Envisioning Ethereum 2030: A World Ledger with Parallel Tracks of L1 and Rollup

Where will Ethereum head in 2030? In this field of Rollup technology, how does the vision of the world ledger become reality?

Written by: Lemniscap

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

More streamlined L1 and its performance-oriented and alignment-oriented Rollup solutions

Ethereum is always committed to maintaining trusted neutrality while allowing higher-level innovations to flourish. Early discussions outlined a "rollup-centric roadmap", 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 insufficient: L1 must have the capability to handle traffic and activities, as this is the foundational basis that L2 ultimately relies on. This means the need for faster block generation speeds, lower data costs, more robust proof mechanisms, and better interoperability.

The increase in activity on L1 will drive the growth of activity on L2, which can be described as a rising tide lifting all boats.

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The upcoming Beam Chain consensus mechanism reconstruction aims to achieve faster final confirmation speeds and lower validator thresholds, while enhancing Ethereum's neutrality alongside improving the original 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 At the same time, there are proposals to consider migrating activities from the increasingly outdated (and "increasingly complex") Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the RISC-V native virtual machine, which is expected to significantly improve the efficiency of provers while maintaining interoperability with traditional contracts.

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

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

When designing these Rollup solutions, each team needs to 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 synchronous 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?
• Performance Execution: 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 the next five years?

Polarization in the Rollup lineage

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, ultra Rollups, reference link), which fully leverage Ethereum's security, data, and consensus mechanisms, prioritizing decentralization, security, and trust neutrality, but sacrifice some performance due to L1 design constraints. Rollups that are in the middle ground, trying to balance both, may find it difficult to compete and will ultimately lean towards one of the extremes, facing the risk of being eliminated.

The Rollup in the upper left corner of the chart focuses on performance: they may use centralized sorters, alternative data availability networks (DA networks), or application-specific optimizations to achieve throughput far exceeding conventional L2s (such as MegaETH). Some performance-oriented Rollups may be further right on the alignment scale (for example, aiming for the "ideal target" in the upper right corner by adopting technologies based on fast pre-confirmation like Puffer UniFi and Rise), but their ultimate determinism still depends on the specifications of L1. In contrast, the Rollup in the lower right corner maximizes alignment with Ethereum: embedding ETH deeply into fees, transactions, and DeFi; solidifying transaction sorting and/or proof verification on L1; and prioritizing composability over raw speed (for example, while Taiko is developing in this direction, it is also exploring permissioned pre-confirmation to optimize user experience). By 2030, I expect many "moderate" L2s to either shift towards one of the aforementioned models or face the risk of being eliminated. Users and developers will tend to choose high-security environments aligned with Ethereum (for high-risk and composable DeFi scenarios) or highly scalable, application-customized networks (for mass user applications). Ethereum's roadmap for 2030 lays the foundation for both of these paths.

The definition of "alignment" is controversial and there is no consensus yet. For the purposes of this report, the above is a brief analytical framework of "performance" and "alignment." The charts presented earlier are based on this definition and may not apply to other interpretations of "alignment."

Why will the middle zone disappear?

Network effects will drive the market to concentrate around fewer, larger hubs. In markets like cryptocurrency where network effects play a dominant role, a pattern may ultimately emerge where a few winners dominate (as we see in the CEX space). Because network effects tend to coalesce around the core advantages of a chain, ecosystems often consolidate around a few platforms that maximize "performance" and "security." A Rollup that only achieves a half-hearted alignment or performance with Ethereum may ultimately gain neither 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 full security guarantees and neutrality (or Ethereum L1 itself). On the other end, applications aimed at the general public (such as memes, trading, socializing, gaming, retail payments, etc.) will cluster on chains that offer the best user experience and lowest costs, which may require customized throughput enhancement solutions or centralized ordering mechanisms. Therefore, general-purpose chains that are "adequately fast but not the fastest, reasonably secure but not optimal" 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 become even more limited.

Evolution of the Ethereum technology stack

The entire underlying layer of Ethereum (from execution, settlement, consensus to data availability) has planned significant upgrades aimed at enhancing L1 scalability and better adapting to the Rollup-centric development model. Key improvements (as indicated by the arrows) will enhance performance, reduce complexity, and promote Ethereum's more direct role in the operation of Rollups.

Execution Layer

By 2030, the current execution environment of Ethereum (using a 256-bit architecture and the traditional Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM) 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 and modular instruction set that is expected to achieve significant breakthroughs in transaction execution and proof generation efficiency (improving by 50-100 times). 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 (for example, the previous community's dilemma of considering eWasm to replace EVM), a dual virtual machine model is planned: retaining 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 aims to significantly simplify and speed up the execution layer while aiding L1 scalability and Rollup support capabilities.

Why do this?

The design of the EVM did not take zero-knowledge proofs into consideration, so the zk-EVM prover incurs a large amount of additional overhead when simulating state transitions, calculating root hashes / hash trees, and handling EVM-specific mechanisms. In contrast, the RISC-V virtual machine adopts a simpler register logic, allowing for direct modeling and proof generation, significantly reducing the required constraints. Its friendliness to zero-knowledge proofs can eliminate inefficient aspects such as gas calculation and state management, which is greatly beneficial for all Rollups that utilize zero-knowledge proofs: the generation of state transition proofs will be simpler, faster, and lower in cost. Ultimately, upgrading the EVM to a RISC-V virtual machine can enhance overall proof throughput, making it possible for L1 to directly verify L2 execution (detailed below), while also raising the throughput ceiling of performance-oriented Rollup's own virtual machine.

In addition, this will break through the niche circle of Solidity/Vyper, significantly expanding the developer ecosystem of Ethereum and attracting more participation from mainstream development communities such as Rust, C/C++, and Go.

Settlement Layer

Ethereum plans to shift from a fragmented L2 settlement model to a unified, natively integrated settlement framework, which will fundamentally change the settlement method of Rollups. Currently, 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 feature (the proposed EXECUTE precompiled feature) as a general L2 execution validator. EXECUTE allows Ethereum validators to directly re-execute the state transitions of Rollups and validate their correctness, essentially "cementing" the ability to validate any Rollup block at the protocol level.

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

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

Consensus Layer

The consensus layer of Ethereum's Beacon Chain is being restructured into Beam Chain (planned for testing in 2027-2029), aimed at upgrading the consensus mechanism through advanced cryptographic techniques (including quantum resistance) to enhance scalability and decentralization. Among the upgrades in the six major research directions, the core features related to this article include:

• Shorter time slots, faster finality: One of the core goals of Beam Chain is to enhance the speed of finality. The current finality of about 15 minutes (2 epochs under the Gasper mechanism, that is, 32+32 slots of 12 seconds each) will be shortened to 3 slot finality (3SF, 4 seconds per slot, about 12 seconds), ultimately achieving single slot finality (SSF, about 4 seconds). The 3SF + 4 seconds per slot means that final confirmation can be completed within 10 seconds after a transaction is on-chain, significantly improving the user experience for L1-based Rollups and native Rollups: the increase in L1 block speed will directly accelerate Rollup block generation. The time to include a transaction in a block is about 4 seconds (longer under high load), allowing a 3-fold increase in the block speed of the related Rollups (although still slower than performance-based Rollups, alternative L1s, or credit card payments, so pre-confirmation mechanisms remain important). Faster L1 finality can also ensure and accelerate settlements: Rollups can complete final confirmation of state submissions on L1 in a few seconds, enabling quick withdrawals and reducing the risks of reorganization or forks. In short, the irreversibility of Rollup transaction batching will be shortened from 15 minutes to the second level.
• Reducing consensus overhead through SNARKification: Beam plans to "SNARKify" the state transition function, allowing each L1 block to be accompanied by a concise zk SNARK proof. This is a prerequisite for achieving synchronized, programmable execution sharding. Validators can verify blocks and aggregate BLS signatures (and future post-quantum signatures) without handling each transaction, significantly reducing the computational cost of consensus (while also lowering the hardware requirements for validators).
• Lowering the staking threshold to enhance decentralization: Beam plans to reduce the minimum staking amount for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Combined with proposer-separator (APS, transferring MEV to on-chain auctions) and SNARKification, it can achieve distributed anti-collusion block construction, no longer favoring large staking pools (such as Lido with a 25% market share), and instead support more independent stakers using devices like 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 strengthen censorship resistance: once a prover includes a transaction in the list, even a small-scale, globally distributed group of proposers cannot exclude these transactions.

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 (MEV) from L1-based Rollups (and native L1-based Rollups) will naturally flow to Ethereum block proposers, and this value can be destroyed, thereby re-concentrating more value back onto ETH instead of flowing to centralized orderers.

Data Availability Layer (DA Layer)

Data availability (DA) throughput is key to Rollup scalability, particularly for performance-oriented Rollups that need to support over 100,000 TPS in the future. Ethereum's Proto-danksharding (Dencun + Pectra upgrade) 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 (approximately 94 KB/s, 1.15 MB/block), but it is still insufficient. By 2030, Ethereum may achieve full danksharding, targeting 64 blobs per block (each 128 KB), which equates to approximately 8 MB per 4-second slot (2 MB/s).

Although this is a 10-fold improvement, 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 (DAS) through solutions like PeerDAS (expected in the second half of 2025 - first half of 2026), allowing nodes to verify availability without downloading complete data, and combining data sharding to increase the target blob size per block to 48+. Under ideal conditions of Danksharding and DAS support, Ethereum can achieve a data processing capacity of 16 MB in 12-second slots, corresponding to about 7,400 simple transactions per second, which can reach 58,000 TPS after compression (e.g., aggregated signatures, address compression). When combined with Plasma or Validium (only on-chain state roots rather than complete data), it can be even higher. Although off-chain scaling involves trade-offs in security and scalability (such as the risk of operator negligence), by 2030, Ethereum is expected to provide diversified DA options at the protocol layer: offering complete on-chain data assurance for Rollups that focus on security and flexible external DA access for Rollups that prioritize scale.

In summary, the data availability (DA) upgrade of Ethereum is increasingly adapting to Rollup. However, it is important to note 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 about 200 bytes of blob data, which roughly calculates to about 20MB/s of raw DA bandwidth; while more complex transactions (like Uniswapswap) 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 improvement must rely on a clever combination of data compression and off-chain scaling.

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 to 1GB/s; while emerging solutions like Hyve promise to achieve modular DA at 1GB/s and support sub-second availability. It is these DA solutions that allow Web3 applications to have speed and user experience comparable to Web2.

The vision of the Ethereum world ledger

"Ethereum aims to be the world ledger: a platform for storing human civilization's assets and records, serving as the foundational layer for finance, governance, high-value data certification, and other fields. This requires two core capabilities: scalability and risk resistance." — Vitalik

By 2030, with core protocol upgrades and a Rollup-centric technological evolution, Ethereum will be better suited for this role. As mentioned earlier, the full-stack upgrade will support two types of Rollup models: one tends towards "deep Ethereumization," focusing on security and trusted neutrality; the other leans towards "light Ethereumization," aiming for extreme throughput and economic independence. Ethereum's roadmap does not enforce a single path but provides sufficiently flexible soil for both models to thrive.

• Aligned Rollup: Ensures that high-value and highly related applications continuously receive strong security guarantees from Ethereum. Among them, Layer 1 (L1) based Rollups can achieve Ethereum-level activity, where L1 validators responsible for generating Rollup blocks also handle transaction ordering; native Rollups possess Ethereum-level execution security, with every Rollup state transition being re-executed and verified within L1; while native L1-based Rollups (also known as Sonic Rollups, i.e., execution sharding) combine 100% execution security with 100% activity, essentially becoming a part of Ethereum L1. These types of Rollups will promote value accumulation on Ethereum L1: the Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) generated by L1-based Rollups directly flows to Ethereum validators, and the MEV destruction mechanism can enhance the scarcity of ETH; invoking the EXECUTE precompiled function to verify the proofs of native Rollups requires gas consumption, creating new value inflow channels for ETH. If in the future, most DeFi and institutional finance operate on a few aligned Rollups, ETH will capture the fees of the entire economy. Moreover, Ethereum's censorship resistance and MEV value capture mechanisms are the two key pillars that enable it to become the "world ledger."
• Performance Rollup: Allows the Ethereum ecosystem to cover all categories of blockchain applications, including scenarios that require large-scale processing capabilities. These types of chains are likely to become mainstream adoption bridges, although they may introduce (semi) trust elements, they still use Ethereum as the final settlement layer and interoperability hub. The coexistence of performance and alignment Rollups enables the Ethereum ecosystem to support both top-tier security and top-tier throughput applications simultaneously. The heterogeneity and interoperability of L2 bring more benefits than drawbacks to Ethereum: although these Rollups have a weak economic binding with ETH, they can still generate new demand for ETH by using ETH as a gas token, transaction medium, DeFi pricing unit, and as the core asset for new applications in high-capacity environments. It is worth noting that the previously mentioned Ethereum DA layer could support 100,000+ TPS, which means that even performance chains may eventually revert to the Ethereum DA layer rather than relying on modular alternatives (for reasons such as ecological synergy, trusted neutrality, and simplification of the tech stack). Of course, if cost savings or performance enhancements are needed, they can still choose other DA solutions, but the key point is that advancements in the Ethereum DA layer, data compression, and off-chain data management will continue to enhance the competitiveness of L1.

The exceptions mainly refer to Rollups that are deeply tied to trusted enterprises (such as Coinbase's Base and Robinhood's L2 network Robinhood Chain), where users' trust in these enterprises exceeds their trust in trustless systems (this effect is particularly pronounced among new users and non-technical users). At this point, the reputation and accountability mechanisms of the associated enterprises become the main guarantees, allowing these types of Rollups to maintain competitiveness while weakening Ethereum's alignment, as users are willing to "trust brands" just like in Web2. However, the degree of adoption largely depends on B2B trust; for example, the JPMorgan Chain may trust Robinhood Chain more than Ethereum and the stronger guarantees provided by aligned Rollups.

In addition, the Rollup in the intermediate zone is gradually integrating towards the two extremes, which is likely a natural result of the maturity of these two paths. The reason is simple: intermediate solutions can neither achieve high alignment nor reach top performance. Users focused on security and composability will choose Rollups that are closer to Ethereum; while those who prioritize low cost and high speed will lean towards platforms with optimal performance. Furthermore, with the upgrade of pre-confirmation technology, acceleration of time slots, and the speed-up of L1 finality, the performance of aligned Rollups will continue to improve, and the demand for "medium performance" will further decline. Overall, the former is more suitable for institutional DeFi, while the latter is more suitable for retail-level applications.

Successful Rollups require a significant investment of resources (from attracting liquidity to maintaining infrastructure). By 2030, integration will become more frequent, meaning that strong networks will absorb the communities of weaker networks. This trend has already begun to show signs. In the long run, an ecosystem composed 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 the valuable discussions and feedback!