Understanding Vitalik's L2 Reflections: Saying Goodbye to Fragmentation, a New Phase Towards Native Rollup's Rectification

Author: imToken

The most discussed topic in the Ethereum community recently is undoubtedly Vitalik Buterin's public reflection on the scaling roadmap.

It can be said that Vitalik's attitude is quite "sharp," stating that as the Ethereum mainnet (L1) improves its own scaling capabilities, the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the main scaling method, has become obsolete.

This statement was once interpreted negatively by the market as a "pessimistic" or even "denial" of L2. However, if we carefully sort out Vitalik's core viewpoints and combine them with a series of mainnet scaling progress, decentralized process evaluation frameworks, and recent technical discussions around Native/Based Rollup, we will find that Vitalik is not entirely dismissing the existence value of L2 but is more inclined towards a kind of "correcting the chaos":

Ethereum is not abandoning L2 but rather clarifying the division of labor—L1 returns to the safest settlement layer positioning, while L2 pursues differentiation and specialization, thus shifting the strategic focus back to the mainnet itself.

1. Has L2 Completed Its Historical Mission?

Objectively speaking, in the previous cycle, L2 was indeed seen as Ethereum's lifeline.

In the initial Rollup-Centric roadmap, the division of labor was also very clear: L1 is responsible for security and data availability, while L2 is responsible for extreme scaling and low Gas. In an era where Gas fees could reach dozens of dollars, this was almost the only feasible answer.

However, the reality has developed in a much more complex manner than expected.

According to the latest statistics from L2BEAT, the broad definition of L2 has surpassed hundreds, but the expansion in quantity does not equate to structural maturity, as the vast majority have made slow progress in the decentralization process.

Here, it is necessary to supplement some basic knowledge. As early as 2022, Vitalik criticized the Training Wheels architecture of most Rollups in his blog, stating that it relies on centralized operations and manual interventions to ensure security. Users who frequently use L2Beat should be very familiar with this, as its homepage displays a related key metric—Stage:

This is an evaluation framework that divides Rollups into three decentralization stages: "Stage 0," which relies entirely on centralized control; "Stage 1," which has limited reliance; and "Stage 2," which is fully decentralized. This also reflects the degree of dependence of Rollups on manual interventions.

In his recent reflections, Vitalik pointed out that some L2s may, due to regulatory or commercial needs, remain forever at "Stage 1," relying on a security council to control upgradability. This means that such L2s are essentially still a "secondary L1" with cross-chain bridging attributes, rather than the originally envisioned "branded sharding."

To put it bluntly, if the rights to order, upgrade, and final judgment are concentrated in the hands of a few entities, it not only goes against the original intention of Ethereum's decentralization but also makes L2 itself akin to a parasite that drains the Ethereum mainnet.

At the same time, the expansion of L2 numbers has brought about another structural issue that everyone has felt deeply over the past few years—liquidity fragmentation.

This has caused the traffic originally concentrated on Ethereum to be gradually divided, forming isolated value islands. As the number of public chains and L2s increases, the degree of liquidity fragmentation will further intensify, which is not the original intention of scaling.

From this perspective, it is understandable why Vitalik emphasizes that the next step for L2 is not more chains, but deeper integration. Ultimately, this is a timely correction—through institutionalized scaling and protocol-internal security mechanisms, reinforcing L1's position as the world's most trusted settlement layer.

In this context, scaling is no longer the only goal; security, neutrality, and predictability have once again become Ethereum's core assets. The future of L2 lies not in quantity but in deeper integration with the mainnet and more specialized innovations in segmented scenarios.

For example, providing unique additional features such as privacy-focused virtual machines, extreme scaling, or dedicated environments designed for AI agents and other non-financial applications.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, shared a similar view at the Consensus 2026 conference, stating that L1 should serve as the safest settlement layer, carrying the most critical activities; while L2 should pursue differentiation and specialization, carrying activities that seek extreme user experiences.

2. Native Rollup: The Future of Based Rollup + Pre-confirmation?

It is in this wave of reflection on the L2 narrative that the concept of Based Rollup is expected to shine in 2026.

If the keyword for the past five years was "Rollup-Centric," the core of the current discussion is shifting to a more specific question: Can Rollups "grow within Ethereum" rather than "hang outside of Ethereum"?

Thus, the currently hotly debated "Native Rollup" in the Ethereum community can, to some extent, be understood as an extension of the Based Rollup concept—if Native Rollup is the ultimate ideal, then Based Rollup is the most practical path to that ideal.

It is well known that the biggest difference between Based Rollup and traditional L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism is that it completely abandons the independent, even centralized sequencer layer, instead directly ordering transactions through Ethereum L1 nodes. In other words, the Ethereum protocol itself integrates verification logic similar to Rollup at the L1 level, unifying the extreme performance optimization and protocol-level security that were originally divided between L2 and the Ethereum mainnet.

This design gives users the most intuitive feeling that Rollups seem to be embedded within Ethereum, inheriting not only L1's censorship resistance and activity but, more importantly, solving the most troublesome problem of L2—synchronous composability. In a Based Rollup block, you can directly call L1's liquidity, achieving atomic cross-layer transactions.

However, Based Rollup faces a practical challenge: if it completely follows L1's rhythm (12 seconds per slot), the user experience may feel cumbersome. After all, under the current Ethereum architecture, even if a transaction is packed into a block, the system still needs to wait about 13 minutes (2 epochs) to achieve finality, which is too slow for financial scenarios.

Interestingly, in a tweet where Vitalik reflected on L2, he recommended a community proposal from January titled "Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability." The core of this proposal is not merely to promote Based Rollup but to propose a hybrid structure:

Retain low-latency sequenced blocks, generate based blocks at the end of the slot, submit the based block to L1, and finally combine with a pre-confirmation mechanism to achieve synchronous composability.

In Based Rollup, pre-confirmation means that before a transaction is officially submitted to L1, a specific role (such as an L1 proposer) commits that the transaction will be included. This is also what Ethereum's Interop roadmap explicitly proposes as Project #4: Fast L1 Confirmation Rule.

The core goal is very straightforward: to allow applications and cross-chain systems to obtain a "strong and verifiable" L1 confirmation signal within 15-30 seconds, without waiting for the complete finality that takes 13 minutes.

Mechanically, the fast confirmation rule does not introduce a new consensus process but reuses the attester voting that occurs in every slot of Ethereum's PoS system. When a block has accumulated enough and sufficiently distributed validator votes in early slots, it can be considered "extremely unlikely to be rolled back under reasonable attack models," even if it has not yet entered the finality stage.

In simple terms, this level of confirmation does not replace finality but provides a strong confirmation explicitly recognized by the protocol before finality. This is particularly crucial for interoperability: cross-chain systems, intent solvers, and wallets no longer need to blindly wait for finality but can safely advance the next logical step based on protocol-level confirmation signals within 15-30 seconds.

Through this layered confirmation logic, Ethereum finely divides different trust levels between "security" and "perceived speed," promising to build an extremely smooth interoperability experience (see further reading: "Ethereum's 'Second-Level' Evolution: From Fast Confirmation to Settlement Compression, How Interop Eliminates Waiting Time?").

3. What is the Future of Ethereum?

Looking back from the node of 2026, the main theme of Ethereum is quietly shifting, gradually moving from the pursuit of extreme "scaling" to the pursuit of "unity, layering, and endogenous security."

Last month, several executives from Ethereum L2 solutions have expressed their willingness to explore and embrace the Native Rollup path to enhance the consistency and synergy of the entire network. This attitude itself is an important signal: the Ethereum ecosystem is undergoing a painful but necessary defoaming process, returning from the pursuit of "the number of chains" to the pursuit of "protocol unity."

However, as the underlying roadmap of Ethereum is recalibrated and advanced, especially as L1 continues to strengthen and Based Rollup and pre-confirmation gradually land, a more realistic issue begins to emerge—the biggest bottleneck is no longer chains but wallets and entry barriers.

This confirms the insight that imToken repeatedly emphasized in 2025: when infrastructure becomes invisible, the true limit of scalability will be determined by the entry-level interaction experience.

Overall, in addition to underlying scaling, the future breakout and scaling development of the Ethereum ecosystem will not focus solely on TPS or the number of blobs but will unfold around three more structurally significant directions:

• Account abstraction and the dissolution of entry barriers: Ethereum is promoting native account abstraction (Native AA), and future smart contract wallets will become the default choice, completely replacing obscure mnemonic phrases and EOA addresses. For users of wallets like imToken, this means that entering the crypto world will be as simple as registering a social account.
• Privacy and ZK-EVM: Privacy features are no longer marginal needs. With the maturity of ZK-EVM technology, Ethereum will provide necessary on-chain privacy protection for commercial applications while maintaining transparency, which will be its core competitiveness in the public chain competition.
• On-chain sovereignty of AI agents: In 2026, the initiators of transactions may no longer be humans but AI agents. The future challenge lies in establishing trustless interaction standards: how to ensure that AI agents are executing the user's will rather than being manipulated by third parties? Ethereum's decentralized settlement layer will become the most reliable rule arbiter in the AI economy.

Returning to the initial question, has Vitalik really "denied" L2?

A more accurate understanding is that he denies a narrative of excessive expansion, detachment from the mainnet, and fragmentation that operates independently. This is not the endpoint but a brand new starting point. From the grand illusion of "branded sharding," returning to the meticulous crafting of Based Rollup and pre-confirmation, essentially helps to reinforce Ethereum L1's absolute position as the global trust foundation.

However, this also means that in this return to technological pragmatism, only those innovations that truly root themselves in the underlying principles of Ethereum's new phase and share the same fate with the mainnet can survive and thrive in the next great age of exploration.