactions, assets, and user states are dispersed into increasingly many execution environments.
I. Ethereum Has Not "Abandoned" L2, But Must Find the New Positioning
To be fair, at the beginning of the formation of the Ethereum scaling roadmap centered on Rollup, L2's most important task was relatively singular, which was to provide Ethereum with more and cheaper transaction space.
Under the technical conditions at that time, this division of labor was very reasonable.
Because Ethereum validators all need to re-execute L1 transactions, the mainnet throughput cannot be radically increased in the short term, while Rollup can execute transactions in batches off-chain, submitting only compressed data or state commitments back to the mainnet, significantly reducing unit transaction costs while retaining certain Ethereum security properties.
Thus, scaling gradually formed two parallel routes, namely L1 remains restrained, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2 takes on new transactions, continuously reducing costs through Blob, data compression, and proof technologies.
But now, the premise of this division of labor has changed.
The Ethereum Foundation re-integrated protocol work in 2026, merging the previously relatively independent "Scale L1" and "Scale Blob" into a unified Scale roadmap, among which increasing Gas Limit, expanding data availability, optimizing execution clients, advancing statelessness and zkEVM attester client, were put into the same scaling framework.
In other words, Ethereum no longer views the scaling of L1 and L2 as two separate tasks, but has begun to reallocate execution, consensus, and data capacity from the perspective of the entire system.
This change does not mean Ethereum is preparing to abandon L2, or suck all activities back to the mainnet. On the contrary, it means L2 will find it difficult to prove its long-term value solely based on "faster transactions, lower Gas."
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 capabilities unique to L2; what L2 needs to provide will shift more towards differentiated needs that L1 finds difficult to satisfy uniformly, such as specific application optimization, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.
The Ethereum Foundation also explicitly emphasized this point in its latest statement on the relationship between L1 and L2 this year. In the past, L2's primary goal was to scale Ethereum, with differentiation and customization being secondary values; now it is to provide differentiated functions while continuing to contribute additional scaling capabilities.
Correspondingly, L1 needs to become a sufficiently powerful, permissionless, and highly resilient global hub, carrying settlement, shared state, liquidity, and DeFi.
This actually pushes L2 from a unified technical category towards a more complex continuous spectrum:
- At one end of the spectrum are Rollups that inherit Ethereum security properties as much as possible; they hope to reduce multi-signature security councils, open permissionless proof mechanisms, and ensure that even if operators stop running, users can still rely on L1 to exit;
- In the middle position are execution environments that inherit partial Ethereum attributes according to business needs; they may possess stronger management permissions, independent sequencers, or specific compliance designs, in exchange for performance, privacy, and operational flexibility;
- At the other end, there may be chains that merely adopt EVM, use Ethereum assets, or access partial cross-chain facilities, but are relatively independent in terms of security and settlement;
This is also why it is said that Ethereum does not intend to abandon L2, but rather to redefine the division of labor. Ultimately, in the past 3-5 years, L2 first represented a scaling technology, while in the future, it is more likely to represent a set of execution environments that establish different security, settlement, and liquidity relationships with Ethereum.
II. Interoperability Is Not Just Cross-Chain, But How States Trust Each Other
However, when Ethereum scales into a system composed of a large number of L2s, another cliché problem gradually surfaces, which is that more and more L2s will undoubtedly fragment liquidity, account states, and application experience simultaneously.
This has been fully reflected in actual use over the past few years. For example, users may hold assets on one chain, use applications on another chain, and need to go to a third chain to complete transactions, so that the same stablecoin has different versions in different networks, and the same account also needs to handle different Gas Tokens, cross-chain bridges, and asset entry points.
Therefore, interoperability has begun to become an increasingly important part of the Ethereum roadmap.
The Ethereum protocol team has focused the priorities of the 2026 Improve UX roadmap on two directions: native account abstraction and interoperability, and believes that the core of solving L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like one chain again," a vision that relies on the maturity of the intent architecture.
- Among them, the Open Intents Framework allows users to declare only the results they want, such as "convert a certain asset on Chain A to USDC on Chain B," and then the solvers behind complete path calculation, advancement, execution, and fund rebalancing (Further Reading: "When "Intent" Becomes the Standard: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Returns Web3 to User Intuition?");
- The further Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) attempts to build a trustless transport layer, aiming to give cross-L2 transactions an experience no different from single-chain transactions (Further Reading: "Ethereum Interop Roadmap: How to Unlock the "Last Mile" of Mass Adoption");
On the account side, EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade has already allowed traditional EOAs to temporarily execute smart contract code, supporting transaction batching, Gas sponsorship, and recovery mechanisms; subsequent native account abstraction solutions represented by EIP-8141 attempt to further embed smart account logic into the protocol, making smart contract wallets gradually become the default account form, and reducing reliance on additional Bundler, Relayer, and intermediary services.
The L1 quick confirmation rule attempts to provide a more secure confirmation signal within tens of seconds before full finality, which can shorten application waiting times in most normal scenarios; this will directly benefit all cross-chain applications relying on L1 finality, which is significant for cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlement, and RWA asset trading.
Because the real bottleneck of many cross-chain interactions is not whether messages can be sent, but when the target chain can be sufficiently convinced that the state on the source chain will not be reverted.
A point often overlooked is that a transaction being packed into a block does not equal that it has achieved finality—from a user perspective, the transaction may show success after a few seconds, but for bridges, exchanges, lending protocols, and cross-chain solvers, they still need to judge the possibility of this transaction encountering block reorganization, and whether assets can be released on another chain or the next operation executed based on this.
This is also why many cross-chain services that look close to "instant arrival" today do not really wait for the source chain to complete final settlement, but rather funds are advanced by solvers or liquidity providers; this mechanism optimizes user experience, but does not make the underlying waiting time disappear out of thin air.
So Ethereum's long-term goal is to gradually shorten finality itself from minutes to seconds, but this is not a single upgrade scheduled for launch, but a set of research tasks that need to be advanced in stages, including decoupling finality voting from fork choice, optimizing validator sets, voting aggregation and network propagation, and then gradually changing the consensus protocol.
Overall, a good interoperability experience is not about giving dozens of chains the same cross-chain button, but about enabling different execution environments to trust each other's states faster and at lower cost.
III. When L1 Also Becomes a Rollup, Does the Layered Boundary Still Exist?
If the change in L2 positioning and the shortening of finality are still about readjusting the existing layered architecture, then another judgment mentioned by Barnabé further touches the definition of L1 and L2 itself: As proof systems enter the Ethereum mainnet, L1 may ultimately also become a kind of "self-Rollup" in a sense.
This statement sounds somewhat counterintuitive.
After all, Rollup is usually understood as a scaling network built on top of L1; it executes transactions externally, and then L1 verifies the state results, so Ethereum itself is the underlying consensus and settlement network, how can it become its own L2?
To understand this point, one needs to first separate "Rollup" from the hierarchical relationship. In today's Ethereum, after a node receives a block, it needs to re-execute all transactions within it, independently calculate state changes, and judge whether the block complies with protocol rules.
This mode guarantees that nodes can verify themselves, but it also means that the overall execution capability of the network must be constrained by the hardware conditions of ordinary nodes. The greater the computation in the block, the more hardware and time validators need to complete execution.
In the future, as real-time proofs and L1 zkEVM gradually mature, transactions can still be computed by high-performance execution nodes, but ordinary validators may not need to personally re-execute every transaction. For example, after execution nodes complete computation, they generate validity proofs, and other validators only need to verify the smaller and lower-cost proofs to confirm whether the state transition is correct.
From the perspective of the relationship between execution and verification, this indeed has similarities with Rollup; some participants are responsible for high-performance execution, execution results are compressed into cryptographic proofs, and wider consensus participants no longer repeat all computations, but verify proofs and confirm the final state.
Therefore, what Barnabé calls "L1 becoming its own Rollup" is more suitable as a summary of this verification mode, rather than saying the Ethereum mainnet will be placed on another underlying chain, or "downgraded" to its own L2.
His point is that when proofs gradually replace the repeated execution of all nodes, Rollup may no longer be just a layer name located above L1, but will become a more general execution and verification architecture.
This will also further blur the traditional boundary between L1 and L2.
On one hand, L1 can expand its own execution capability with the help of zkEVM proofs; on the other hand, Native Rollup hopes to allow L2 to more directly call the verification capabilities within the Ethereum protocol, with L1 verifying L2 state transitions in a more native and unified way.
Today, different Rollups usually need to build their own proof systems, verification contracts, upgrade mechanisms, and security councils. Once the proof system has errors, the protocol needs emergency upgrades, or operators fail, users often still need to rely on additional governance and trust structures; the long-term direction of Native Rollup is to turn part of the Rollup verification logic into Ethereum native capabilities, allowing L2 to reduce self-built security structures, inherit L1 state transition rules more completely, and have the opportunity to get rid of security councils.
If going one step further, when multiple L2s can rely on faster L1 confirmation, unified proof mechanisms, and synchronous composability to access each other's states, their relationship with the mainnet may no longer be connected by cross-chain bridges like today.
They are more like multiple execution domains under the same set of Ethereum consensus, some responsible for general financial activities, some oriented towards gaming, social, or payments, some providing privacy or special compliance capabilities; they have different execution logics and product forms, but jointly rely on a set of verifiable states, security foundations, and asset settlement systems.
Of course, this is still a long-term direction.
But regardless of what form these technologies eventually take, they have already made the boundary between L1 and L2 gradually change from a clear architectural boundary to security inheritance relationships of varying degrees.
Final Thoughts
The general trend of the world is that unity leads to division, and division leads to unity.
Ethereum once relied on shared state to gain global composability; later it split execution out through Rollup in exchange for greater capacity. Today, what it needs to complete is to reconnect the separated assets, accounts, and applications without revoking the scaling achievements.
For ordinary users, the ideal Ethereum should never be a network map composed of dozens of chains, different Gas tokens, and cross-chain bridges; in fact, where transactions are executed, where liquidity comes from, and who settles finally can gradually be handed over to wallets, applications, and underlying protocols to handle, but the trust assumptions, security boundaries, and exit paths involved cannot be hidden along with the operational experience.
Therefore, the end game of L2 may be neither replacing L1 nor being eliminated by the continuously scaling L1, but becoming a set of execution environments with different functions and performance, yet capable of sharing security, liquidity, and state relationships.
In the past, Ethereum relied on splitting execution to gain greater capacity.
In the next stage, let us see whether, after splitting, it can still reassemble into an Ethereum.
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