Vitalik Buterin signals a major reframing of Ethereum’s layer 2 narrative: not the death of rollups, but the end of the idea that L2s are shards whose primary job is to scale the network. While L1 fees are now low and the gas limit is expected to increase sharply in 2026, he says the initial principle of the roadmap focused on accumulation no longer corresponds to the reality on the ground.
Buterin opened his post According to him, these trends break the old mental model in both directions.
“Ethereum must evolve,” he wrote, recapping what he presented as the original thesis. “The definition of “Ethereum scaling” is the existence of large amounts of block space that are backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum… a block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself runs. If you create an EVM of 10,000 TPS where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.
The punchline is direct: “This vision no longer makes sense. » Buterin asserts that L1 does not need L2s to serve as “brand fragments” if base layer capacity increases, and he is increasingly skeptical that many L2s can or will meet the expectations of security and control that the label implies. He highlighted at least one L2 who, in his words, “may never want to move beyond stage 1,” citing not only technical concerns about ZK-EVM security, but also customer-focused regulatory requirements that “require them to have ultimate control.”
The need to change Ethereum Layer-2
This is not presented as an indictment so much as a change in categorization. If an L2 retains ultimate control, it can still be a valuable product for its users, Buterin suggested, but it should not be marketed as “Ethereum scaling” in the strict sense envisioned by the stack-centric roadmap. In this context, he argues, “we should stop considering L2s as ‘brand fragments’, with the social status and responsibilities that entails. »
Instead, it sketches a spectrum model: some L2s may be tightly backed by ETH’s security guarantees, while others may be looser and more optional depending on user needs. This spectrum framing implicitly leaves room for application-specific chains, different trust models, and non-EVM environments, without forcing them into a single “group as a chunk” scenario.
For L2 teams, Buterin’s advice is simple: stop anchoring your identity on evolution alone. If you manage assets issued by ETH or Ethereum, he says “step 1 at a minimum” is important; otherwise, you effectively operate as “just a separate L1 with a bridge”. The real differentiator, he says, should be the features and properties that a larger L1 still won’t provide, whether it’s specialized execution environments, privacy, sequencing features like ultra-low latency, or non-financial use cases.
Buterin says he became “more convinced of the value of native rollup precompilation,” especially once Ethereum dedicated the ZK-EVM proof verification that it “needs anyway to scale to L1.” The idea is a protocol-level precompilation that verifies ZK-EVM proofs and is treated as part of Ethereum itself, meaning it would “automatically upgrade with Ethereum” and if it shipped with a bug, “Ethereum will do a hard fork to fix the bug.”
That last point is the subtext: he wants a path where trustless verification and interoperability are easier to achieve without a “security council”, and where rollups can add custom functionality while anchoring their EVM correctness directly to Ethereum. He also linked this focus to the prospect of synchronous composability: transactions that can securely cover L1 and L2 liquidity with tight coupling, referencing ongoing research into combining preconfirmations with based rollups and real-time proof.
Buterin’s conclusion leaves room for uncomfortable results. A permissionless ecosystem will produce chains with elements that are “trust-dependent, or hijacked, or otherwise insecure,” he wrote, calling this “inevitable.” The work, as he describes it, is to make collateral readable to users while strengthening Ethereum’s base layer, suggesting that the next phase of L2 competition may be less about who “scales Ethereum” and more about who can credibly define and prove what they are actually proposing.
At press time, ETH was trading at $2,256.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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