Written by: Blue Fox

What does this mean?

It means that the L1 execution capacity has increased by over three times, with further expectations for even more doubling in the future. Combined with technologies like ePBS, BAL optimization, and gas repricing, the throughput of L1 will significantly improve. Assuming there is no sudden surge in demand, L1 fees could potentially remain at a very low level for a long time, making them almost imperceptible to users.

So, what does this mean for Ethereum L2 or other high-performance public chains?

First, the fees on Ethereum L1 are approaching those of L2, or even being very similar.

Currently, the general transfer fee on L1 is already quite low (about $0.1-0.4). After the upgrade, if gas prices are further driven down to the 0.01-0.05 gwei range, many simple transactions can be conducted directly on L1, making L2 unnecessary. First, there are additional costs for bridges/withdrawals; second, L1 is just as secure.

One of the core selling points of L2 in the past—“much cheaper than L1”—will be significantly weakened.

Secondly, the economic models of L2 will face adjustments.

L2 has to bundle data back to L1 (data availability). While cheaper L1 is beneficial for L2 (reduced rollup costs), L1 becoming “sufficient and cheap” might lead many applications to deploy directly on L1 (especially in DeFi, NFTs, and games where ultra-high TPS is not required).

This forces L2 to upgrade. To maintain competitiveness, L2 must differentiate itself in terms of speed, custom execution environments, and specific application optimizations (such as zk proof speed, account abstraction, dedicated chains for perpetual contracts), rather than relying solely on being “cheap.”

The evolutionary trend suggests that, aside from a few general-purpose L2 solutions like Base and Arbitrum, the future could see more application-specific L2 chains, like Lighter and Ronin, which could also lead Polymarket to choose the path of Ethereum L2.

In the short term, it may seem that Ethereum L1 has lost much fee revenue; however, in the long term, this will greatly help Ethereum's control over its ecosystem, eventually translating into more fee revenue.

Finally, the pressure on high-performance public chains has increased significantly.

In the past, high-performance chains targeted “ETH L1 as slow and expensive.” Now ETH L1 suddenly appears to be “fast and cheap + highest security + deepest liquidity + most comprehensive developer ecosystem,” severely compressing the differentiated advantages of high-performance public chains.

Unless they can continue to lead significantly in terms of actual TPS, finality, developer experience, and capital efficiency, many projects and users may reassess “whether it is worth leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.”

This will create a trend where, aside from a few 1-2 high-performance public chains, other high-performance chains will gradually become part of the Ethereum ecosystem, with more projects and users turning to Ethereum L1 and L2.

This upgrade represents a return to Ethereum’s “single-chain narrative”: L1 itself must first boost its capacity, while L2 continues to build on top of it.

For L2 projects: in the short term, it is a benefit (cost reduction), while in the medium term, it is a pressure (they must prove they are more valuable than L1).

For other public chains: the barriers to competition have been raised again.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。