"Is L2 eating away at the value of L1?" "Is Ethereum losing its global composability?" During the two years when L2 was at its peak, such anxieties almost filled the entire Ethereum community.

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

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

On one hand, Ethereum L1 has been continuously increasing the Gas Limit, promoting statelessness and zkEVM verification, no longer satisfied with just being a low-throughput settlement base; on the other hand, community discussions have also become increasingly intense, with Vitalik stating earlier this year that with the improvement of the Ethereum mainnet's own scalability capabilities, some of the premises of the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the main scaling means, have already changed (see also "Understanding Vitalik's Reflection on L2: Goodbye to Fragmentation, Correcting Course Towards Native Rollup in the New Stage").

Recently, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot further stated that there is a need to reassess 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 "self-Rollup" in a certain sense as proof systems gradually enter the mainnet verification process.

These views, although not equivalent to a determined protocol roadmap, offer a valuable observation perspective.

Ultimately, the problems Ethereum faces today are no longer just about how to continue to increase block space, but rather how to redefine the roles between L1, L2, the execution layer, and the settlement layer after transactions, assets, and user states are dispersed across an increasing number of execution environments.

1. Ethereum Has Not "Abandoned" L2, But Must Find Its New Position

To be pragmatic, when the Ethereum scaling roadmap centered around Rollup first formed, the most important task of L2 was relatively singular, that is, to provide more and cheaper transaction space for Ethereum.

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

Because Ethereum validators needed to re-execute L1 transactions, and the throughput of the mainnet could not be aggressively increased in the short term, Rollup could execute transactions off-chain in batches, only submitting the compressed data or state commitments back to the mainnet, significantly reducing unit transaction costs while retaining certain security properties of Ethereum.

Thus, scaling gradually formed two parallel routes, where L1 remained restrained, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2 took on new transactions, continually reducing costs through Blob, data compression, and proof technologies.

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

The Ethereum Foundation, in 2026, will reintegrate protocol work, merging the relatively independent "Extend L1" and "Extend Blob" into a unified Scale roadmap, where increasing Gas limits, expanding data availability, optimizing execution clients, advancing statelessness and zkEVM attester client have been included in 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 redistribute execution, consensus, and data capacity from a system-wide perspective.

This change does not mean that Ethereum is prepared to give up L2 or revert all activities back to the mainnet. On the contrary, it suggests that L2 can no longer prove its long-term value solely by being "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 are no longer unique capabilities of L2; the value that L2 needs to provide will shift more towards differentiated demand that L1 finds difficult to uniformly satisfy, such as specific application optimization, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.

The Ethereum Foundation has also clearly emphasized this point in its latest statement regarding the relationship between L1 and L2 this year. In the past, the primary goal of L2 was to scale Ethereum; differentiation and customization were only 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 carries settlement, shared states, liquidity, and DeFi.

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

• At one end of the spectrum are Rollups that inherit Ethereum's security properties as much as possible. They seek to minimize multi-signature security committees, open permissionless proof mechanisms, and ensure that even if the operator stops functioning, users can still withdraw relying on L1;
• In the middle, there are execution environments that inherit some Ethereum properties based on business needs. They may have stronger administrative capabilities, independent orderers, or specific compliance designs in exchange for performance, privacy, and operational flexibility;
• At the other end, there are chains that merely adopt EVM, use Ethereum assets, or access some cross-chain facilities, but are relatively independent in terms of security and settlement;

This is why it is said that Ethereum does not aim to abandon L2, but to clarify the division of labor. Ultimately, over the past 3-5 years, L2 first represented a scaling technology, while in the future, it is more likely to represent a group 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 emerges: an increasing number of L2s will inevitably slice liquidity, account states, and application experiences.

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

Consequently, interoperability has started to become an increasingly important part of Ethereum's roadmap.

The Ethereum protocol team has focused the emphasis of the 2026 Improve UX route on two directions: native account abstraction and interoperability, believing that the core of resolving L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like one chain again". This vision relies on the maturity of intent architectures.

• The Open Intents Framework allows users to declare only the outcomes they want, such as "convert a certain asset on Chain A into USDC on Chain B," while the underlying solvers complete path calculations, funding, execution, and fund rebalancing (see also "When 'Intents' Become the Standard: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Returns Web3 to User Intuition?");
• The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) further attempts to build a trustless transport layer aimed at giving cross-L2 transactions the same experience as single-chain transactions (see also "Ethereum Interop Roadmap: How to Unlock the 'Last Mile' for Massive Adoption");

On the account side, the EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade has allowed traditional EOAs to temporarily execute smart contract code, supporting transaction batching, Gas payment delegation, and recovery mechanisms; the follow-up native account abstraction solution represented by EIP-8141 further attempts to embed smart account logic into the protocol, making smart contract wallets gradually the default account form and reducing reliance on additional Bundlers, Relayers, and intermediary services.

The rapid confirmation rules for L1 attempt to provide a more secure confirmation signal within tens of seconds before complete finality, effectively reducing application waiting times in most normal scenarios, which will directly benefit all cross-chain applications that rely on L1 finality, making it significant for cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlements, and RWA asset transactions.

This is because the real bottleneck in 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.

A commonly 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 appear successful a few seconds later, but for bridges, exchanges, lending protocols, and cross-chain solvers, they still need to determine the likelihood of this transaction encountering a block reorganization and whether they can thus release assets on another chain or perform the next operation.

This is also why many cross-chain services that seem to approach "instant arrival" are not genuinely waiting for the source chain to achieve final settlement, but rather advance funds from solvers or liquidity providers; this mechanism indeed optimizes user experience but does not make the underlying wait time disappear out of thin air.

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

In summary, 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 more quickly and at lower costs.

3. When L1 Also Becomes a Rollup, Do Layer Boundaries Still Exist?

If the change in L2 positioning and the shortening of finality are still about readjusting the existing layer architecture, then another judgment mentioned by Barnabé further touches on the definitions of L1 and L2 themselves: As proof systems enter the Ethereum mainnet, L1 may ultimately become a "self-Rollup" in a certain sense.

This statement seems a bit counterintuitive.

After all, Rollups are typically understood as scaling networks built on top of L1, executing transactions externally and verifying state results via L1. How could Ethereum itself, being the underlying consensus and settlement network, become its own L2?

To understand this viewpoint, one needs to detach "Rollup" from hierarchical relationships. In today's Ethereum, once a node receives a block, it must re-execute all transactions within it, calculate state changes independently, and determine if the block adheres to protocol rules.

This model guarantees that nodes can verify independently but 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 within 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 the execution node completes computation, it generates a validity proof, and other validators only need to verify the smaller, lower-cost proof to confirm whether the state transition is correct.

From the perspective of the relationship between execution and verification, this indeed bears similarities to Rollup, where a part of the participants is responsible for high-performance execution, and the execution results are compressed into cryptographic proofs, with broader consensus participants no longer repeating all calculations but verifying proofs and confirming final states.

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

His emphasis lies in that once proofs gradually replace the repeated execution of all nodes, Rollup may no longer just be a tier name situated above L1 but will become a more general execution and verification architecture.

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

On one hand, L1 can utilize zkEVM proofs to expand its execution capabilities; on the other hand, Native Rollups hope to allow L2 to call upon Ethereum's verification capabilities more directly, enabling L1 to validate 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 a proof system encounters an error, if the protocol requires an urgent upgrade, or if the operator fails, users often still need to rely on additional governance and trust structures. The long-term direction of Native Rollup is to convert some Rollup verification logic into Ethereum native capabilities, allowing L2 to reduce self-built security structures, inherit L1 state transition rules more completely, and potentially free itself from security committees.

Taking it a step further, when multiple L2s can rely on faster L1 confirmations, unified proof mechanisms, and synchronized composable access to each other's states, their relationship with the mainnet may no longer be interconnected like today by bridges.

They are more likely to become multiple execution domains under the same Ethereum consensus, some responsible for general financial activities, some oriented towards gaming, social or payment, some providing privacy or special compliance capabilities; they possess different execution logics and product forms but jointly rely on a verifiable state, security foundations, and asset settlement system.

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

But regardless of how these technologies ultimately land, they have already transformed the boundary between L1 and L2 from a well-defined architectural boundary to a relationship of varying degrees of security inheritance.

Final Thoughts

The world's trends inevitably rise and fall, unite and divide.

Ethereum once gained global composability through shared states; later, it separated execution via Rollup to gain greater capacity. Now, what it needs to accomplish is to reconnect the fragmented assets, accounts, and applications without revoking the accomplishments of scaling.

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, which chain liquidity comes from, and who finally settles should gradually be handled by wallets, applications, and underlying protocols, but 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 involve replacing L1 nor being eliminated by an increasingly expanded L1, but rather becoming a group of execution environments with different functionalities and performances that can share security, liquidity, and state relationships.

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

In the next phase, let's see if it can still recompose an Ethereum after being dismantled.

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