The most discussed topic in the Ethereum community recently is undoubtedly Vitalik Buterin's public reflection on the scaling roadmap.

It can be said that Vitalik's attitude is remarkably "sharp"; he bluntly stated that with the improvement of Ethereum's mainnet (L1) scalability, the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the main scaling means, has become obsolete.

This statement was once negatively interpreted by the market as a "pessimistic" or even "denying" view towards L2. However, if one carefully sorts out Vitalik's core viewpoints and combines them with a series of progress in Ethereum's mainnet scaling, decentralized process evaluation framework, and recent technical discussions around Native/Based Rollup, it can be observed that Vitalik is not completely dismissing the existence value of L2 but is leaning towards a kind of "rectification":

Ethereum is not discarding L2, but is re-establishing the division of labor——L1 returns to the most secure settlement layer position, while L2 pursues differentiation and specialization, thus allowing the strategic focus to return to the mainnet itself.

1. Has L2 Completed its Historical Mission?

Objectively speaking, in the previous cycle, L2 was indeed seen as a lifeline for Ethereum at one point.

In the initial Rollup-Centric roadmap, the division of labor was also very clear: L1 is responsible for security and data availability, while L2 is responsible for extreme scalability and low Gas, and in that era where Gas costs were easily in the tens of dollars, this was almost the only feasible answer.

However, the development in reality has been far more complicated than expected.

According to the latest statistics from L2BEAT, the broad definition of L2 has now surpassed hundreds, but the expansion in numbers does not equate to structural maturity, with the vast majority making slow progress in the decentralized process.

Here, it is necessary to first supplement some basic knowledge; as early as 2022, Vitalik criticized most Rollup’s Training Wheels architecture on his blog, bluntly stating that it relies on centralized operations and manual intervention to ensure security. Users who frequently use L2Beat should also be familiar with this; its homepage shows a related key indicator——Stage:

This is an assessment framework that divides Rollup into three decentralized stages: completely dependent on centralized control, "Stage 0"; limited dependency, "Stage 1"; and completely decentralized, "Stage 2," which also reflects the degree of dependence of Rollup on manual intervention.

In his recent reflection, Vitalik pointed out that some L2 may, due to regulatory or commercial needs, remain forever in "Stage 1," relying on a security council to control upgradability, which means that such L2 is essentially still a "subordinate L1" with cross-chain bridging characteristics, rather than the originally envisioned "branded shard."

Or to put it more bluntly, if the ordering rights, upgrade rights, and final adjudication rights are concentrated in the hands of a few entities, it not only goes against the original intention of Ethereum’s decentralization but also treats L2 itself as a parasite that merely drains the Ethereum mainnet.

At the same time, the explosion in the number of L2s has also brought about another structural issue that everyone has felt deeply over the past few years: liquidity fragmentation.

This causes the traffic originally concentrated on Ethereum to be gradually divided, forming fragmented value islands. Moreover, with the increasing number of public chains and L2s, the degree of liquidity fragmentation will further intensify, which is not the original intention of scaling.

From this perspective, it is understandable why Vitalik emphasizes that the next step for L2 is not more chains but deeper integration. Ultimately, this is indeed a timely rectification—through institutionalized scaling and internally secure mechanisms, reinforcing L1's positioning as the world’s most trusted settlement layer.

In this context, scaling is no longer the sole goal; security, neutrality, and predictability have once again become Ethereum's core assets, while the future of L2 lies not in quantity but in deeper integration with the mainnet, focusing more on innovation in segmented scenarios.

For example, providing unique additional features, such as privacy-specific virtual machines, extreme scalability, or dedicated environments designed for AI agents and other non-financial applications.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, expressed similar views at the Consensus 2026 conference, stating that L1 should serve as the most secure settlement layer to carry the most critical activities, while L2 should pursue differentiation and specialization to carry activities seeking the ultimate user experience.

2. Native Rollup: The Future of Based Rollup + Pre-confirmations?

Amidst this wave of reflection on the L2 narrative, the concept of Based Rollup is expected to shine in 2026.

Because if the keyword for the past five years has been "Rollup-Centric," the current discussion focus is shifting to a more specific question: Can Rollup "grow within Ethereum" rather than "hang outside of Ethereum"?

Therefore, the currently heated discussion of "Native Rollup" in the Ethereum community can be understood, to some extent, as

an extension of the Based Rollup concept—if Native Rollup is the ultimate ideal, then Based Rollup is the most practical path to that ideal.

It is well known that the biggest difference between Based Rollup and traditional L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism is that it completely discards independent or even centralized sequencer layers and instead directly sorts them by Ethereum L1 nodes. In other words, the Ethereum protocol itself integrates Rollup-like verification logic at the L1 level, thus unifying the extreme performance optimization and protocol-level security that used to belong to both L2 and Ethereum's mainnet.

This design provides users with the most intuitive feeling: Rollup seems to be embedded within Ethereum, inheriting not only the anti-censorship and activity of L1 but, more importantly, solving the most troublesome issue of L2—synchronous composability. In a Based Rollup block, you can directly invoke L1 liquidity, achieving atomic cross-layer transactions.

However, Based Rollup faces a real challenge; if it completely follows L1's rhythm (12 seconds per slot), the user experience will appear cumbersome. After all, under the current Ethereum architecture, even if transactions are packed into blocks, the system still needs to wait for about 13 minutes (2 epochs) to achieve finality, which is too slow for financial scenarios.

Interestingly, right on the tweet where Vitalik reflected on L2, he recommended a community proposal from January titled "Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability." The core of this proposal is not merely to push Based Rollup but to propose a hybrid structure:

Retaining low-latency sequenced blocks, generating a based block at the end of the slot, submitting the based block to L1, and finally combining it with a pre-confirmation mechanism to achieve synchronous composability.

In Based Rollup, pre-confirmation means that before a transaction is formally submitted to L1, specific roles (such as L1 proposers) promise that the transaction will be included. This is also the task that Ethereum explicitly proposed in the Interop roadmap as Project #4: Fast L1 Confirmation Rule.

The core goal is straightforward: to enable applications and cross-chain systems to receive a "strong and verifiable" L1 confirmation signal within 15–30 seconds, without having to wait for the full finality which takes 13 minutes.

Mechanically, the fast confirmation rule does not introduce a new consensus process but reuses the attester voting that occurs in every slot of the Ethereum PoS system. When a block has already accumulated enough and sufficiently distributed validator votes in early slots, even if it has not yet entered the finality stage, it can be considered "extremely unlikely to be rolled back under reasonable attack models."

In other words, this level of confirmation does not replace finality, but rather provides a strong confirmation explicitly acknowledged by the protocol before finality. This is especially critical for Interop: cross-chain systems, intent solvers, and wallets no longer need to wait blindly for finality but can securely advance the next logical step within 15–30 seconds based on protocol-level confirmation signals.

Through this layered confirmation logic, Ethereum finely delineates different trust levels between "security" and "perceived speed," potentially constructing an extremely smooth interoperability experience (see further reading: “Ethereum’s 'second-level' evolution: From fast confirmation to settlement compression, how can Interop eliminate waiting time?”).

3. What is the Future of Ethereum?

Looking back from the node of 2026, the main theme of Ethereum is quietly shifting, gradually moving from the pursuit of extreme "scaling" to the pursuit of "unity, layering, and endogenous security."

Last month, several executives of Ethereum L2 solutions successively expressed their willingness to explore and embrace the Native Rollup path to enhance the overall consistency and synergy of the network. This attitude itself is an important signal: the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a painful but necessary deflation, shifting from the pursuit of "the number of chains" back to the pursuit of "protocol unity."

However, with the recalibration and promotion of the underlying roadmap of Ethereum, especially as L1 continues to strengthen and Based Rollup and pre-confirmations gradually take shape, when underlying performance is no longer the only bottleneck, a more realistic issue begins to emerge—the biggest bottleneck is no longer chains but wallets and access thresholds.

This confirms the insight repeatedly emphasized by imToken in 2025: when infrastructure becomes increasingly invisible, the true limit on scalability will be determined by the entry-level interaction experience.

Overall, in addition to underlying scaling, the future breakthrough and scaled development of the Ethereum ecosystem will not solely focus on TPS or Blob numbers but will unfold around three more structurally significant directions:

• Account abstraction and melting access thresholds: Ethereum is promoting native account abstraction (Native AA), and future smart contract wallets will become the default choice, completely replacing obscure mnemonic phrases and EOA addresses. For users of wallets like imToken, this means that entering the crypto world will be as simple as registering a social media account (see further reading: “From EOA to account abstraction: Will the next leap in Web3 happen in 'account systems'?”);
• Privacy and ZK-EVM: Privacy features are no longer marginal demands. With the maturation of ZK-EVM technology, Ethereum will provide necessary on-chain privacy protection for commercial applications while maintaining transparency, which will be its core competitiveness in the public chain competition (see further reading: “ZK Roadmap 'Dawn Moment': Is Ethereum's roadmap accelerating towards its final goal?”);
• On-chain sovereignty of AI Agents: In 2026, the initiator of transactions may no longer be human but AI agents. The future challenge lies in establishing trustless interaction standards: How can it be ensured that AI agents are executing the user's will rather than being manipulated by third parties? Ethereum's decentralized settlement layer will become the most reliable rule-examiner in the AI economy (see further reading: “A new ticket in the era of AI Agents: Pushing ERC-8004, what is Ethereum betting on?”);

Returning to the original question, has Vitalik really "denied" L2?

A more accurate understanding is that he denies a kind of excessive, detached, fragmented narrative from the mainnet; this is not the endpoint, but a brand-new starting point. From the grand illusion of "branded sharding," returning to the meticulous carving of Based Rollup and pre-confirmations, essentially helps to reinforce Ethereum L1's absolute position as a global trust foundation.

However, this also means that in this return of technological pragmatism, only those innovations that truly root themselves in the underlying principles of Ethereum’s new phase, breathing and sharing fate with the mainnet, will survive and thrive in the next great era of exploration.

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