Envisioning Ethereum 2030: A World Ledger with L1 and Rollup Running in Parallel

Ethereum is always committed to maintaining trusted neutrality while allowing higher-level innovations to flourish. Early discussions outlined a roadmap centered around Rollup, where the underlying network will gradually simplify and solidify, so that most activities can migrate to L2. However, recent developments indicate that merely serving as a minimal consensus and data availability layer is not enough: L1 must possess the capability to handle traffic and activities, as this is the foundation that L2 ultimately relies on. This necessitates faster block generation speeds, lower data costs, more robust proof mechanisms, and better interoperability.

The increase in activity of Layer 1 will drive the growth of activity in Layer 2, which can be said to be a rising tide lifts all boats.

The upcoming Beam Chain consensus mechanism reconstruction aims to achieve faster final confirmation speeds and lower validator thresholds, while enhancing the original throughput and further strengthening the neutrality of Ethereum. Meanwhile, proposals have been made to consider migrating activities from the increasingly outdated Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the RISC-V native virtual machine, which is expected to significantly improve the efficiency of proofers while maintaining interoperability with traditional contracts.

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

• Aligned Rollup: Prioritize deep integration with Ethereum, fully utilizing L1 liquidity while minimizing trust assumptions. This relationship is mutually beneficial, as aligned Rollups can directly obtain composability and security from L1.

• Performance Rollup: Prioritizes throughput and real-time user experience, sometimes achieved through alternative data availability layers or authorized participants, but still uses Ethereum as the final settlement layer for credibility.

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

• Liquidity Acquisition: How to acquire and utilize liquidity on Ethereum and potentially other Rollup solutions? What is the importance of synchronization or atomic-level composability?

• Security Source: To what extent should the liquidity transferred from Ethereum to Rollup directly inherit the security of Ethereum, or rely on the Rollup provider?

• Execution Expressiveness: How important is Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility? Given the rise of alternatives like SVM and popular Rust smart contracts, will EVM compatibility still be important in the next five years?

Polarization in the Rollup Ecosystem

Rollup projects are gradually converging towards two extremes. On one end are high-performance Rollups, which can provide maximum throughput and user experience, but have a lower coupling with Ethereum L1; on the other end are Ethereum-aligned Rollups, which fully leverage Ethereum's security, data, and consensus mechanisms, prioritizing decentralization, security, and trustworthy neutrality, but sacrifice some performance due to L1 design constraints. Rollups that occupy the middle ground and attempt to balance both may find it difficult to compete, ultimately leaning towards one of the extremes and facing the risk of being eliminated.

Why will the middle ground disappear?

Network effects will drive the market towards fewer, larger hubs. In markets where network effects play a dominant role, such as cryptocurrencies, a pattern may ultimately emerge where a few winners dominate. Because network effects tend to coalesce around the core advantages of a chain, ecosystems often integrate towards a few "performance-maximizing" and "security-maximizing" platforms. A Rollup that only achieves a half-hearted alignment or performance on Ethereum may ultimately neither gain the security of the former nor the usability of the latter.

As Rollup technology matures, economic activities will form layers based on the trade-off between "required security" and "cost of obtaining security". Scenarios that cannot bear settlement or governance risks, such as institutional-level DeFi, large on-chain vaults, and high-value collateral markets, may concentrate on chains that inherit Ethereum's complete security guarantees and neutrality. On the other hand, application scenarios aimed at the general public will gather on chains that offer the best user experience at the lowest cost; these chains may require customized throughput enhancement solutions or centralized ordering mechanisms. Therefore, those "sufficiently fast but not the fastest, adequately secure but not optimal" general-purpose chains will gradually lose their appeal. Especially by 2030, if cross-chain interoperability allows assets to flow freely between these two types of scenarios, the survival space in this intermediate zone will be even more limited.

Evolution of the Ethereum Technology Stack

The entire base layer of Ethereum has planned significant upgrades aimed at enhancing L1 scalability and better adapting to the Rollup-centric development model. Key improvements will enhance performance, reduce complexity, and promote a more direct role for Ethereum in Rollup operations.

Execution Layer

By 2030, the current execution environment of Ethereum 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 significant breakthroughs in transaction execution and proof generation efficiency. Its 32/64-bit instructions can be directly adapted to modern CPUs and are more efficient in zero-knowledge proofs. To mitigate the impact of technological iterations and avoid stagnation, a dual virtual machine model is planned: retaining the EVM to ensure backward compatibility while introducing the new RISC-V virtual machine to handle new contracts. This move aims to greatly simplify and accelerate the execution layer while supporting L1 scalability and Rollup capabilities.

Settlement Layer

Ethereum plans to shift from fragmented L2 settlement models to a unified, natively integrated settlement framework, which will fundamentally change the settlement method of Rollups. By 2030, Ethereum may integrate a native feature ( proposed EXECUTE precompiled function ), as a universal L2 execution validator. EXECUTE allows Ethereum validators to directly re-execute the state transitions of Rollups and verify their correctness, essentially "hardcoding" the ability to validate arbitrary Rollup blocks at the protocol level.

This upgrade will give rise to "native Rollup", which is essentially a programmable execution shard. Unlike regular L2, standard Rollup, or L1-based Rollup, the blocks of native Rollup are verified by Ethereum's own execution engine.

EXECUTE eliminates the complex custom infrastructure required for EVM simulation and maintenance, significantly simplifying the development of equivalent EVM Rollups, ultimately achieving a fully trustless L2 with almost no custom code required. Combined with next-generation real-time provers, real-time settlement can be achieved on L1: once Rollup transactions are included in L1, finality is reached without waiting for the fraud proof window or multi-period proof computations. By building the settlement layer as a globally shared infrastructure, Ethereum enhances trust neutrality and composability. All native Rollups will use the same L1 settlement function, achieving standardized proofs and convenient interactions between Rollups.

Consensus Layer

The consensus layer of Ethereum's beacon chain is being restructured as Beam Chain, aimed at upgrading the consensus mechanism through advanced cryptographic technology to enhance scalability and decentralization. Among the six major research directions for the upgrade, the core features related to this article include:

• Shorter time slots, faster finality: One of the core goals of Beam Chain is to enhance finality speed. The current finality of about 15 minutes will be reduced to 3 slots finality (3SF, 4 seconds per slot, about 12 seconds ), ultimately achieving single slot finality (SSF, around 4 seconds ). 3SF + 4 seconds per slot means that final confirmation can be completed within 10 seconds after the transaction is on-chain, significantly improving the user experience for L1-based Rollups and native Rollups.

• Reducing consensus overhead through SNARKification: The Beam plan will "SNARKify" the state transition function, so that each L1 block comes with a concise zk SNARK proof. This is a prerequisite for achieving synchronized, programmable execution sharding. Validators can verify blocks and aggregate BLS signatures without processing each transaction, significantly reducing the computational cost of consensus.

• Lowering the staking threshold to enhance decentralization: The Beam plan will reduce the minimum staking amount for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Combined with the separation of provers and proposers and SNARKification, it will enable distributed anti-collusion block construction, no longer favoring large staking pools, and instead supporting more independent stakers using devices like Raspberry Pi. This will enhance decentralization and trust neutrality, directly benefiting aligned Rollups.

All of this points to the future of the Ethereum base layer: it will have stronger scalability and decentralization. In particular, L1-based Rollups will benefit the most from these consensus upgrades, as L1 will be more suited to their transaction ordering needs. By ordering transactions on L1, the maximum extractable value from L1-based Rollups will naturally flow to Ethereum block proposers, and this value can be destroyed, thereby concentrating more value accumulation back onto ETH, rather than flowing to centralized orderers.

Data Availability Layer

Data availability throughput is key to Rollup scaling, especially for performance-oriented Rollups that need to support 100,000+ TPS in the future. Ethereum's Proto-danksharding has increased the target and maximum number of blobs per block to 6 and 9, respectively, allowing for a blob data capacity of 8.15 GB/day, but this is still insufficient. By 2030, Ethereum may achieve full danksharding, targeting 64 blobs per block, which is approximately 8 MB/4-second slot.

Although this is a 10-fold increase, it still cannot meet the demand of performance-oriented Rollups like MegaETH for ~20 MB/s. However, Ethereum's roadmap includes more upgrades: achieving data availability sampling through solutions like PeerDAS, allowing nodes to verify availability without downloading the complete data, and combined with data sharding, raising the blob target per block to 48+. Under ideal conditions of Danksharding and DAS support, Ethereum can achieve a processing capability of 16 MB data in 12-second slots, corresponding to about 7,400 simple transactions per second, which can reach 58,000 TPS after compression, and even higher when combined with Plasma or Validium. Although there are trade-offs in security and scalability for off-chain expansion, by 2030, Ethereum is expected to provide diversified DA options at the protocol level: offering full on-chain data guarantees for Rollups focused on security and external DA access flexibility for Rollups focused on scale.

In summary, the data availability upgrade of Ethereum is making it increasingly compatible with Rollup. However, it should be noted that Ethereum's current throughput is still far from sufficient to support high-frequency scenarios such as payments, social interactions, and gaming. Even a simple ERC-20 transfer requires approximately 200 bytes of blob data, which roughly calculates to about 20MB/s of raw DA bandwidth; while more complex transactions will generate larger state differences, requiring bandwidth to increase to about 60MB/s! Relying solely on complete Danksharding technology is insufficient to meet this bandwidth requirement, so throughput enhancement must rely on a 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. These solutions can currently provide a throughput of about 15MB/s, with plans to increase it to 1GB/s; emerging solutions like Hyve even promise to achieve modular DA at 1GB/s, supporting sub-second availability. It is precisely these DA solutions that enable Web3 applications to have speed and user experience comparable to Web2.

The Vision of the Ethereum World Ledger

By 2030, with core protocol upgrades and technological evolution centered around Rollups, Ethereum will be more capable of serving as the world's ledger. As mentioned earlier, the full technology stack upgrade will support two types of Rollup models: one favors "deep Ethereumization," focusing on security and trusted neutrality.