Analysis of Ethereum development strategy: Expand L1 or develop Rollups?

Author: Mat Source: X, @materkel Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

I am tired of all the negative talk around Ethereum and Rollup, the whole ecosystem is now in a stage of crazy development. Those who only see what we have now and still think that Ethereum should prioritize the expansion of L1...are you crazy?

Let me tell you what will happen if we expand L1:

• Now the TPS on L1 may only be 50-100, I believe all skeptics will do everything on Ethereum L1.

• Previously aligned with Ethereum's Rollup will definitely choose alternatives to achieve DA scalability (now Ethereum can be used as a DA implementation).

• We will not have hundreds of Rollup teams contributing to the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem.

• Marketing for the Ethereum ecosystem will be minimal… L2s will just end up doing their own thing, because why would they stick around if Ethereum chooses to abandon them when it matters most?

Despite funding a ton of ZK and Rollup research in the past (even 5+ years ago), Ethereum will basically push its most valuable ally away.

Now that we have far more to gain from L2s, and with PeerDAS and full proto-Danksharding on the horizon, there will no longer be any argument as to why these Rollups would even consider doing “their own thing” or choosing a different DA. I mean, look at what’s happening with $TIA… Ethereum is basically cannibalizing their market share now.

We now have:

• Multiple consensus and execution client teams, making Ethereum the most decentralized public blockchain to date. As far as I know, no other blockchain has 2 widely adopted clients… Ethereum has 7 clients with >10% of adoption, which is incredible.

• Multiple Rollups are currently one of the most active chains

• Base and Arbitrum are both breaking their own records every few days, attracting billions of TVL and millions of users, scaling like crazy, having significant traction, and having growing application ecosystems

• More Ethereum-centric themes L2, such as Immutable attracting hundreds of game studios and ultimately millions of gamers

• Account abstraction wallets with sponsored meta transactions via Immutable passport or infinex, which is not easily possible on L1 (at least not this quickly)

• The cheapest L1 gas fees we are likely to have. Introducing blobs with EIP-4844 makes room for more meaningful transactions. At its peak, L2 took up about 30% of Ethereum blockspace (this was most likely temporary and bought us some time to focus on L1)

I have no doubt that what Ethereum is doing is the best protocol outcome we could have hoped to see over the last 3-4 years.

Of course, there could be some improvements to L1, but this criticism is overblown and feels like we are just making excuses because the price is what we expected.

If you told me 3-4 years ago what Ethereum would be like now, I can't imagine it being in a more solid position.

Now we can discuss what to do next, whether going further down the Rollup route might not be a good idea, or whether we should focus on fixing issues like fragmentation, and whether delaying things to focus on L1 improvements is a good idea. I fully support this, but please stop all the complaining because we just released an upgrade a few months ago that makes fees for Base and other Rollups sub 1 cent…

Ethereum and its entire ecosystem is still winning, and there is nothing stopping it from winning even more as this behemoth scaled in parallel by thousands of ecosystem teams is just getting started.