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

Author: imToken

Recently, the most discussed topic in the Ethereum community has undoubtedly been 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 by the market as a pessimistic or even negative view of L2. However, a careful analysis of Vitalik’s core points, combined with Ethereum’s series of mainnet scaling progress, decentralization assessment frameworks, and recent technical discussions around Native/Based Rollup, 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 is redefining roles—L1 returns to its core function as the most secure settlement layer, 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, in the previous cycle, L2 was indeed seen as Ethereum’s lifeline.

In the initial Rollup-Centric roadmap, roles were very clear: L1 responsible for security and data availability, L2 responsible for extreme scalability and low gas fees. During an era when gas fees could reach dozens of dollars, this was almost the only feasible answer.

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’s a fundamental point: as early as 2022, Vitalik criticized most Rollup “training wheels” architectures in his blog, stating 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 (completely reliant on centralized control), Stage 1 (limited reliance), and Stage 2 (fully decentralized). It also reflects the degree of dependence on manual intervention.

Recently, Vitalik pointed out that some L2s, due to regulatory or commercial reasons, may remain forever 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 brands.”

To put it bluntly, if control over ordering, upgrades, and final authority is concentrated in a few entities, it not only contradicts Ethereum’s decentralization ethos but also turns L2 into a parasitic entity that drains resources from the mainnet.

Meanwhile, the explosion in the number of L2 solutions has brought about another deep-seated structural issue: liquidity fragmentation.

This has gradually dispersed the traffic originally concentrated on Ethereum, creating isolated value islands. As the number of public chains and L2s increases, liquidity fragmentation worsens—contrary to the original 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—strengthening L1’s role as the most trusted global settlement layer through institutionalized scaling and protocol-native security mechanisms.

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; L2 should pursue differentiation and specialization, supporting activities that require the best user experience.

2. Native Rollup: Based Rollup + pre-confirmation—The future?

It is in this wave of reflection on L2 narratives that the concept of Based Rollup is expected to shine in 2026.

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 hot topic of “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 main difference between Based Rollup and traditional L2s like Arbitrum or Optimism is that it completely abandons independent, even centralized sequencers, instead relying on Ethereum L1 nodes for ordering. In other words, the validation logic of Rollup is integrated directly into the Ethereum protocol itself at the L1 level, unifying the performance optimization and protocol-level security previously divided between L2 and mainnet.

This design gives users the most direct experience: Rollup feels embedded within Ethereum, inheriting L1’s censorship resistance and activity, and crucially solving the most challenging L2 problem—synchronous composability. Within a Based Rollup block, you can directly invoke L1 liquidity, enabling atomic cross-layer transactions.

However, Based Rollup faces a practical challenge: if it fully follows L1’s pace (12 seconds per slot), user experience may become sluggish. Currently, even if transactions are included in a block, finality takes about 13 minutes (2 epochs), which is too slow for financial applications.

Interestingly, on Vitalik’s reflection tweet about L2, he recommended a community proposal from January: “Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability.” The core idea isn’t just promoting Based Rollup but proposing 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 committed to L1, a designated role (such as the proposer) commits to including them. This aligns with Ethereum’s Interop roadmap’s Project #4: Fast L1 Confirmation Rule.

Its 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 occurring in each Ethereum PoS slot. When a block accumulates enough and sufficiently dispersed validator votes early in the slot, even before finality, it can be considered “extremely unlikely to be rolled back under reasonable attack models.”

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

This layered confirmation approach allows Ethereum to finely balance “security” and “perceived speed,” potentially creating an ultra-smooth interoperability experience (see also “Ethereum’s ‘second-level’ evolution: from fast confirmation to settlement compression, how Interop eliminates waiting time”).

3. What is Ethereum’s future?

Looking back from 2026, Ethereum’s main theme is quietly shifting from pursuing extreme “scalability” to emphasizing “unification, layering, and endogenous 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 signals an important shift: the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a painful but necessary de-foaming process—shifting from “pursuing chain quantity” back to “protocol unification.”

However, as Ethereum’s foundational roadmap is recalibrated and advanced, especially with ongoing improvements to L1, Based Rollup, and pre-confirmation mechanisms, the underlying performance bottleneck is no longer the chain itself. A more pressing issue emerges: the biggest bottleneck is now wallets and entry barriers.

This echoes the insight repeatedly emphasized by imToken in 2025: as infrastructure becomes more invisible, the true limit of scalability will be determined by entry-level user experience.

Overall, beyond core scalability, the future of Ethereum’s ecosystem expansion and scaling will not focus solely on TPS or blob counts but will revolve around three structurally significant directions:

• Account abstraction and entry barrier elimination: Ethereum is pushing for native account abstraction (Native AA). Future smart contract wallets will become the default, replacing cumbersome mnemonic phrases and EOA addresses. For imToken users, this means entering the crypto world as easily as registering a social account.
• 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 key competitive advantage in the public chain space.
• On-chain sovereignty of AI Agents: 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 are not manipulated by third parties? Ethereum’s decentralized settlement layer will serve as the most reliable rule arbiter for the AI economy.

Returning to the initial question: has Vitalik truly “negated” L2?

A more accurate understanding is that he is rejecting an over-expansive, fragmented narrative detached from the mainnet. This is not the end but a new beginning. From the grand illusion of “sharded brands” back to the refined integration of Based Rollup and pre-confirmation, this shift actually reinforces Ethereum L1’s position as the global trust backbone.

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 era of exploration.