- The best developers in Ethereum cite the urgency in housing cooperation.
- The so-called native Rollups could provide greater safety to the blocks of layer 2.
- Ether’s dull price performance fueled a wave of anger this month.
A developer described it as “inflection moment”. Another called it, simply, “war time”.
On Friday, several influential software developers based on Ethereum undertook to cooperate after the second world blockchain was shot this month by accusations which it loses quickly.
The problem is an old – Ethereum can make its promise as the backbone of a new decentralized internet? The developers of the blockchains of layer 2 competitors, including the base, optimism, arbitrum and scrolling, said that they would collaborate to overcome a key problem on this score: the meaning that the blockchain community fractures In dozens of fiefdoms while layer 2 competes for users and liquidity.
“I do not know if you can feel it in the air, but I think you can: it’s war,” said Ben Jones, co-founder of Optimism, during a virtual meeting led by the Researcher of the Ethereum Justin Drake Foundation.
“It’s time to make improvements in our ecosystem.”
Admittedly, the developers of Ethereum have published major upgrades each of the last three years. These upgrades have considerably reduced its energy consumption and the cost of transactions on the blockchains of layer 2.
But the cryptocurrency of the blockchain, Ether, was a disappointment. Even if Bitcoin and Solana broke the price records set three years earlier, Ether in 2024 and early 2025 oscillated just above $ 3,000, or about 30% of its own top of all time.
The criticisms turned their attention to the Ethereum Foundation, a non -profit organization based in Switzerland led by the co -founder and the figurehead of the blockchain, Vitalik Buterin.
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The criticism of the Foundation, which has simmered for months, boiled this month, when long-time supporters have called for the ousting of executive director Aya Miyaguchi.
The calls are mounted for the formation of a competing foundation that would make Ether prices performance a priority and play a more muscular role in the continuous development of blockchain.
In an article shared on X last weekend, Buterin said that the foundation brought “important changes” to leadership, although it insisted that these changes preceded the recent controversy.
Ethereum developers said on Friday’s call that they felt the emergency of the moment.
“We are in a moment of inflection, and the world is starting to go to an increasingly fast pace,” said Jesse Pollak, the developer behind the basic blockchain of Coinbase.
“And at the moment, we are not well placed to enter this request.”
He declared that his colleagues have projected an increase of 10 to 20 times of demand this year, much more than the expected additional capacity during the next major upgrade of Ethereum, the code name Pectra.
“We are in war mode,” said Drake, researcher of the Ethereum Foundation. “We change speed and move much faster.”
Last week, he published a proposal for “native rollups” which would bring layer 2 blockchains in a more in-depth alignment with Ethereum itself.
It was very technical – but the key to long -term success of Ethereum, argued Drake.
Ethereum is slow and expensive, the cost of its accent on decentralization or “resistance to censorship” in cryptographic language.
To achieve its ambition to become a “global computer”, Ethereum adopted the so-called blockchains of layer 2.
Also known as Rollups, they treat transactions separately before grouping them and submit them to Ethereum. Friday, there were 56 layer 2 blockchains in operation, according to L2Beat.
But many are relatively centralized, based on small committees with special privileges to upgrade emergency and routine. The native rollers would have much greater security than the blockchains of the layer 2 of today, which makes these committees unnecessary.
“If we want to bring national states and institutions and a lot of money – think of the billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars – we cannot have these security advice. We cannot have bugs, we cannot have governance, “said Drake.
In short, the blockchains of layer 2 must adopt the emphasis on decentralization and reliability which has become the Ethereum call card, he said.
On Friday, the founders of certain Blockchains in layer 2 said they had supported Drake’s proposal.
“Until a day or two ago, I was quite lower on the idea of native rollers,” said the co -founder of Arbitrum, Steven Goldfeder, in a pre -recorded message shared during the meeting.
Goldfeder said that he had initially thought that the concept would force the developers of the blockchains of the layer 2 to adopt a very specific technology, stifling innovation.
But a blog article by Buerin published Thursday had convinced the opposite of Goldfeder.
“It’s a fantastic vision, but it is also at the start of the research phase.”
Jones, the co-founder of optimism, said that he could see optimism pursuing indigenous rolling technology. However, he also underlined the need to bring under-centuries and subsecond transactions to Ethereum himself.
Basic Pollak, on the other hand, said that nothing was more important than supporting the construction applications for developers at the top of Ethereum and its dozens of layer 2 blockchains.
“The only thing that matters is to deliver products to customers they love,” he said.
“If we don’t do that, none of this is important and I think that frankly, there is still a ton of opportunities to do better.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News“DEFI correspondent based in New York. You can contact him at Aleks@dlnews.com.
