Community Perspective on L2: Understanding Vitalik's Correct Statement About Native Rollup and the Future of Ethereum

In recent months, the Ethereum community has experienced a significant wave of reinterpretation regarding the scalability roadmap presented by Vitalik Buterin. However, many community statements mistakenly believe that this approach means Vitalik “rejects” Layer 2, when the correct understanding is that this vision represents a fundamental strategic adjustment—Ethereum is shifting focus from uncoordinated expansion to deeper consolidation with stronger security guarantees.

Why Community Statements About “Rejecting L2” Are Misleading

When Vitalik openly criticizes the five-year roadmap that positioned L2 as the primary expansion solution as needing adjustment, community voices reacted negatively—some even interpreted this as a signal that L2 would be completely abandoned. However, the accurate community perspective shows that many fail to distinguish between “criticism of the current L2 model” and “rejection of L2’s existence.”

Objectively, in an era where Ethereum gas fees remain a significant barrier, L2 has played an unparalleled historical role. According to the latest data from L2BEAT, the L2 ecosystem has grown to encompass hundreds of implementations. But growth in numbers does not equate to structural maturity. Most of these L2 solutions are still in “Phase 1” of decentralization—meaning they still rely on centralized security councils and human interventions to ensure integrity. This is Vitalik’s critical diagnosis: not about the existence of L2, but about the quality of decentralization and their long-term commitment.

Liquidity Fragmentation: Limited Community Understanding of the Core Issue

The accurate statement about the modern community is that many have not fully grasped the impact of liquidity fragmentation. As the number of L2s continues to grow without clear protocol coordination, the flow of value once concentrated on Ethereum gradually breaks into isolated islands, each maintaining shallow markets.

In this structure, not only do users experience fragmented interactions, but the blockchain infrastructure itself loses economic efficiency. Vitalik emphasizes that the next strategic step is not to create more chains, but to integrate L2s more deeply into L1 protocols. This approach is not abandonment—it’s a repositioning necessary to restore Ethereum’s primary function as the world’s most secure settlement layer.

Based Rollup and Pre-Confirmation: The Technical Foundation of the Community’s Correct Perspective

The most accurate community statement today is the recognition that emerging technologies—particularly Based Rollup and pre-confirmation mechanisms—represent evolution, not revolution, in Ethereum’s thinking.

Unlike traditional L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism that rely on independent sequencers (often centralized), Based Rollup integrates verification logic directly into the L1 protocol. This means transactions are ordered by Ethereum validators themselves, not third-party entities. With this design, users benefit from cross-layer composability—within a single Based Rollup block, you can access L1 liquidity directly.

A real technical challenge is latency. Fully following L1’s rhythm (12 seconds per slot) still requires about 13 minutes to reach full finality. For financial use cases, this is considered too slow. Vitalik’s recommended solution in January is a hybrid structure: maintaining low-latency sequential blocks in the initial phase, then producing final blocks at the end of slots, and integrating pre-confirmation mechanisms to achieve synchronous composability.

In this model, pre-confirmation creates an intermediate trust layer: when transactions are submitted to L1, certain roles (like L1 proposers) commit to including them, providing a “strong and verifiable” confirmation signal within 15–30 seconds. This aligns with the clear roadmap mentioning “L1 Fast Confirmation Rules” as a priority project.

Three Directions of Structural Growth: Community Consensus on Ethereum’s Future

The correct statement about the modern Ethereum community is an evolving understanding that future growth will not be measured solely by TPS or the number of blobs, but by three fundamental pillars:

First, native account abstraction. The Ethereum Foundation is pushing for native Account Abstraction, which will make smart contract wallets the default standard. This eliminates the complexity of recovery phrases and traditional EOA addresses, reducing entry barriers to the level of social media account registration.

Second, privacy and ZK-EVM. As Zero-Knowledge technology matures, Ethereum will provide on-chain privacy protections needed for commercial applications while maintaining transparency. This will be a competitive advantage in the race among public blockchains.

Third, on-chain sovereignty for AI agents. By 2026, transaction initiators may no longer be just humans but autonomous AI agents. The emerging challenge is to build verified interaction standards: how to ensure AI agents truly execute user intent without third-party influence. Ethereum’s decentralized settlement layer will become the most trusted arbiter in the growing AI economy.

Final Consensus: What Vitalik Is Truly Saying

Returning to the initial question often misunderstood by the community: is Vitalik truly rejecting L2? The correct community statement is that Vitalik’s critique is not about L2 itself, but about the excessive fragmentation narrative where each chain operates independently without protocol cohesion. Vitalik rejects the illusion of “separate shards,” but welcomes Based Rollup and pre-confirmation mechanisms rooted in Ethereum’s decentralization principles and aligned with the mainnet.

This is a transition from temporary pragmatism to sustainable pragmatism. Only innovations that truly align with the foundations of the new generation of Ethereum—strengthening, not weakening, the L1 as the global trust layer—will endure and thrive in the next era of exploration. That is the most accurate community statement to understand Ethereum’s future.