L2 « recalibrage » : quand L1 devient son propre Rollup, quel est le destin final d’Ethereum ?
"L2 Recalibration": When L1 Becomes Its Own Rollup, What Is Ethereum's Endgame?
In recent years, the proliferation of L2s (Rollups) has solved Ethereum's scalability issues but at the cost of fragmenting liquidity, user states, and the unified chain experience. This has prompted a fundamental reevaluation of the relationship between L1 and L2 within the Ethereum community.
Ethereum's roadmap is evolving. The core challenge is no longer just creating more block space, but redefining the roles of L1, L2, execution, and settlement layers in a fragmented ecosystem. L1 is actively enhancing its own scalability (increasing Gas Limit, statelessness, zkEVM). Consequently, L2s can no longer rely solely on "cheaper, faster transactions" for long-term value. Their future role shifts towards providing differentiated features (privacy, custom governance, application-specific optimizations) that L1 cannot easily offer uniformly, while still contributing extra capacity.
Interoperability is key to restoring a seamless user experience. The goal is not just cross-chain bridges but enabling different execution environments to trust each other's states faster and at lower cost. Initiatives like Open Intents Frameworks and the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aim to make cross-L2 interactions feel like single-chain transactions. Crucially, shortening Ethereum's finality time (from minutes to seconds) is a major focus, as it directly benefits cross-chain applications by reducing the trust latency for state changes.
A provocative idea from researcher Barnabé Monnot suggests that as proof systems (like zkEVM) mature on mainnet, L1 itself could become a form of "its own Rollup." Here, specialized nodes would execute transactions and generate validity proofs, while validators would verify these proofs instead of re-executing everything. This blurs the traditional L1/L2 hierarchy, making "Rollup" more of a general execution-verification architecture than a strict layer. The vision is a future where multiple L2s act as specialized execution domains (for DeFi, gaming, privacy, etc.) under a shared Ethereum security, settlement, and state framework—a system that is fragmented in execution but unified in trust and liquidity.
In conclusion, Ethereum's endgame is not L2s replacing L1 or being made obsolete by a scaled L1. It is an ecosystem where L2s become a spectrum of execution environments with varying features, all capable of securely interoperating and sharing Ethereum's foundational security and liquidity. The next phase is about re-integrating what was fragmented back into a coherent, user-friendly "one chain" experience.
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