Imagine Ethereum 2030: Rollup's dual-track parallel world ledger

Where will Ethereum go in 2030? In this Rollup technology divide, how can the vision of a world ledger become a reality?

Original article: Ethereum 2030

Author: Lemniscap

Compiled by Saoirse, Foresight News

Cover: Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

A more streamlined L1 and its performance-oriented and aligned Rollup solutions

Ethereum has always been committed to maintaining trusted neutrality while allowing higher-level innovation to flourish. Early discussions outlined a "Rollup-centric roadmap" where the underlying network would be gradually simplified and solidified so that most activities could be migrated to L2. However, recent developments have shown that being a minimal consensus and data availability layer is not enough: L1 must be able to handle the traffic and activity that L2 ultimately relies on. This means faster block generation, lower data costs, stronger proof mechanisms, and better interoperability.

The increase in L1 activity will drive the growth of L2 activity, which is like a rising tide lifting all boats.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/EvYRiFRYQ9Q?si=bsLWGA6FP9pi2vqI&t=477

The upcoming reconstruction of the Beam Chain consensus mechanism aims to achieve faster final confirmation speed and lower validator threshold, further strengthening the neutrality of Ethereum while increasing raw throughput. At the same time, there are proposals to consider migrating activities from the increasingly outdated (and "increasingly complex") Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the RISC-V native virtual machine, which is expected to greatly improve the efficiency of provers while maintaining interoperability with traditional contracts.

These upgrades will reshape the L2 landscape. By 2030, I expect Ethereum’s roadmap centered around generalized Rollups to integrate in two directions within a range:

• Aligned Rollups : Prioritize deep integration with Ethereum (e.g. shared ordering, native verification), fully leveraging L1 liquidity while minimizing trust assumptions. This relationship is mutually beneficial, and aligned Rollups can directly obtain composability and security from L1.
• Performance Rollups : Prioritize throughput and real-time user experience, sometimes achieved through alternative data availability layers (DA layers) or authorized participants (such as centralized sorters, small security committees/multi-signatures), but still use Ethereum as the final settlement layer to gain credibility (or for marketing).

When designing these Rollup solutions, each team needs to weigh the following three aspects:

1. Liquidity Acquisition: How to acquire and use liquidity on Ethereum and possibly other Rollup solutions? How important is synchronization or atomic composability?
2. Security Source: To what extent should liquidity transferred from Ethereum to Rollup directly inherit Ethereum’s security, or rely on the Rollup provider?
3. Execution Expressiveness: How important is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility? Given the rise of alternatives like SVM and popular Rust smart contracts, will EVM compatibility still be important in five years?

Polarization in the Rollup Spectrum

Rollup projects are gradually converging towards two extremes. On one end are high-performance Rollups, which can provide maximum throughput and user experience (high bandwidth, low latency), but are less coupled with Ethereum L1; on the other end are Ethereum-aligned Rollups (such as L1-based Rollups, native Rollups, ultrasonic Rollups, reference link ). These types of Rollups make full use of Ethereum's security, data, and consensus mechanisms, and prioritize decentralization, security, and trusted neutrality, but are limited by L1 design and will sacrifice some performance. Rollups that are in the middle and try to balance the two may find it difficult to compete, and will eventually move closer to one of the two poles, facing the risk of being eliminated.

The Rollups in the upper left corner of the chart focus on performance: they may use centralized sorters, alternative data availability networks (DA networks), or application-specific optimizations to achieve throughput far beyond conventional L2s (such as MegaETH). Some performance-oriented Rollups will be further to the right in alignment (for example, by adopting fast pre-confirmation-based technologies such as Puffer UniFi and Rise, aiming for the "ideal goal" in the upper right corner), but their finality still depends on the specifications of L1. In contrast, the Rollups in the lower right corner maximize alignment with Ethereum: deeply integrating ETH into fees, transactions, and DeFi; solidifying transaction ordering and/or proof verification in L1; and prioritizing composability rather than raw speed (for example, Taiko is moving in this direction, but is also exploring permissioned pre-confirmation to optimize user experience). By 2030, I expect many "mediocre" L2s to either move to one of the above models or face the risk of being eliminated. Users and developers will tend to choose a highly secure, Ethereum-aligned environment (for high-risk and composable DeFi scenarios), or a highly scalable, application-tailored network (for mass user applications). Ethereum’s 2030 roadmap lays the foundation for both paths.

The definition of "alignment" is controversial and no consensus has been reached. For the purpose of this report, the above is a brief analysis framework of "performance" and "alignment". The previous chart is based on this definition and may not be applicable to other interpretations of "alignment".

Why is the middle ground disappearing?

Network effects drive markets toward fewer, larger hubs. In markets where network effects dominate, such as cryptocurrencies, a few winners may eventually emerge (as we have seen in the CEX space). Because network effects coalesce around a chain’s core strengths, ecosystems tend to consolidate toward a few platforms that “maximize performance” and “maximize security.” A Rollup that only achieves half-baked alignment or performance on Ethereum may end up with neither the security of the former nor the usability of the latter.

As Rollup technology matures, economic activities will be stratified based on the trade-off between "required security" and "cost of obtaining security". Scenarios that cannot afford settlement or governance risks, such as institutional-grade DeFi, large on-chain vaults, and high-value collateral markets, may be concentrated on chains that inherit the full security and neutrality of Ethereum (or Ethereum L1 itself). On the other hand, mass-market application scenarios (such as Meme, transactions, social networking, games, retail payments, etc.) will gather on chains with the best user experience and the lowest cost. Such chains may require customized throughput improvement solutions or centralized sorting mechanisms. Therefore, the attractiveness of general-purpose chains that are "okay but not the fastest, and ok but not the best" will gradually decline. In particular, by 2030, if cross-chain interoperability allows assets to flow freely between these two scenarios, the living space of this middle ground will be more limited.

Evolution of the Ethereum Technology Stack

The entire base layer of Ethereum (from execution, settlement, consensus to data availability) has planned major upgrades to improve the scalability of L1 and better adapt to the development model centered on Rollup. The key improvements (as shown by the arrows) will improve performance, reduce complexity, and promote Ethereum to play a more direct role in the operation of Rollup.

Execution Layer

By 2030, Ethereum's current execution environment (Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM with 256-bit architecture and traditional design) may be replaced or enhanced by a more modern and efficient virtual machine. Vitalik has proposed upgrading the Ethereum virtual machine to a RISC-V-based architecture. RISC-V is a streamlined modular instruction set that is expected to achieve major breakthroughs in transaction execution and proof generation efficiency (50-100 times improvement). Its 32/64-bit instructions can be directly adapted to modern CPUs and are more efficient in zero-knowledge proofs. In order to reduce the impact of technology iterations and avoid stagnation of progress (such as the dilemma when the community considered replacing EVM with eWasm), it is planned to adopt a dual virtual machine mode: retain EVM to ensure backward compatibility, while introducing a new RISC-V virtual machine to handle new contracts (similar to Arbitrum Stylus's compatibility solution for WASM + EVM contracts). This move is intended to greatly simplify and speed up the execution layer, while helping L1's scalability and Rollup support capabilities.

Why do this?

The EVM was not designed with zero-knowledge proofs in mind, so the zk-EVM prover incurs a lot of extra overhead when simulating state transitions, calculating root hashes/hash trees, and handling EVM-specific mechanisms. In contrast, the RISC-V virtual machine uses a simpler register logic that can directly model and generate proofs with significantly fewer constraints. Its friendliness to zero-knowledge proofs can eliminate inefficient links such as gas calculations and state management, and is of great benefit to all Rollups that use zero-knowledge proofs: the generation of state transition proofs will be simpler, faster, and cheaper. Ultimately, upgrading the EVM to a RISC-V virtual machine can increase the overall proof throughput, making it possible for L1 to directly verify L2 execution (described below), while increasing the throughput limit of the performance-based Rollup's own virtual machine.

In addition, this will break through the niche circle of Solidity/Vyper, greatly expand Ethereum's developer ecosystem, and attract more participation from mainstream development communities such as Rust, C/C++, and Go.

Settlement Layer

Ethereum plans to move from a fragmented L2 settlement model to a unified, natively integrated settlement framework, which will completely change the way Rollups are settled. Today, each Rollup needs to deploy independent L1 verification contracts (fraud proofs or validity proofs), which are highly customized and independent of each other. By 2030, Ethereum may integrate a native function (the proposed EXECUTE precompilation function) as a general-purpose L2 execution validator. EXECUTE allows Ethereum validators to directly re-execute the state transitions of Rollups and verify their correctness, essentially "solidifying" the ability to verify any Rollup block at the protocol layer.

This upgrade will give birth to "native Rollup", which is essentially a programmable execution shard (similar to NEAR's design). Unlike ordinary L2, standard Rollup or L1-based Rollup, the blocks of native Rollup are verified by Ethereum's own execution engine.

EXECUTE eliminates the need for complex custom infrastructure (such as fraud proof mechanisms, zero-knowledge proof circuits, and multi-signature "security committees") required for EVM simulation and maintenance, greatly simplifying the development of equivalent EVM Rollups, and ultimately achieving a completely trustless L2 with almost no custom code. Combined with the next generation of real-time provers (such as Fermah and Succinct), real-time settlement can be achieved on L1: Rollup transactions are finalized once they are included in L1, without waiting for fraud proof windows or multi-period proof calculations. By building the settlement layer into a globally shared infrastructure, Ethereum enhances trusted neutrality (users can freely choose verification clients) and composability (no need to worry about real-time proof issues in the same slot, and synchronous composability is greatly simplified). All native (or native + L1-based) Rollups will use the same L1 settlement function to achieve standardized proofs and convenient interactions between Rollups (shards).

Consensus Layer

Ethereum's Beacon Chain consensus layer is being reconstructed into Beam Chain (planned for testing in 2027-2029), aiming to upgrade the consensus mechanism through advanced encryption technology (including quantum resistance) to improve scalability and decentralization. Among the upgrades in the six major research directions, the core features related to this article include:

(The latest developments of Beam Chain can be found in the “ Beam Call ” series on YouTube.)

• Shorter time slots, faster finality : One of the core goals of Beam Chain is to improve the speed of finality. The current finality of about 15 minutes (2 epochs under the Gasper mechanism, that is, 32+32 12-second time slots) will be shortened to 3-time slot finality (3SF, 4-second time slots, about 12 seconds), and finally single-time slot finality (SSF, about 4 seconds). 3SF+4-second time slots means that the final confirmation can be completed within 10 seconds after the transaction is on the chain, which greatly improves the user experience of L1-based Rollup and native Rollup: the increase in L1 block speed will directly speed up Rollup block generation. The time for a transaction to be included in the block is about 4 seconds (longer under high load), which increases the block speed of the relevant Rollup by 3 times (although it is still slower than performance Rollup, alternative L1 or credit card payment, so the pre-confirmation mechanism is still important). Faster L1 finality also guarantees and accelerates settlement: Rollup can complete the final confirmation of the state submission on L1 within a few seconds, enabling fast withdrawals and reducing the risk of reorganization or forks. In short, the irreversibility of Rollup transaction batches will be reduced from 15 minutes to seconds.
• Reduce consensus overhead through SNARKization : Beam plans to "SNARKize" the state transition function so that each L1 block comes with a concise zk SNARK proof. This is a prerequisite for synchronous, programmable execution of sharding. Validators can verify blocks and aggregate BLS signatures (and future quantum-resistant signatures) without processing each transaction, greatly reducing the computational cost of consensus (while reducing the hardware requirements of validators).
• Lower the threshold for staking to enhance decentralization : Beam plans to reduce the minimum stake for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Combining prover-proposer separation (APS, moving MEV to on-chain auctions) and SNARKization will enable distributed anti-collusion block construction, no longer favoring large-scale staking pools (such as Lido, which has a 25% market share), and instead supporting more independent stakers using devices such as Raspberry Pi. This will enhance decentralization and trusted neutrality, directly benefiting aligned Rollups. Under the APS mechanism, the number of proposers will decrease, but the inclusion list (FOCIL) will enhance anti-censorship capabilities: once a prover lists a transaction, even a small, globally distributed group of proposers cannot exclude these transactions.

All of this points to a more scalable and decentralized future for Ethereum’s base layer. In particular, L1-based Rollups will benefit the most from these consensus upgrades, as L1 will be more adaptable to their transaction ordering needs. By ordering transactions on L1, the maximum extractable value (MEV) from L1-based Rollups (and native L1-based Rollups) will naturally flow to Ethereum block proposers, and these values can be destroyed, thereby re-centralizing more value accumulation to ETH rather than to centralized sorters.

Data Availability Layer (DA Layer)

Data availability (DA) throughput is key to Rollup expansion, especially for future performance Rollups that need to support 100,000+ TPS. Ethereum's Proto-danksharding (Dencun + Pectra upgrade) has increased the target and maximum number of blobs per block to 6 and 9, respectively, bringing the blob data capacity to 8.15 GB/day (about 94 KB/s, 1.15 MB/block), but it is still insufficient. By 2030, Ethereum may achieve full danksharding, with a target of 64 blobs per block (128 KB each), or about 8 MB/4 second slot (2 MB/s).

(Note: Proto-danksharding is a key technology upgrade in Ethereum's expansion route, which greatly improves network performance by introducing a new data storage mechanism. It is a transitional solution for Danksharding. Its core goal is to reduce transaction costs and enhance data availability for L2 solutions, while laying the foundation for future fully sharded technology.)

Although this is a 10-fold improvement, it still cannot meet the ~20 MB/s requirements of performance-oriented Rollups such as MegaETH. However, Ethereum's roadmap also includes more upgrades: Data Availability Sampling (DAS, expected in the second half of 2025-the first half of 2026) through solutions such as PeerDAS, nodes can verify availability without downloading the full data, and combined with data sharding, the blob target per block is increased to 48+. With ideal Danksharding and DAS support, Ethereum can achieve 16 MB of data processing capacity in 12-second time slots, corresponding to about 7,400 simple transactions/second, and can reach 58,000 TPS after compression (such as aggregate signatures, address compression), and even higher when combined with Plasma or Validium (only on-chain state roots instead of complete data). Although there is a trade-off between security and scalability in off-chain expansion (such as the risk of operator negligence), by 2030, Ethereum is expected to provide diversified DA options at the protocol layer: providing full on-chain data protection for Rollups that focus on security, and providing external DA access flexibility for Rollups that focus on scale.

In summary, Ethereum's data availability (DA) upgrade is making it more and more suitable for Rollup. However, it should be noted that Ethereum's current throughput is still far from enough to support high-frequency scenarios such as payment, social networking, and games. Even if a simple ERC-20 transfer only requires about 200 bytes of blob data, a rough calculation requires about 20MB/s of raw DA bandwidth; and more complex transactions (such as Uniswapswap) will produce greater state differences, and the required bandwidth will increase to about 60MB/s! It is difficult to achieve this bandwidth requirement with the complete Danksharding technology alone, so the improvement in throughput depends on the clever combination of data compression and off-chain expansion.

During this period, performance-oriented Rollups need to rely on alternative DA solutions such as Eigen DA. Such solutions can currently provide about 15MB/s throughput, and are planned to be increased to 1GB/s; while emerging solutions such as Hyve promise to achieve 1GB/s modular DA and support sub-second availability. It is this type of DA solution that can enable Web3 applications to have speed and user experience comparable to Web2.

The Vision of Ethereum’s World Ledger

“Ethereum aims to be the world’s ledger: a platform for storing the assets and records of human civilization, and a foundational layer for finance, governance, high-value data authentication, and other fields. This requires two core capabilities: scalability and risk resistance.” - Vitalik

By 2030, Ethereum will be more competent in this role with the core protocol upgrade and the technology evolution centered on Rollup. As mentioned above, the upgrade of the full technology stack will support two types of Rollup models: one tends to be "deep Ethereum", with security and trusted neutrality as the core; the other tends to be "light Ethereum", with extreme throughput and economic independence as the goal. Ethereum's roadmap does not force a single path, but provides a flexible enough soil for both models to flourish:

• Aligned Rollup : Ensure that high-value, highly relevant applications continue to receive strong security protection from Ethereum. Among them, Rollup based on L1 can achieve Ethereum-level activity, and the L1 validator that generates the Rollup block is also responsible for transaction sorting; native Rollup has Ethereum-level execution security, and each Rollup state transition is re-executed and verified in L1; and native L1-based Rollup (or ultrasonic Rollup, that is, execution sharding) has 100% execution security and 100% activity, essentially becoming a part of Ethereum L1. This type of Rollup will boost the value accumulation of Ethereum L1: the MEV (maximum extractable value) generated by the L1-based Rollup flows directly to the Ethereum validator, and the scarcity of ETH can be enhanced through the MEV destruction mechanism; calling the EXECUTE pre-compilation function to verify the proof of the native Rollup consumes gas, creating a new value inflow channel for ETH. If most DeFi and institutional finance run on a few aligned Rollups in the future, ETH will capture the costs of the entire economy. Ethereum's anti-censorship capabilities and MEV value capture mechanism are the two key pillars of its becoming the "world ledger."
• Performance Rollup : Allows the Ethereum ecosystem to cover the entire category of blockchain applications, including scenarios that require large-scale processing power. This type of chain is likely to become a bridge to mainstream adoption, although it may introduce (semi-)trust elements, but still uses Ethereum as the final settlement layer and interoperability hub. The coexistence of performance and alignment Rollup enables the Ethereum ecosystem to support both top-level security and top-level throughput applications. The heterogeneity and interoperability of L2 are more beneficial than harmful to Ethereum: although these Rollups have weak economic ties to ETH, they can still generate new demand for ETH by using ETH as a gas token, medium of exchange, DeFi unit of account, and core asset for new applications in high-capacity environments. It is worth noting that the Ethereum DA layer mentioned above may support 100,000+ TPS, which means that even performance chains may eventually return to the Ethereum DA layer instead of relying on modular alternatives (for example, for ecological synergy, trusted neutrality, and simplified technology stack considerations). Of course, if they need to save costs or improve performance, they can still choose other DA solutions, but the core is: the progress of Ethereum DA layer, data compression and off-chain data management will continue to enhance the competitiveness of L1.

The exceptions are mainly Rollups that are deeply tied to trusted businesses (such as Coinbase’s Base, Robinhood’s L2 network Robinhood Chain), and users trust these businesses more than they trust trustless systems (this effect is particularly evident among new and non-technical users). At this point, the reputation and accountability mechanism of the affiliated companies become the main guarantee, so this type of Rollup can remain competitive while weakening Ethereum’s alignment because users are willing to "trust the brand" as in Web2. However, its adoption depends largely on B2B trust. For example, JPMorgan Chain may trust Robinhood Chain more than Ethereum and the stronger guarantees provided by aligned Rollups.

In addition, the gradual integration of Rollups in the middle zone toward the two poles is likely to be the natural result of the maturity of these two paths. The reason is simple: the middle solution can neither achieve high alignment nor top performance. Users who are concerned about security and composability will choose Rollups that are closer to Ethereum; while users who value low cost and high speed will tend to prefer the best performance platform. In addition, with the upgrade of pre-confirmation technology, the acceleration of time slots and the acceleration of L1 finality, the performance of aligned Rollups will continue to improve, and the demand for "medium performance" will further decline. In general, the former is more suitable for institutional DeFi, and the latter is more suitable for retail applications.

Operating a successful Rollup requires a lot of resources (from attracting liquidity to maintaining infrastructure), and by 2030, consolidation will be more frequent, that is, strong networks will absorb communities of weak networks. This trend is already evident. In the long run, an ecosystem consisting of a few core hubs with clear value propositions will outperform hundreds of homogeneous systems.

Special thanks to mteam, Patrick, Amir, Jason, Douwe, Jünger and Bread for helpful discussions and feedback!

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