Vitalik personally "executes" the L2 narrative: Is Ethereum stabbing the entire crypto community in the back?

If you're still bragging about "Layer 2 blooming in all directions," you might have already been buried by Vitalik himself.

Recently, his reflection, which the community sees as a technical discussion, to me reads like a dire warning for the entire clone L2 ecosystem. Vitalik straightforwardly said: the roadmap from five years ago has failed.

Don’t listen to those soft interpretations claiming “clear division of labor.” In plain English, that means: you L2s, stop bleeding on the mainnet.

1. The Emperor’s New Clothes of L2: Who’s Naked?

Over the past two years, what has been the biggest bubble in crypto? Not MEME tokens, but “pseudo-decentralized” L2s.

This time, Vitalik directly slammed the table, smashing the evaluation framework called “Stage” in everyone’s face. Data shows that over a hundred L2s are still in Stage 0, nursing their early growth.

What is Stage 0? It’s a sheep’s head hanging on a Rollup, selling multisig servers as the dog meat. The sorting authority is in my hands, the upgrade rights are in my hands, and even if I want to rug someday, it’s just a multisig voting matter.

What is this? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes of blockchain.

Vitalik sees through it clearly: these so-called L2s are essentially parasites disguised as “sharding brands.” They haven’t inherited Ethereum’s decentralized spirit; instead, they fatten their wallets by exploiting the security and liquidity of the mainnet, carving up the entire Ethereum ecosystem into isolated value islands.

What does this mean for crypto? It means that the “ecosystem tokens” you hold might just be game tokens trapped in a centralized playground—unable to exit or exchange.

2. Native Rollup: Ethereum’s “Purging the Court”

Now, Vitalik is ready to act. His weapon is called “Native Rollup.”

If previous L2s were like “hot air balloons” hanging outside Ethereum—flying high but at risk of losing connection and drifting away—now, Vitalik plans to replace that string with a steel cable, even welding the hot air balloon directly onto the mainnet.

This is the ultimate form of Based Rollup—confiscating L2’s independent ordering rights.

It’s an extremely alarming signal: Ethereum is reclaiming its “minting rights.” Future Rollups will no longer need their own sequencers or governance tokens to maintain a semblance of pseudo-decentralization. Ordering will be dictated by L1 validators, and security guaranteed by L1 finality.

Where does the value capture for L2 tokens lie? Vitalik didn’t answer, but the answer is already in the code: it might have no value anymore.

3. Blood in the Streets: Who’s Shaking?

This is a structural blow to the entire crypto market:

1. Valuation system collapse: L2 projects relying on “modular blockchain” narratives and selling “sequencers” for mining will see their valuation logic cut in half. If the ordering rights aren’t in your hands, what justifies your token’s billion-dollar market cap?

2. Liquidity migration: When Native Rollup achieves “synchronous composability,” funds will instantly flow back to the mainnet. Cross-chain bridges and middleware protocols built during L2 fragmentation will face extinction.

3. End of the “Grind and Loot” era: Vitalik aims to eliminate not just technical redundancy but also the business models that rely on data spamming and stacking tokens to farm airdrops. When L2 becomes just a feature of the mainnet, with no independent economic entity, how many “wealth creation myths” can still be replayed?

4. The Last Noah’s Ark

Of course, this isn’t the end of the world—it’s a major cleanup.

In the future, only two types of projects will survive in crypto:

One is those that fully embrace the mainnet, honestly building Based Rollups, entrusting security entirely to L1 “obedient children”;

The other is those that create extreme differentiation at the application layer, such as ultra-fast networks for AI agents trading or privacy-preserving dark pools with native privacy features.

Vitalik’s reflection this time is essentially a declaration to the entire market: stop dreaming. The era of raising funds just by launching a chain is over. $ETH ‌

For investors, this is a stage more terrifying than a bear market—the death of narrative logic. If you still cling to those Stage 0 “pseudo-L2s,” what awaits you might not be a soft landing but a free fall.