Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflection: Farewell to Fragmentation, a New Phase of Rectification Towards Native Rollup

Recently, the most discussed topic within the Ethereum community is undoubtedly Vitalik Buterin's public reflection on the scaling roadmap.

It can be said that Vitalik's attitude is quite "sharp," bluntly stating that with the improvement of the Ethereum mainnet's (L1) own scaling capabilities, the roadmap established five years ago, which viewed L2 as the primary scaling solution, has become obsolete.

These remarks were once negatively interpreted by the market as "bearish" or even a "negation" of L2. However, by carefully examining Vitalik's core arguments and considering a series of Ethereum mainnet scaling progress, decentralization assessment frameworks, and recent technical discussions around Native/Based Rollup, one finds that Vitalik is not completely dismissing the value of L2. Instead, his stance leans more towards a "course correction":

Ethereum is not abandoning L2, but rather redefining the division of labor—L1 returns to its role as the most secure settlement layer, while L2 pursues differentiation and specialization, thereby refocusing strategic emphasis on the mainnet itself.

1. Has L2 Fulfilled Its Historical Mission?

Objectively speaking, in the previous cycle, L2 was indeed seen as Ethereum's lifeline.

In the initial Rollup-Centric roadmap, the division of labor was also clear: L1 was responsible for security and data availability, while L2 was responsible for extreme scaling and low gas fees. In an era where gas fees could easily reach tens of dollars, this was almost the only viable answer.

But reality unfolded in a much more complex way than anticipated.

The latest statistics from L2BEAT show that there are now over a hundred broadly defined L2s. However, this quantitative expansion does not equate to structural maturity, as the vast majority have made slow progress in decentralization.

Here, it's necessary to add some foundational knowledge. As early as 2022, Vitalik criticized the "Training Wheels" architecture of most Rollups in a blog post, bluntly stating their reliance on centralized operations and manual intervention for security. Users familiar with L2Beat should be very aware of this, as its homepage prominently displays a key related metric—Stage:

This is an assessment framework that categorizes Rollups into three decentralization stages: "Stage 0" (fully reliant on centralized control), "Stage 1" (limited reliance), and "Stage 2" (fully decentralized). This also reflects the degree of a Rollup's dependence on the manual intervention of training wheels.

In his recent reflections, Vitalik pointed out that some L2s, possibly due to regulatory or commercial needs, may remain stuck at "Stage 1" forever, relying on security councils to control upgradability. This would mean such L2s are essentially "secondary L1s" with cross-chain bridging properties, not the originally envisioned "branded shards."

Or, to put it more bluntly, if sequencing rights, upgrade rights, and final arbitration rights are concentrated in the hands of a few entities, it not only runs counter to Ethereum's original decentralized ethos but also makes the L2 itself little more than a parasite leaching off the Ethereum mainnet.

Simultaneously, the proliferation of L2s has brought about another structural issue that everyone has keenly felt over the past few years: liquidity fragmentation.

This has gradually siphoned off traffic originally concentrated on Ethereum, creating isolated value islands. As the number of public chains and L2s increases, liquidity fragmentation will worsen, which was not the original intent of scaling.

From this perspective, one can understand why Vitalik emphasizes that the next step for L2 is not more chains, but deeper integration. Ultimately, this is a timely course correction—strengthening L1's position as the world's most trusted settlement layer through institutionalized scaling and protocol-native security mechanisms.

Against this backdrop, scaling is no longer the sole objective. Security, neutrality, and predictability are once again becoming Ethereum's core assets. The future of L2 lies not in quantity, but in deeper integration with the mainnet and more specialized innovation in niche scenarios.

For example, providing unique additional features such as privacy-focused virtual machines, extreme scaling, or specialized environments designed for non-financial applications like AI agents.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, echoed this view at Consensus 2026, stating that L1 should serve as the most secure settlement layer, hosting the most critical activities, while L2 should pursue differentiation and specialization, hosting activities that demand an ultimate user experience.

2. Native Rollup: The Future of Based Rollup + Preconfirmations?

It is precisely within this wave of reflection on the L2 narrative that the concept of Based Rollup is poised to have its moment in the spotlight in 2026.

Because if the keyword of the past five years was "Rollup-Centric," the core of the current discussion is shifting to a more specific question: Can Rollups be "grown within Ethereum" rather than "attached outside Ethereum"?

Therefore, the "Native Rollup" currently hotly debated in the Ethereum community can, to some extent, be understood as an extension of the Based Rollup concept—if Native Rollup is the ultimate ideal, then Based Rollup is currently the most practical path towards that ideal.

As is well known, the biggest difference between Based Rollup and traditional L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism is that it completely abandons an independent, even centralized, sequencer layer. Instead, it relies directly on Ethereum L1 nodes for sequencing. In other words, the Ethereum protocol itself integrates Rollup-like validation logic at the L1 level, thereby unifying the extreme performance optimization and protocol-level security that were previously split between L2 and the Ethereum mainnet.

The most intuitive feeling this design gives users is that the Rollup seems embedded within Ethereum. It not only inherits L1's censorship resistance and liveness but, more importantly, solves the most troublesome problem for L2s—synchronous composability. Within a Based Rollup block, you can directly tap into L1's liquidity, achieving atomic cross-layer transactions.

However, Based Rollup faces a practical challenge: if it strictly follows L1's rhythm (one Slot every 12 seconds), the user experience would feel clunky. After all, under Ethereum's current architecture, even after a transaction is included in a block, the system still needs to wait about 13 minutes (2 Epochs) to reach finality, which is too slow for financial scenarios.

Interestingly, in the same thread where Vitalik reflected on L2, he recommended a January community proposal titled "Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability." The core of this proposal is not simply promoting Based Rollup, but suggesting a hybrid structure:

Retain low-latency sequenced blocks, generate a based block at the end of the slot, submit the based block to L1, and finally combine it with a preconfirmation mechanism to achieve synchronous composability.

In Based Rollup, a preconfirmation is a commitment made by a specific role (like an L1 proposer) that a transaction will be included before it is formally submitted to L1. This is precisely what Project #4 in Ethereum's Interop roadmap, "Fast L1 Confirmation Rule," aims to do.

Its core goal is very direct: to allow applications and cross-chain systems to receive a "strong and verifiable" L1 confirmation signal within 15–30 seconds, without waiting for the 13 minutes required for full finality.

Mechanically, the fast confirmation rule does not introduce a new consensus process. Instead, it repurposes the attester votes that occur in every slot of Ethereum's PoS system. When a block has accumulated enough, and sufficiently dispersed, validator votes in early slots, it can be considered "extremely unlikely to be reverted under reasonable attack models," even before entering the finalization phase.

Simply put, this confirmation level does not replace finality. Instead, it provides a strong confirmation, explicitly acknowledged by the protocol, before finality is reached. This is particularly crucial for Interop: cross-chain systems, Intent Solvers, and wallets no longer need to blindly wait for finality. They can safely proceed with the next logical step within 15–30 seconds based on a protocol-level confirmation signal.

Through this layered confirmation logic, Ethereum finely carves out different trust levels between "security" and "perceived speed," promising to build an exceptionally smooth interoperability experience (Extended reading: Ethereum's "Second-Level" Evolution: From Fast Confirmations to Settlement Compression, How Interop Eliminates Wait Times?).

3. What is Ethereum's Future?

Looking back from the vantage point of 2026, Ethereum's main theme is quietly shifting, gradually moving from pursuing extreme "scaling" to pursuing "unification, layering, and native security."

Last month, executives from several Ethereum L2 solutions have successively expressed willingness to explore and embrace the Native Rollup path to enhance the entire network's consistency and synergy. This attitude itself is a significant signal: the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a painful but necessary deflation of hype, shifting from pursuing "quantity of chains" back to pursuing "unification of protocol."

However, as Ethereum's underlying roadmap is recalibrated and advanced, especially as L1 continues to strengthen and Based Rollup with preconfirmations gradually materializes, and underlying performance is no longer the sole bottleneck, a more practical issue begins to emerge—the biggest bottleneck is no longer the chain, but wallets and entry barriers.

This confirms the insight repeatedly emphasized by imToken in 2025: when infrastructure becomes invisible, what truly determines the limits of scale will be the entry-level interaction experience.

Overall, beyond underlying scaling, the future breakout and scaled development of the Ethereum ecosystem will not focus solely on TPS or Blob count. Instead, it will revolve around three more structurally significant directions:

• Account Abstraction and the Dissolution of Entry Barriers: Ethereum is pushing for native account abstraction (Native AA). Future smart contract wallets will become the default choice, completely replacing obscure seed phrases and EOA addresses. For users of wallets like imToken, this means the barrier to entering the crypto world will become as simple as registering for a social media account (Extended reading: From EOA to Account Abstraction: Will Web3's Next Leap Happen in the "Account System"?);
• Privacy and ZK-EVM: Privacy features are no longer edge-case demands. With the maturation of ZK-EVM technology, Ethereum will provide necessary on-chain privacy protection for commercial applications while maintaining transparency. This will be its core competitive advantage in the public chain race (Extended reading: The "Dawn" of the ZK Route: Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Accelerating Across the Board?);
• On-Chain Sovereignty for 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 to ensure AI agents are executing user intent, not being manipulated by third parties? Ethereum's decentralized settlement layer will become the most reliable rule arbiter for the AI economy (Extended reading: The New Ticket in the AI Agent Era: What is Ethereum Betting on by Pushing ERC-8004?);

Returning to the initial question, has Vitalik truly "negated" L2?

A more accurate understanding is that he is negating an over-inflated, detached-from-the-mainnet, fragmented narrative where each goes its own way. This is not an endpoint, but a brand new starting point. Returning from the grand illusion of "branded shards" to the meticulous crafting of Based Rollup and preconfirmations essentially helps strengthen Ethereum L1's absolute position as the global trust foundation.

However, this also means that in this return to technological pragmatism, only those innovations truly rooted in the underlying principles of Ethereum's new phase, breathing and thriving in sync with the mainnet, will survive and prosper in the next great age of exploration.