L2 'Recalibration': What is the Endgame for Ethereum as L1 Becomes Its Own Rollup?

As L1 begins to scale directly and L2 shifts towards differentiated execution, how to recompose Ethereum.

Written by: imToken

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

At that time, within the Ethereum scaling framework, L1 served as a stable but expensive settlement layer, while L2, as a cheaper and more efficient execution layer, indeed provided Ethereum with more block space, but gradually lost the complete experience of being "one chain".

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

On one hand, Ethereum L1 continues to increase the Gas Limit, promote statelessness, and zkEVM verification, no longer content with just being a low-throughput settlement base; on the other hand, community discussions have become increasingly heated. Earlier this year, Vitalik openly stated that with the enhancement of Ethereum mainnet's own 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 Reflection on L2: Farewell to Fragmentation, a New Phase Towards Native Rollup's Rectification").

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 kind of "self-Rollup" as proof systems gradually enter the mainnet verification process.

Although these views do not yet equate to a determined protocol roadmap, they provide a valuable observational angle.

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 Position

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.

Given the technological conditions at the time, this division of labor was quite reasonable.

Since Ethereum validators need to re-execute L1 transactions, the mainnet's throughput cannot be aggressively increased in the short term. Rollup can execute transactions in batches off-chain, only submitting 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: L1 maintains restraint, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2 undertakes new transactions, continuously reducing costs through Blob, data compression, and proof technologies.

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

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

In other words, Ethereum no longer views the scaling of L1 and L2 as two separate tasks, but rather begins 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 can no longer prove its long-term value solely by "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 are no longer unique capabilities of L2; what L2 needs to provide will shift more towards differentiated needs that L1 cannot uniformly satisfy, such as specific application optimizations, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.

In the Ethereum Foundation's latest statement on the relationship between L1 and L2 this year, this point was also clearly emphasized. In the past, L2's primary goal was to scale Ethereum, while differentiation and customization were 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, carrying 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, hoping to reduce multi-signature security committees, 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 some Ethereum properties based on business needs, which may have stronger management authority, independent sorters, 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, but are relatively independent in terms of security and settlement;

This is also why it is said that Ethereum is not abandoning L2, but rather 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 actual 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 key to solving L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like one chain again," a vision that relies on the maturity of intent architecture.

• Among them, the Open Intents Framework allows users to simply declare 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;
• Further, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) attempts to build a trustless transport layer, aiming to provide cross-L2 transactions with an experience equivalent to single-chain transactions;

On the account side, the EIP-7702 in the Pectra upgrade has already allowed traditional EOAs to temporarily execute smart contract code, supporting transaction batching, gas fee payment, and recovery mechanisms. The subsequent native account abstraction scheme 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 waiting time for applications in most normal scenarios, directly benefiting 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 reverted.

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 possibility of block reorganization for that transaction 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, funds are first advanced by solvers or liquidity providers, optimizing user experience without making the underlying waiting time disappear.

Therefore, Ethereum's long-term goal is to gradually shorten finality itself from minute-level to second-level. However, this is not a single upgrade that has already 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" in a certain sense.

This statement sounds somewhat counterintuitive.

After all, Rollup is usually understood as a scaling network built on top of L1, executing transactions externally and having L1 verify the state results. How could Ethereum itself, as the underlying consensus and settlement network, become its own L2?

Understanding this viewpoint requires first separating "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 complies with protocol rules.

This model ensures 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 in the block, the more hardware and time validators need to complete the 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, execution nodes can generate validity proofs after completing calculations, 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 relationships, this indeed bears similarities to Rollup, where some participants are responsible for high-performance execution, and the execution results are compressed into cryptographic proofs, allowing broader consensus participants to no longer repeat all calculations but to verify proofs and confirm the final state.

Thus, what Barnabé refers to as "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 be "downgraded" to its own L2.

His emphasis is on the fact that as proofs gradually replace the repeated execution of all nodes, Rollup may no longer just be a hierarchical name above L1, but rather 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 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 self-built security structures and more completely inherit L1's state transition rules, with the opportunity to break free from security committees.

If we take another step forward, 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 bridges as it is today.

They may resemble 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 share 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 land, they have already transformed the boundary between L1 and L2 from a clear architectural boundary into a relationship of varying degrees of security inheritance.

In Conclusion

The trends of the world, after a long period of unity, must divide, and after a long period of division, must 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 achievements 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, 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 endgame for L2 may neither be to replace L1 nor to be eliminated by an increasingly scaled L1, but 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 recombine into one Ethereum after being split.