L2 "Recalibration": When L1 Becomes Its Own Rollup, What is Ethereum's Endgame?

"Are L2s cannibalizing L1 value?" "Is Ethereum losing its global composability?" During the peak of L2 hype, such anxieties pervaded the Ethereum community.

Within Ethereum's scaling framework at the time, L1 served as a stable yet expensive settlement layer, while L2s acted as cheap and efficient execution layers. While this granted Ethereum more block space, it also gradually eroded the cohesive experience of operating as "a single chain."

Consequently, over the past two years, these questions have driven Ethereum to re-examine the relationship between L1 and L2.

On one hand, Ethereum L1 has continuously increased the Gas Limit, pushed forward statelessness and zkEVM verification, no longer content to be just a low-throughput settlement base. On the other hand, community discussions have intensified. Earlier this year, Vitalik stated that as Ethereum's mainnet scaling capabilities improve, some premises of the roadmap formulated five years ago, which positioned L2s as the primary scaling method, have already changed (Extended Read: Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflection: Moving Beyond Fragmentation, Course Correction Towards Native Rollups in the New Phase).

Recently, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot suggested the need to reassess the long-term relationship between L1 and L2. This includes how L2s should create value in the future, why finality needs to be significantly shortened, and whether L1 could become a form of "its own Rollup" as proof systems gradually integrate into the mainnet verification process.

While these views don't yet constitute a finalized protocol roadmap, they offer a valuable lens for observation.

Ultimately, the issue Ethereum faces today is no longer just about how to keep increasing block space, but how to redefine the division of labor between L1, L2, the execution layer, and the settlement layer once transactions, assets, and user states are dispersed across an increasing number of execution environments.

I. Ethereum Isn't "Abandoning" L2s, But Must Find a New Positioning

To be fair, when the Rollup-centric Ethereum scaling roadmap was first conceived, the primary task for L2s was singular: to provide Ethereum with more and cheaper transaction space.

This division of labor was perfectly reasonable given the technical constraints at the time.

Since Ethereum validators need to re-execute L1 transactions, mainnet throughput couldn't be drastically increased in the short term. Rollups, however, could batch-execute transactions off-chain, submitting only compressed data or state commitments to the mainnet. This significantly reduced per-transaction costs while retaining a degree of Ethereum's security properties.

Thus, scaling evolved along two parallel paths: L1 remained restrained, prioritizing decentralization and security, while L2s absorbed new transactions, continuously reducing costs through Blobs, data compression, and proof technologies.

But now, the premises of this division have changed.

In 2026, the Ethereum Foundation reintegrated protocol efforts, merging the previously separate "Scale L1" and "Scale Blob" tracks into a unified Scale roadmap. Increasing the Gas Limit, expanding data availability, optimizing execution clients, and advancing statelessness and zkEVM attester clients are now all part of the same scaling framework.

In other words, Ethereum no longer treats L1 and L2 scaling as two separate tasks. Instead, it's beginning to reallocate execution, consensus, and data capacity from a holistic, system-wide perspective.

This shift does not mean Ethereum intends to abandon L2s or suck all activity back to the mainnet. Rather, it means L2s will find it increasingly difficult to prove their long-term value solely based on "faster transactions and lower Gas."

After all, if L1 itself can increase its execution capacity by orders of magnitude while maintaining security and decentralization, then generic EVM execution and cheap block space will no longer be unique L2 capabilities. L2s will need to provide more differentiated services that L1 struggles to uniformly satisfy, such as application-specific optimizations, privacy features, and more flexible governance and economic models.

The Ethereum Foundation's latest articulation of the L1-L2 relationship this year clearly emphasizes this point. In the past, L2s' primary goal was to scale Ethereum, with differentiation and customization being secondary. Now, the goal is to provide differentiated functionality while continuing to contribute additional scaling capacity.

Correspondingly, L1 needs to become a sufficiently powerful, permissionless, and highly resilient global hub, carrying settlement, shared state, liquidity, and DeFi.

This effectively moves L2 from a unified technical category towards a more complex continuous spectrum:

• At one end are Rollups that seek to inherit as much of Ethereum's security properties as possible. They aim to reduce reliance on multi-signature security councils, open up permissionless proving mechanisms, and ensure users can always exit via L1 even if the operator stops running.
• In the middle are execution environments that inherit some of Ethereum's properties based on business needs. They might have stronger administrative permissions, independent sequencers, or specific compliance designs, trading some degree of trustlessness for performance, privacy, and operational flexibility.
• At the other end are chains that might simply adopt the EVM, use Ethereum assets, or connect via some cross-chain infrastructure but remain relatively independent in terms of security and settlement.

This is why Ethereum isn't abandoning L2s but rather redefining the division of labor. In essence, over the past 3-5 years, L2 primarily represented a scaling technology. In the future, it's more likely to represent a set of execution environments that establish different security, settlement, and liquidity relationships with Ethereum.

II. Interoperability Isn't Just Cross-Chain, It's About State Trust

However, as Ethereum expands into a system comprising numerous L2s, another well-known problem surfaces: an increasing number of L2s inevitably fragments liquidity, account states, and application experiences.

This has been starkly evident in real-world usage over the past few years. Users might hold assets on one chain, use applications on another, and need to go to a third chain to finalize a transaction. The same stablecoin has different versions across networks, and the same account must manage different Gas tokens, bridges, and asset entry points.

Therefore, interoperability has become an increasingly critical part of Ethereum's roadmap.

The Ethereum protocol team has focused the 2026 Improve UX roadmap on two key areas: native account abstraction and interoperability. They believe the core solution to L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like a chain again," a vision dependent on the maturation of intent architecture.

• The Open Intents Framework (OIF) allows users to simply declare their desired outcome, e.g., "convert asset X on chain A to USDC on chain B," leaving a solver to handle pathfinding, pre-payment, execution, and rebalancing. (Extended Read: When 'Intents' Become the Standard: How OIF Can End Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Return Web3 to User Intuition).
• The more advanced Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aims to build a trust-minimized transport layer, targeting a cross-L2 transaction experience indistinguishable from a single-chain transaction. (Extended Read: Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Unlocking the 'Last Mile' of Mass Adoption).

On the account side, EIP-7702, part of the Pectra upgrade, allows traditional EOAs to temporarily execute smart contract code, enabling features like transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and recovery. Subsequent native account abstraction proposals, like EIP-8141, aim to embed smart account logic into the protocol itself, making smart contract wallets the default account type and reducing reliance on external Bundlers, Relayers, and intermediary services.

L1 fast confirmation rules aim to provide a stronger security confirmation signal within tens of seconds, before full finality. This would shorten application wait times in most normal scenarios, directly benefiting all cross-chain applications that depend on L1 finality – a significant development for bridges, stablecoin settlements, and RWA asset trading.

Because the real bottleneck for many cross-chain interactions isn't whether a message *can* be sent, but when the target chain can be sufficiently certain that the state on the source chain won't be reverted.

An often-overlooked point: a transaction being included in a block doesn't mean it has achieved finality. From a user's perspective, a transaction might show as successful in seconds. But for bridges, exchanges, lending protocols, and cross-chain solvers, they must assess the probability of a block reorganization and decide whether to release assets or execute the next action on another chain based on that transaction.

This is why many cross-chain services that appear "instant" don't actually wait for the source chain's final settlement. Instead, solvers or liquidity providers front the funds. While this optimizes user experience, it doesn't eliminate the underlying wait time.

So, Ethereum's long-term goal is to gradually reduce finality itself from minutes to seconds. This isn't a single scheduled upgrade but a set of research tasks to be implemented in phases. This includes decoupling finality voting from fork choice, optimizing the validator set, vote aggregation and network propagation, and gradually changing the consensus protocol.

In summary, a good interoperability experience isn't about giving dozens of chains the same cross-chain button. It's about enabling different execution environments to trust each other's state faster and at a lower cost.

III. When L1 Becomes a Rollup, Do Hierarchical Boundaries Still Exist?

If changes in L2 positioning and shortened finality are still adjustments within the existing layered architecture, then another point raised by Barnabé touches upon the very definitions of L1 and L2: As proof systems enter the Ethereum mainnet, L1 might ultimately become a form of 'its own Rollup.'

This sounds counterintuitive.

After all, a Rollup is typically understood as a scaling network built *on top of* L1. It executes transactions externally, and L1 verifies the resulting state. How can Ethereum itself, the underlying consensus and settlement network, become its own L2?

To understand this, we need to decouple the concept of "Rollup" from the hierarchical relationship. In today's Ethereum, when a node receives a block, it must re-execute *all* transactions within it, independently compute the state change, and verify that the block follows protocol rules.

This model ensures nodes can verify independently, but it also means the network's overall execution capacity is constrained by the hardware capabilities of average nodes. The more computation in a block, the more hardware and time validators need to complete execution.

In the future, as real-time proving and L1 zkEVM mature, transactions could still be computed by high-performance execution nodes, but regular validators might not need to re-execute every transaction themselves. For instance, an execution node generates a validity proof after computation. Other validators only need to verify the smaller, cheaper proof to confirm the state transition is correct.

From the perspective of the execution-verification relationship, this is indeed similar to a Rollup. Some participants handle high-performance execution, the results are compressed into a cryptographic proof, and the broader consensus participants no longer repeat the entire computation but verify the proof to confirm the final state.

Therefore, Barnabé's statement "L1 becoming its own Rollup" is best understood as a summary of this verification model, not as Ethereum's mainnet being placed on top of another base layer or being "downgraded" to its own L2.

His key point is that when proofs gradually replace repetitive execution by all nodes, 'Rollup' may cease to be just a layer name above L1 and become a more general architecture for execution and verification.

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

On one hand, L1 can leverage zkEVM proofs to expand its own execution capacity. On the other hand, Native Rollups aim to allow L2s to more directly call upon Ethereum's in-protocol verification capabilities, 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 councils. If a proof system has an error, an emergency protocol upgrade is needed, or the operator fails, users often rely on additional governance and trust structures. The long-term direction for Native Rollups is to embed some of the Rollup verification logic into Ethereum's native capabilities. This would allow L2s to reduce their self-built security infrastructure, more fully inherit L1's state transition rules, and potentially move away from relying on security councils.

Taking a step further, if multiple L2s can access each other's state via faster L1 confirmation, unified proof mechanisms, and synchronous composability, their relationship with the mainnet might no longer resemble a network connected by numerous bridges.

They would look more like multiple execution domains under the same Ethereum consensus umbrella. Some would handle general financial activities, others target gaming, social, or payments, others offer privacy or specific compliance capabilities. They would have different execution logic and product forms, yet share a common verifiable state, security foundation, and asset settlement system.

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

But regardless of how these technologies are ultimately implemented, they are already transforming the boundary between L1 and L2 from a clear architectural line into a spectrum of varying degrees of security inheritance.

Final Thoughts

Empires wax and wane; the world is in constant flux.

Ethereum once achieved global composability through a shared state. It later disaggregated execution via Rollups to gain greater capacity. Now, its task is to reconnect the fragmented assets, accounts, and applications without reversing the scaling gains.

For ordinary users, the ideal Ethereum should never be a network map of dozens of chains, different Gas tokens, and bridges. Where a transaction executes, which chain provides liquidity, and who ultimately settles it 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 improved user experience.

Therefore, the endgame for L2s might be neither to replace L1 nor to be obsoleted by an ever-scaling L1. Instead, they could become a set of execution environments offering diverse functionalities and performance levels, yet sharing security, liquidity, and state relationships.

In the past, Ethereum gained greater capacity by breaking execution apart.

In the next phase, let's see if, after breaking apart, it can still be reassembled into a single Ethereum.