Separation must lead to reunion, and reunion must lead to separation: What is the ultimate fate of Ethereum when L1 becomes its own Rollup?

"Is L2 eroding the value of L1?" "Is Ethereum losing its global composability?" During the peak of L2's popularity over the past two years, such anxieties have permeated the entire Ethereum community.

At that time, in Ethereum's scaling framework, L1 was a stable but expensive settlement layer, while L2 served as a cheap and efficient execution layer. This indeed allowed Ethereum to gain more block space, but it gradually lost the complete experience of being "one chain."

Therefore, over the past two years, these questions have driven Ethereum to re-examine the relationship between L1 and L2.

On one hand, Ethereum L1 continues to increase the Gas Limit, promote statelessness, and advance zkEVM verification, no longer content to merely serve as a low-throughput settlement base; on the other hand, community discussions have become increasingly heated. Earlier this year, Vitalik bluntly stated that with the improvement of Ethereum's mainnet scaling capabilities, some of the premises of the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the primary scaling method, have changed (see further reading "Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflection: Farewell to Fragmentation, a New Phase Towards Native Rollup's Rectification").

Recently, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot even suggested that we need to re-examine the long-term relationship between L1 and L2, 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 viewpoints do not yet equate to a determined protocol direction, they provide a valuable perspective for observation.

Ultimately, the issues Ethereum faces today are no longer just about how to continue increasing block space, but rather how to redefine the division of labor between L1, L2, execution layers, and settlement layers as transactions, assets, and user states become dispersed across an increasing number of execution environments.

1. Ethereum has not "abandoned" L2, but must find a new positioning

To be pragmatic, when the Ethereum scaling route centered around Rollup was first formed, L2's most important task was relatively singular: 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 needed to re-execute L1 transactions, and the mainnet's throughput could not be aggressively increased in the short term, Rollup could batch execute transactions off-chain, submitting only the compressed data or state commitments back to the mainnet, significantly reducing the unit transaction cost while retaining certain security properties of Ethereum.

Thus, scaling gradually formed two parallel routes: L1 maintained restraint, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2 took on new transactions, continuously reducing costs through Blob, data compression, and proof technologies.

However, the premises of this division of labor have now changed.

The Ethereum Foundation is reorganizing protocol work in 2026, merging the previously relatively independent "scaling L1" and "scaling Blob" into a unified Scale route, where increasing Gas Limit, expanding data availability, optimizing execution clients, promoting statelessness, and zkEVM attester client have been integrated into the same scaling framework.

In other words, Ethereum no longer views the scaling of L1 and L2 as two separate tasks but is beginning to redistribute execution, consensus, and data capacity from the perspective of the entire system.

This change does not mean that Ethereum is preparing to abandon L2 or pull all activities back to the mainnet. On the contrary, it means that L2 will find it difficult to prove its long-term value solely based on "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 capabilities of L2; what L2 needs to provide will increasingly shift towards differentiated demands that L1 finds difficult to uniformly satisfy, such as specific application optimizations, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.

In its latest statement on the relationship between L1 and L2 this year, the Ethereum Foundation also clearly emphasized this point. In the past, L2's primary goal was to scale Ethereum, with differentiation and customization being secondary values. Now, it is about providing differentiated functionalities while continuing to contribute additional scaling capabilities.

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

This effectively pushes L2 from a unified technical category towards a more complex continuous spectrum:

• At one end of the spectrum are Rollups that aim to inherit Ethereum's security properties as much as possible. They hope to reduce multi-signature security committees, open permissionless proof mechanisms, and ensure that even if operators cease to operate, users can still rely on L1 to exit;
• In the middle position are execution environments that inherit some Ethereum properties based on business needs. They may have stronger management authority, independent orderers, or specific compliance designs in exchange for performance, privacy, and operational flexibility;
• At the other end may be chains that simply adopt EVM, use Ethereum assets, or access some cross-chain facilities, yet are relatively independent in terms of security and settlement;

This is also why it is said that Ethereum is not abandoning L2 but is clarifying 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.

2. Interoperability is not just cross-chain, but how states trust each other

However, as Ethereum expands into a system composed of numerous L2s, another age-old problem gradually surfaces: the increasing number of L2s will undoubtedly fragment liquidity, account states, and application experiences.

This has been vividly reflected in practical usage 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, leading to the same stablecoin having different versions across different networks, and the same account needing to handle different Gas Tokens, cross-chain bridges, and asset entrances.

Therefore, interoperability has begun to become an increasingly important part of Ethereum's roadmap.

The Ethereum protocol team has focused the 2026 Improve UX roadmap on two directions: native account abstraction and interoperability, believing that the core of solving L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like one chain again." This vision 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," with the underlying solver completing path calculations, advances, execution, and fund rebalancing (see further reading "When 'Intent' Becomes the Standard: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Returns Web3 to User Intuition?");
• Furthermore, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) attempts to build a trustless transport layer, aiming to provide cross-L2 transactions with an experience indistinguishable from single-chain transactions (see further reading "Ethereum Interop Roadmap: How to Unlock the 'Last Mile' for 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 payment, and recovery mechanisms. The subsequent native account abstraction solution represented by EIP-8141 aims to further embed smart account logic into the protocol, gradually making smart contract wallets the default account form and reducing reliance on additional Bundlers, Relayers, and intermediary services.

The rapid confirmation rules of L1 attempt to provide a stronger confirmation signal within a few seconds to tens of seconds before complete finality, which can shorten the application waiting time in most normal scenarios. This will directly benefit all cross-chain applications that rely on L1 finality, which is significant for cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlements, and RWA asset transactions.

Because the real bottleneck of many cross-chain interactions is not whether messages can be sent, but when the target chain can be sufficiently confident that the state on the source chain will not be revoked.

One often overlooked point is that a transaction being packed into a block does not mean it has achieved finality— from the user's perspective, the transaction may show as successful seconds later, but for bridges, exchanges, lending protocols, and cross-chain solvers, they still need to assess the likelihood of this transaction encountering a block reorganization and whether they can release assets or execute the next operation on another chain based on that.

This is also why many cross-chain services that seem close to "instant arrival" today do not actually wait for the source chain to complete final settlement; instead, they are pre-funded by solvers or liquidity providers. This mechanism optimizes user experience but does not eliminate the underlying waiting time.

Thus, Ethereum's long-term goal is to gradually shorten finality itself from minutes to seconds. However, this is not a single upgrade that has been scheduled for launch, but a set of research tasks that need to be advanced in phases, including decoupling finality voting from fork choice, optimizing validator sets, voting aggregation, and network propagation, and gradually changing the consensus protocol.

Overall, a good interoperability experience is not about having dozens of chains with the same cross-chain button, but about enabling different execution environments to trust each other's states faster and at lower costs.

3. When L1 also becomes a Rollup, do layered boundaries still exist?

If the changes in L2 positioning and the shortening of finality are still about readjusting the existing layered architecture, then another judgment mentioned by Barnabé further touches on the definition of L1 and L2 itself: as proof systems enter the Ethereum mainnet, L1 may ultimately become a kind of "self-Rollup."

This statement sounds somewhat counterintuitive.

After all, Rollup is typically understood as a scaling network built on top of L1, executing transactions externally and then 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 viewpoint, we need to separate "Rollup" from the hierarchical relationship. In today's Ethereum, when a node receives a block, it needs to re-execute all transactions within it, independently calculate state changes, and determine whether the block adheres to protocol rules.

This model ensures that nodes can verify independently, but it also means that the overall execution capacity of the network must be constrained by the hardware conditions of ordinary nodes. The larger the computational load in a 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 re-execute every single transaction personally. For example, after execution nodes complete calculations, they generate validity proofs, and other validators only need to verify smaller, cheaper proofs to confirm whether the state transition is correct.

From the perspective of execution and verification, this indeed bears similarities to Rollup, where some participants are responsible for high-performance execution, and the execution results are compressed into cryptographic proofs. A broader set of consensus participants no longer repeat all calculations but verify proofs and confirm the final state.

Therefore, Barnabé's notion of "L1 becoming its own Rollup" is more suitable as a summary of this verification model rather than suggesting that the Ethereum mainnet will be placed on another underlying chain or "downgraded" to its own L2.

His emphasis is on when proofs gradually replace the repeated execution of all nodes, Rollup may no longer just be a hierarchical name above L1 but could become a more general execution and verification architecture.

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

On one hand, L1 can leverage zkEVM proofs to expand its own execution capacity; on the other hand, Native Rollup hopes to allow L2 to directly call the verification capabilities within the Ethereum protocol, enabling 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. Once a proof system encounters an error, a protocol needs an emergency upgrade, or an operator fails, 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's native capabilities, allowing L2 to reduce the need for self-built security structures, inherit L1's state transition rules more completely, and have the opportunity to break free from security committees.

If we take a step further, when multiple L2s can rely on faster L1 confirmations, unified proof mechanisms, and synchronous composability to access each other's states, their relationship with the mainnet may no longer be connected by individual cross-chain bridges as it is today.

They are more like multiple execution domains under the same Ethereum consensus, some responsible for general financial activities, some focused on gaming, social, or payment, and some providing privacy or special compliance capabilities. They have different execution logics and product forms but collectively rely on a verifiable state, security foundation, and asset settlement system.

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

But regardless of how these technologies ultimately materialize, they have already transformed the boundary between L1 and L2 from a clear architectural boundary into varying degrees of security inheritance relationships.

In Conclusion

In the grand scheme of things, what has been united must eventually be divided, and what has been divided must eventually unite.

Ethereum once relied on shared states to achieve global composability; later, it split execution through Rollup to gain greater capacity. Now, what it needs to accomplish is to reconnect the fragmented assets, accounts, and applications without undoing 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 ultimately settles can gradually be handled by wallets, applications, and underlying protocols. However, the trust assumptions, security boundaries, and exit paths involved cannot be hidden along with the operational experience.

Therefore, the ultimate fate of L2 may neither be to replace L1 nor to be eliminated by an ever-expanding L1, but rather to become a set of execution environments with different functions and performances that can share security, liquidity, and state relationships.

In the past, Ethereum gained greater capacity by splitting execution.

In the next phase, let us see if it can still recompose an Ethereum after the split.