Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflection: Saying Goodbye to Fragmentation, Restoring Order in the New Stage with Native Rollup

The hottest topic currently discussed within the Ethereum community is undoubtedly Vitalik Buterin’s public reflection on the scalability roadmap.

It can be said that Vitalik’s attitude is quite “sharp,” openly stating that as Ethereum’s mainnet (L1) scalability improves, the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the primary scaling solution, has become invalid.

This statement was initially interpreted negatively by the market as a dismissal or even negation of L2. However, a careful review of Vitalik’s core viewpoints, combined with recent progress in Ethereum’s mainnet scaling, decentralization assessment frameworks, and technical discussions around native/based rollups, reveals that Vitalik is not entirely dismissing the value of L2. Instead, it’s more of a “correction of course”:

Ethereum is not abandoning L2 but rather redefining roles—L1 returns to its safest settlement layer position, while L2 pursues differentiation and specialization, allowing the strategic focus to shift back to the mainnet itself.

1. Has L2 fulfilled its historical mission?

Objectively speaking, during the previous cycle, L2 was indeed seen as Ethereum’s lifeline.

In the initial rollup-centric roadmap, the division of responsibilities was very clear: L1 responsible for security and data availability, L2 for extreme scalability and low gas fees. In an era where gas fees could easily reach dozens of dollars, this was almost the only feasible solution.

But reality has proven to be much more complex than expected.

Latest statistics from L2BEAT show that there are now over a hundred generalized L2 solutions, but the proliferation of numbers does not equate to a mature structure. Most are progressing slowly in decentralization.

Here, a fundamental knowledge point needs to be clarified: as early as 2022, Vitalik criticized most rollups’ “training wheels” architecture in his blog, stating that they rely on centralized operations and manual interventions for security. Users familiar with L2BEAT will recognize this, as their homepage displays a key metric—Stage:

This is an evaluation framework dividing rollups into three decentralization stages: Stage 0, fully dependent on centralized control; Stage 1, with limited reliance; and Stage 2, fully decentralized. It also reflects the degree of reliance on manual intervention.

Recently, Vitalik pointed out that some L2s, due to regulatory or commercial reasons, might remain at “Stage 1,” relying on a security council to control upgrades. This essentially makes such L2s a “secondary L1” with cross-chain bridging properties, rather than the originally envisioned “sharded chain.”

To put it plainly, if control over ordering, upgrades, and final decision-making is concentrated in a few entities, it not only contradicts Ethereum’s decentralization ethos but also makes L2 a parasitic “bloodsucker” on the mainnet.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of L2s has led to another deep-seated structural issue: liquidity fragmentation.

This causes the original traffic on Ethereum to be gradually divided into isolated value islands, and as the number of public chains and L2s increases, the degree of fragmentation worsens—something contrary to the initial purpose of scalability.

From this perspective, it’s understandable why Vitalik emphasizes that the next step for L2 is not more chains but deeper integration. Ultimately, this is a timely correction—through institutionalized scaling and protocol-intrinsic security mechanisms, reinforcing L1’s role as the most trusted global settlement layer.

In this context, scalability is no longer the sole goal. Security, neutrality, and predictability have become core assets of Ethereum again. The future of L2 is not about quantity but about deeper integration with the mainnet and innovation in specialized scenarios.

For example, providing unique additional functions such as privacy-specific virtual machines, extreme scalability, or dedicated environments for AI agents and non-financial applications.

Ethereum Foundation co-CEO Wang Xiaowei’s (Hsiao-Wei Wang) views at Consensus 2026 align with this: L1 should serve as the most secure settlement layer, carrying the most critical activities; while L2 should pursue differentiation and specialization, supporting activities that require optimal user experience.

2. Native Rollup: Based Rollup + pre-confirmation—what’s the future?

Amid this wave of reflection on L2 narratives, the concept of Based Rollup is poised to shine in 2026.

Because if the past five years’ keyword was “Rollup-Centric,” the current discussion is shifting toward a more specific question: can rollups “grow inside Ethereum” rather than “hang outside Ethereum”?

Thus, the currently popular “Native Rollup” in the Ethereum community can be understood as an extension of the Based Rollup concept—if native rollup is the ultimate ideal, then Based Rollup is the most practical path toward that ideal.

As is well known, the biggest difference between Based Rollup and traditional L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism is that it completely abandons independent, even centralized sequencers, instead relying on Ethereum L1 nodes for ordering. In other words, the protocol itself integrates rollup-like validation logic at the L1 layer, unifying the performance optimization and protocol-level security previously split between L2 and the mainnet.

This design gives users the most direct experience: rollups seem embedded within Ethereum, inheriting L1’s censorship resistance and activity, and more importantly, solving the most vexing L2 problem—synchronous composability. Within a Based Rollup block, you can directly call L1 liquidity to achieve atomic cross-layer transactions.

However, Based Rollup faces a practical challenge: if it fully follows L1’s pace (a slot every 12 seconds), user experience may become sluggish. Under current Ethereum architecture, even if transactions are included in a block, it still takes about 13 minutes (two epochs) to reach finality—far too slow for financial applications.

Interestingly, on Vitalik’s reflection tweet about L2, he recommended a community proposal from January titled “Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability.” The core idea isn’t just to promote Based Rollup but to propose a hybrid structure:

Retain low-latency sequenced blocks, generate based blocks at the end of each slot, submit these to L1, and then combine with pre-confirmation mechanisms to achieve synchronous composability.

In Based Rollup, pre-confirmation means that before transactions are officially submitted to L1, a designated role (such as an L1 proposer) commits to including them. This aligns with Ethereum’s Interop roadmap’s Project #4: Fast L1 Confirmation Rule.

The goal is straightforward: enable applications and cross-chain systems to receive a “strong and verifiable” L1 confirmation signal within 15–30 seconds, without waiting for the full 13-minute finality.

Mechanistically, the fast confirmation rule doesn’t introduce new consensus processes but reuses attester votes that occur in each Ethereum PoS slot. When a block accumulates enough, sufficiently dispersed validator votes early in the slot, it can be considered “highly unlikely to be rolled back under reasonable attack models,” even before finality.

In simple terms, this confirmation level doesn’t replace finality but provides a protocol-acknowledged strong confirmation before finality. For cross-chain systems, intent solvers, and wallets, this is crucial: they no longer need to blindly wait for finality but can confidently proceed within 15–30 seconds based on protocol signals.

This layered confirmation logic allows Ethereum to finely distinguish different trust levels between “security” and “perceived speed,” promising a smoother interoperability experience (see also “Ethereum’s ‘second-level’ evolution: from fast confirmation to settlement compression—how Interop eliminates waiting?”).

3. What is Ethereum’s future?

Looking back from 2026, Ethereum’s main theme is quietly shifting from pursuing extreme “scalability” to seeking “unification, layering, and intrinsic security.”

Last month, several senior executives from Ethereum L2 projects expressed willingness to explore and embrace native rollup pathways to improve network consistency and synergy. This attitude itself signals an important trend: Ethereum’s ecosystem is undergoing a painful but necessary de-bubble process—shifting focus from “chain quantity” to “protocol unification.”

However, as Ethereum’s underlying roadmap is recalibrated and advanced, especially with continuous improvements to L1, Based Rollup, and pre-confirmation mechanisms, the underlying performance is no longer the only bottleneck. A more tangible challenge emerges: the biggest bottleneck is no longer the chain but wallets and entry barriers.

This echoes the insight repeatedly emphasized by imToken in 2025: as infrastructure becomes more invisible, the real limit to scale is the user experience at entry points.

Overall, beyond layer-1 scaling, the future of Ethereum’s ecosystem expansion and scaling will not just focus on TPS or blob counts but will revolve around three more structurally meaningful directions:

Account abstraction and lowering entry barriers: Ethereum is pushing for native account abstraction (Native AA). Future smart contract wallets will become the default, replacing obscure mnemonic phrases and EOA addresses. For imToken users, entering the crypto world will become as simple as registering a social account (see also “From EOA to account abstraction: Will the next leap in Web3 happen in the ‘account system’?”).

Privacy and ZK-EVM: Privacy features are no longer fringe needs. As ZK-EVM technology matures, Ethereum will maintain transparency while providing on-chain privacy protections for commercial applications—becoming a core competitive advantage in public chain competition (see “ZK roadmap ‘dawn’: Is Ethereum’s finality roadmap accelerating?”).

AI Agents’ on-chain sovereignty: By 2026, transaction initiators may no longer be humans but AI agents. The challenge will be establishing trustless interaction standards: how to ensure AI agents act according to user intent and aren’t manipulated by third parties? Ethereum’s decentralized settlement layer will become the most reliable rule-setter for the AI economy (see “New tickets for the AI agent era: Pushing ERC-8004, what is Ethereum betting on?”).

Returning to the initial question—has Vitalik really “negated” L2?

A more accurate understanding is that he is negating an over-expansive, detached, fragmented narrative—this is not the end but a new beginning. Moving from the grand dream of “sharded chains” back to the refined design of Based Rollup and pre-confirmation actually helps reinforce Ethereum L1’s position as the global trust layer.

However, this also means that in this pragmatic return to technology, only innovations rooted in Ethereum’s new foundational principles—those aligned with the mainnet’s destiny—will survive and thrive in the next great voyage.