1. Ethereum Needed L2s to Survive And L2s Needed Ethereum to Exist

In 2021 and 2022, Ethereum was technically the most secure, decentralised smart contract platform in the world. It was also, for most practical purposes, not very usable. Average gas fees regularly hit $50 to $200 per transaction during periods of peak demand. NFT mints, DeFi interactions, basic token transfers, all of them priced out ordinary users and made the network inaccessible to anyone who wasn't moving large enough sums to justify the cost. Ethereum had won the credibility race. It was losing usability.

L2s arrived as emergency infrastructure at precisely the right moment. The economic logic behind why they succeeded is worth stating plainly. As per Decentralised Co article Large proof-of-stake L1s spend billions of dollars annually simply to keep validators producing blocks Ethereum itself spends roughly $4.5 billion per year on validator security with approximately $125 billion staked at around 3.7% APR, while Solana spends around $3.9 billion per year.

An independent chain attempting to rival Ethereum's security model faces that cost from day one, before acquiring a single user or developer. Running an L2 sequencer, by contrast, is cheap. L2s inherited Ethereum's security and credibility, the hardest and most expensive things to build in this industry without bearing their cost. Ethereum, in return, got the scale and usability it could not build fast enough on its own. The deal was asymmetric by design, and correctly so. The scale of what that arrangement produced is significant.

According to L2Beat and data compiled through 2025, L2 total value locked grew from under $4 billion in 2023 to roughly $47 billion by October 2025 more than a tenfold increase in under three years. Daily transactions on L2s climbed to as high as 1.9 million per day, eclipsing Ethereum mainnet transaction volume entirely. In Q1 2025 alone, L2 rollups secured over $40 billion in assets and processed nearly half of Ethereum's total DEX volume.

Meanwhile, Ethereum's own monthly transaction count climbed to 50 million-plus even as average fees fell well below prior cycles because heavy activity had migrated to L2s, freeing L1 to function as the high-integrity settlement layer it was designed to be. As Blockworks noted in their September 2025 analysis, the value of Ethereum's base layer increasingly derives from demand for its credible neutrality, security, and settlement across L2s not from maximising L1 fees directly.

Steven Goldfeder, CEO of Offchain Labs, provides the most concrete snapshot of what this produced at scale. During peak market volatility in early 2026, Arbitrum and Base both exceeded 1,000 TPS while Ethereum L1 sat at 40 TPS. His framing is precise: this is not a criticism of Ethereum. Arbitrum and Base would not exist without Ethereum's security foundation. That is the rollup-centric roadmap working exactly as designed, Ethereum providing settlement integrity while L2s absorb transaction volume at a scale L1 was never architected to handle directly.

Although, it is true that bootstrapping the Ethereum network to be used at scale was done by rollups. The numbers confirm it. Ethereum survived its scaling only because L2s absorbed the demand while L1 continued to develop. Currently, Ethereum holds just over $55 billion in DeFi TVL, far outpacing Solana at $6.76 billion and BNB Chain at $5.96 billion with $166 billion in Ethereum-based stablecoins, a reserve pool larger than the foreign exchange holdings of countries like Singapore and India.

A meaningful portion of that dominance was built on the back of an ecosystem made usable by L2s during the years when L1 alone could not carry it. At the time of writing, the approximate value secured by L2s and others is around $40 Billion.

The deal worked. Ethereum survived its most vulnerable era. L2s grew into commercially significant businesses with real users and real institutional partnerships. And that commercial success is precisely where the next problem began

Because what happens when an emergency contractor becomes a permanent tenant and starts optimising for their own revenue rather than the house they were called in to fix?

2. Generic L2s Solved the Capacity Crisis While Deepening the Identity Crisis

What played out between 2023 and 2025 was not a moral failure. It was incentive physics. But to understand why it damaged Ethereum specifically, we first need to understand exactly how value flows in a rollup-centric ecosystem and where it was supposed to go.

How Ethereum Was Supposed to Capture Value From L2s

The rollup-centric roadmap was an economic model. The logic ran as follows:

• Users transact on L2s; cheaper, faster

• L2s post transaction data and proofs back to Ethereum L1, paying fees to do so

• Those fees burn ETH, making ETH deflationary and accruing value to ETH holders

• L2 sequencers, who order transactions, earn revenue but as L2s decentralised their sequencers, that revenue would redistribute toward validators and ultimately strengthen Ethereum's economic security

• The more activity on L2s, the more fees flow to Ethereum, the stronger ETH becomes as an asset

  
  

This was the flywheel. L2 activity was supposed to translate into Ethereum value capture. The key words in that entire model are “supposed to”.

What Actually Happened: The Value Capture Problem

The flywheel broke at the sequencer. Every major L2 – Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, zkSync, etc. – operates a centralized sequencer. That sequencer is the entity that orders transactions on the L2, and it earns the revenue from doing so. In a centralized sequencer model, that revenue goes entirely to the L2 team.

The numbers make the scale of this visible:

• Approximately 5% of Base's total revenue flows back to Ethereum through blob fees. From 2025 to 2026 Base generated $90M+ in revenue through the chain revenue itself

• The remaining 95% stays with Coinbase, contributing just $4.9 million to the mainnet in blob fees out of $90M+generated revenue.

• Priority fees on Base averaged $156,138 per day, approximately 86% of total daily revenue

• In Q1 2025, L2 rollups processed nearly half of Ethereum's DEX volume while securing over $40B in assets, yet L1 daily gas revenue had already fallen from ~$23M at peak to ~$6.3M.

Ethereum provided the security. Ethereum provided credibility. Ethereum absorbed the reputational risk of being the settlement layer. And L2 sequencers captured the overwhelming majority of the transaction revenue that activity produced.

This is the actual betrayal the community was sensing not an ideological one, but an economic one. Ethereum became the infrastructure that made L2 businesses possible while those businesses captured the value.

Why Stage 2 Decentralisation Was the Specific Fix

This is the part of the debate that got almost entirely lost in the noise about alignment and ideology. Stage 2 decentralisation was not a philosophical goal. It was the specific mechanism that would have changed the value flow.

Here is what the stage progression actually means:

• Stage 0: Fully centralised sequencer and upgrade keys; one entity controls everything, including the ability to rewrite the chain

• Stage 1: Proof system live but a security council can override it; partial decentralisation with training wheels

• Stage 2: Proof system fully trustless, no override possible, sequencer decentralised; the chain operates as a true extension of Ethereum's security guarantees

Stage 2 matters economically for Ethereum in three specific ways:

1. A Stage 2 rollup's sequencer is decentralised, meaning sequencer revenue is no longer captured by a single corporate entity. It distributes to validators and sequencer operators, creating a more open economic system where Ethereum's own validators can participate in capturing L2 revenue.

2. A Stage 2 rollup posts valid proofs to Ethereum that Ethereum can cryptographically verify making the L2 a genuine extension of Ethereum's security rather than a chain with a marketing relationship to Ethereum. This increases demand for ETH as the asset that backs that security, strengthening ETH's value proposition.

3. A Stage 2 removes the upgrade key, meaning no single entity can unilaterally change the L2's rules, drain user funds, or censor transactions. This is the difference between an L2 that genuinely inherits Ethereum's security properties and one that merely claims to.

Not a single economically important L2 reached Stage 2. The Block's 2026 analysis confirms decentralisation was treated as a long-term goal rather than an immediate priority throughout 2025. Astria, the most serious shared sequencer effort, shut down entirely. Most L2s continue to rely on trusted operators, upgrade keys, and closed infrastructure.

Facet became the first Stage 2 rollup – the only chain in the ecosystem to fully deliver what the community said it valued most. However, it has very few users, and therefore no significant impact on Ethereum.

Stage 2 was valuable to Ethereum. It was not valuable to L2 teams in the way that user growth, sequencer revenue, and token launches were valuable to them.

The Compounding Identity Crisis

The value capture problem had a second-order effect that compounded the damage. Every generic L2 that launched as "cheaper, faster Ethereum" absorbed activity that might otherwise have concentrated on L1 and with it, absorbed a portion of Ethereum's narrative identity.

The cumulative effect of dozens of generic EVM scaling chains was to make "just use Ethereum" seem unnecessary not because Ethereum had failed, but because Ethereum had been successfully replicated at lower cost by its own infrastructure layer. Ethereum became the backend of an ecosystem that users increasingly experienced through interfaces that had nothing to do with Ethereum.

Paramonov captures the identity crisis this produced precisely. Ethereum could not decide what its token was:

• A commodity? complicated by dynamic supply changes and staking mechanisms

• A tech stock? undermined by insufficient fee revenue

• A store of value? the ultrasound money narrative lasted ~3 years before ETH inflation turned positive again in 2024

ETH was never designed to be Bitcoin. But the ultrasound money narrative tried to compete on that axis while ETH was simultaneously a gas asset, a staking asset, and a settlement layer. None of those framings was convincingly satisfied. And every generic L2 that diluted "what Ethereum is for" made answering that question harder.

The Category Error That Cost Three Years

The Ethereum community treated this as a moral failure and that category error made it nearly impossible to fix. L2 teams did not betray Ethereum. They responded rationally to the incentives in front of them:

• Sequencer revenue was too valuable to surrender without a mechanism making it worthwhile

• Token launches rewarded narrative over execution

• The low cost of launching an "Ethereum-aligned" L2, combined with significant upside from token incentives, attracted a wave of opportunistic entrants with little long-term commitment to the ecosystem.

None of this required bad actors. It required a system where incentives pointed in directions the community did not want and then expressed outrage when people followed them.

The fix was always an incentive redesign. And the differentiation era, examined in the next two sections, is the first version of the L1-L2 relationship where the incentives are actually pointing in the right direction.

3. The L2s That Asked "What Can We Do That Ethereum Cannot?" Are the Ones That Matter Now

Vitalik's February 2026 post is being read as a critique of L2s. It is more accurately a selection mechanism.

The spectrum from "branded shards" obligated to return value to Ethereum through ideological loyalty, to a full range of chains at different levels of connection to Ethereum officially releases L2s from the social contract that was never working. In its place, a simpler and more durable question:

What do you do that Ethereum cannot?

The teams that were asking that question from the beginning, often dismissed as insufficiently aligned or too technically divergent, are the ones the data now validates. They cluster into four categories.

Category 1: Privacy-Native Execution

Ethereum's transparent architecture is one of its most important properties. Every transaction, every contract interaction, every wallet balance is publicly visible and independently verifiable. That transparency is foundational to Ethereum's trust model, it is what makes credible neutrality possible at scale.

It is also a structural limitation for an entire class of use cases the next era of blockchain adoption requires:

• Financial institutions under regulatory frameworks cannot expose transaction details publicly

• Enterprises building supply chain applications cannot broadcast proprietary data on a public ledger

• Institutional trading desks cannot afford to have positions, counterparties, and strategies visible on-chain

These are not edge cases. They represent some of the largest potential markets for blockchain technology. These 2 chains also have the highest developer activities of all the L2s.

Aztec uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable private smart contract execution transaction details verifiable without being publicly visible. Fhenix is built on fully homomorphic encryption, enabling computation on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. Both represent computational models categorically unavailable on Ethereum L1 as its design deliberately prioritises transparency over privacy.

Starknet is building into the same space from its ZK-native architecture. Its Privacy Pool, a compliance-compatible privacy feature on Ekubo, is open-sourced and in final development. More concretely, Starknet is launching strkBTC in 2026: a Bitcoin-backed asset enabling shielded balances and confidential DeFi transfers, where transaction amounts and counterparties remain private while auditability is preserved.

The Starknet Foundation's VP of Growth has stated that privacy at the infrastructure level "removes a critical barrier to broader blockchain adoption" particularly for institutional capital that has remained hesitant to participate in public blockchain markets.

Vitalik explicitly validates this category in his post. As regulatory frameworks like MiCA in Europe and evolving SEC guidance in the United States push institutions toward confidential execution environments, privacy-native L2s become more valuable as L1 gets cheaper not less.

Category 2: Alternative Virtual Machines

The EVM is the most battle-tested smart contract execution environment in the industry. It is also a ceiling.

Writing smart contracts in Solidity excludes the overwhelming majority of the world's software developers – those working in Rust, C, C++, Python, and Go. The EVM's execution model limits certain classes of computation; specific application architectures, particularly those requiring different approaches to state management or provability, are simply not well served by EVM design.

1. Arbitrum's Stylus takes a complementary approach, extending rather than replacing the EVM. Rust, C, and C++ contracts now execute in a WebAssembly environment alongside Solidity on Arbitrum. The developer pool working in those languages dwarfs the Solidity community by orders of magnitude. Stylus opens the ecosystem to entirely different talent pools and existing software libraries deployable on-chain without rewriting in Solidity.

   As Goldfeder argues: even infinite L1 scaling would not make these capabilities unnecessary. They serve developers and use cases the EVM structurally cannot reach.
   
   

2. Starknet + Cairo VM is trying to build a better machine from scratch. Starknet is powered by Cairo rather than the EVM, a deliberate choice because Cairo was designed from the ground up to maximize efficiency for STARK-based proving.

   Its fundamentally different execution model optimized for ZK provability. The Starknet ecosystem grew 168% in projects in 2024, reaching 193 user-centric projects, with the gaming vertical alone seeing 47 new projects and 29 of them built on Dojo, a Cairo-native game engine.

   Starknet is also positioning itself as the execution layer for Bitcoin, targeting a path from Bitcoin's current 13 TPS to thousands with over 1,700 BTC already staked on the network. But it has a tradeoff, Cairo has a steep learning curve, and the ecosystem is smaller. But it's a genuine technical bet. That earns it a place at the table.
   
   

3. Fluent is an Ethereum L2 that combines EVM, SVM, and Wasm into a single unified execution environment, allowing EVM, SVM, and Wasm smart contracts to be atomically composable and accessible through one wallet.

   Calling a program in Solidity via a program written in Solana Rust happens in a single call, included in one transaction which requires no bridging and no shared sequencing. This lets developers leverage popular Solidity applications like Aave but also run more complex cryptography, agent orchestration systems, and even website frontends on-chain.

   
   

Category 3: Institutional Sovereignty

The third category receives the least technical attention in the ecosystem debate and the one that may have the largest near-term economic impact.

What institutions actually did in 2024–2025:

• @coinbase → @base (Ethereum L2)

• @RobinhoodApp → integrated @arbitrum for brokerage settlement rails

• @Sony → @soneium for gaming and media distribution

• @krakenfx → @inkonchain

• @Uniswap → @unichain

• @stripe + @paradigm → @tempo (independent L1)

• @Bybit_Official -> @Mantle_Official

These decisions were not made on throughput calculations. They were made on sovereignty, the need for a dedicated execution environment that an institution controls, customises for its specific regulatory requirements, and evolves at its own pace without depending on the governance of a shared public chain.

Four institutional requirements Ethereum L1 cannot accommodate by design:

• Compliance infrastructure: KYC/AML integration at protocol level is incompatible with Ethereum's permissionless design

• Transaction reversibility: Real estate, securities, and legally complex instruments will require reversal mechanisms, Ethereum L1 transactions are immutable by design

• Custom ordering policies: Regulated brokerages need environments that prevent specific forms of value extraction unacceptable in a regulated context

• Brand and operational control: A regulated financial institution cannot accept the reputational risks of whatever else happens on a shared public chain

None of these requirements disappear as Ethereum L1 scales. They are sovereignty problems, not scaling problems.

Goldfeder's warning is pointed: if institutions on the fence between an Ethereum L2 and an independent L1 conclude the ecosystem does not want their kind of chain, they will not move to the Ethereum L1 – they will build independent L1s. In this scenario, Ethereum loses not just the rollup relationship, but the institutions entirely. Tempo is the most visible current example of that outcome.

Category 4: Extreme Performance

The conventional reading of Vitalik's post that L1 scaling makes L2 scaling redundant is empirically wrong at current and near-term trajectories.

• Arbitrum and Base both exceeded 1,000 TPS during peak 2026 volatility

• Ethereum L1 sat at 40 TPS during that time

• MegaETH is targeting performance ceilings orders of magnitude beyond any L1 scaling roadmap. 100,000 TPS target, 10ms block times, sustained 35,000 TPS in stress tests processing 10.7 billion transactions in a week (more than Ethereum's entire 10-year history).

• Base's gigagas target: 1 gigagas/second – processing the entire current Ethereum L1 throughput every few seconds

• Gaming studios like Atari, Lotte Group, Nexon, and Sky Mavis have adopted app-specific chains for use cases that cannot operate within L1 constraints

Extreme performance L2s are not doing what L1 does faster. They are enabling application categories including fully on-chain games, high-frequency on-chain order books, real-time settlement that do not exist at lower throughput levels.

Base's departure from the OP Stack is the clearest signal that even the most commercially successful generic L2 has concluded that extreme performance rather than alignment credentials is the differentiator worth building around. The six hardforks per year target, 99.99% non-empty block reliability, and gigagas throughput ambition are not incremental improvements. They are the construction of a genuinely distinct identity around what Base can do that Ethereum L1 cannot.

The data behind this trajectory is now substantial:

• $369.9M in ecosystem app revenue in 2025 – 30x growth year-over-year, leading all L2 networks

• 9.3M Coinbase monthly active trading users – a captive distribution channel no other L2 can replicate

• $866.3M in loans applied for through Coinbase via Morpho on Base; Morpho's TVL on Base is up 1,906% year-to-date

• Q4 2025 gross sequencer revenue: ~$19M ($15M net after L1 data costs and OP Collective share)

• Coinbase holds $6B+ in cash and generated $2.8B in subscription and services revenue in 2025

Source: Base 2025 Report, December 2025; Coinbase Q4 2025 Earnings Outlook;Coinbase 2026 Research, March 2026

That last data point matters specifically. Coinbase is legally obligated to maximise shareholder returns. At Base's current sequencer revenue trajectory, the case for continuing to pay Ethereum's blob fees weakens every quarter. The balance sheet to fund an independent security model exists. Wall Street analysts are already pricing Base's sequencer economics into COIN valuations.

J.P. Morgann and Goldman Sachs recently upgraded COIN to Buy, in part due to Base Network Effects.

None of this means Base will become an L1. But the option is now credible in a way it was not two years ago. And the framing of Base leaving the OP Stack as "fragmentation" misreads what is actually happening: the most commercially successful generic L2 is finally building an identity around what it uniquely can do and that identity has almost nothing to do with scaling Ethereum as the rollup-centric roadmap originally conceived it.

What These Four Categories Share

Privacy chains, alternative VM chains, institutional sovereignty chains, and extreme performance chains share one property that distinguishes them from the generic L2s of the extraction era:

They all have a credible answer to the question Vitalik is now explicitly asking: what do you do that Ethereum cannot?

The L2s that cannot answer that question are generic EVM scaling chains whose entire value proposition was cheaper execution of the same transactions Ethereum processes. These networks face existential pressure as L1 fees fall, L1 throughput increases, and the native rollup precompile makes EVM verification a native Ethereum function available to any L2 for free.

That selection pressure is not Ethereum becoming hostile to L2s. It is Ethereum becoming strong enough that the weakest reason to build an L2 is cheaper EVM execution which no longer justifies an independent chain's existence.

4. What the L1-L2 Relationship Actually Looks Like Now

On February 17, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation announced the formation of a new Platform team with a single mandate: to unify L1 and L2 into a coherent platform. The stated goal was to "deliver the strongest possible Ethereum platform, where L1 and L2s are best positioned to support users, apps, and all organisations building on Ethereum."

The announcement received far less attention than Vitalik's post two weeks earlier. It deserved more.The Ethereum Foundation is catching up organisationally to a structural reality the market had already priced in.

The alignment debate is over.

The initial question was, “are L2s sufficiently loyal to Ethereum?”

But this has been replaced by a more productive one, “how do L1 and L2s together build the strongest possible platform?”

The Technical Mechanism: Native Rollup Precompile

The most consequential proposal in Vitalik's post is the native rollup precompile, a mechanism that would verify ZK-EVM proofs as a native Ethereum function, auto-upgrading with Ethereum and covered by hard-fork remediation if bugs emerge.

Its structural effect is a selection mechanism. For generic EVM L2s, it evaporates their primary technical moat. If Ethereum verifies EVM execution natively and for free, cheaper EVM transactions alone no longer justify an independent chain's existence. For differentiated L2s, it is unambiguously positive. Vitalik's design principle is explicit: if an L2 is "EVM plus other stuff," Ethereum verifies the EVM portion for free, and the L2 only proves its differentiated layer. Aztec's privacy system, Starknet's CairoVM, and Arbitrum's Stylus contracts are examples of the "other stuff" that survives and strengthens.

The precompile also enables synchronous composability between rollups – atomic transactions across different L2s as if on the same chain – laying the technical foundation for a unified Ethereum that finally feels like one ecosystem.

The Economic Logic

Ethereum's value as a settlement layer does not derive primarily from fee revenue. It derives from the scale and trustworthiness of the economic activity that settles on it. Every differentiated L2 that builds a genuinely valuable application increases the total economic surface area Ethereum secures worth considerably more than the marginal blob fees any individual L2 pays.

The numbers reflect this. Ethereum holds $165 billion in stablecoin issuance and $55 billion in DeFi TVL outpacing Solana at $6.76 billion by a factor of seven. Monthly transactions hit all-time highs of 50 million-plus in 2025 even as fees fell to multi-cycle lows while usage was at all-time highs, a settlement layer whose infrastructure costs are falling while demand grows.

L2s that settle on Ethereum inherit proximity to that trust from day one. Independent L1s do not. That cost differential grows over time rather than shrinking. Ethereum's security budget scales with staked value while L2 sequencer costs remain relatively fixed. The economic incentive for differentiated L2s to remain anchored to Ethereum strengthens as the ecosystem matures rather than weakens.

Three Eras, One Coherent Story

The relationship makes most sense as three distinct eras. 1. The bootstrap era (2020 to 2023) was an asymmetric deal, correct for its moment, that produced the ecosystem whose numbers define this piece. 2. The extraction era (2023 to 2025) exposed the incentive misalignments that a social contract without enforcement mechanisms always produces. 3. The differentiation era (2026 and onwards) beginning now is the first version of the relationship where the incentives of every major participant point in the same direction.

Ethereum wants differentiated L2s that expand what the ecosystem can do. Differentiated L2s want Ethereum's security and liquidity. Institutions want dedicated execution environments on Ethereum rails and the enterprise rollup trend confirms they are building them. Generic L2s face a structural choice between finding genuine differentiation or accepting that they are operating in a category the market is exiting.

The Block's 2025 data shows the selection already operating activity concentrated around a small set of ecosystems with genuine differentiation while most new launches became ghost towns after incentive cycles ended.

The Winner-Takes-Most Dynamic Is Already Playing Out

The L2Beat data makes the consolidation trend hard to ignore. Arbitrum One holds $16.43B in total bridged value. Base Chain holds $11.08B. Together they account for roughly 75% of all L2 TVL across the top 13 chains and the gap to the next tier is not incremental. OP Mainnet sits at $1.55B, nearly an order of magnitude behind, while chains like Scroll ($118M) and Abstract ($73M) are competing in a different category entirely.

This distribution reflects the compounding logic of L2 network effects. The chains with the most revenue attract the best developers. The best developers build the killer apps. Killer apps attract more users. More users generate more sequencer revenue. More revenue funds better infrastructure, tooling, and institutional partnerships.

The cycle reinforces itself every quarter. The leaders from the flywheel are already visible in the data:

• Arbitrum One: deepest DeFi liquidity, strongest developer ecosystem, Stylus opening the chain to Rust/C++ developers

• Base: $369.9M in ecosystem app revenue in 2025, Aerodrome generating $160.5M alone, 9.3M Coinbase users as a captive distribution moat

• Starknet: $47.2M annualised fees, $130M in bridged BTC, growing BTCFi and privacy use cases that competitors cannot easily replicate

The challenge for newer entrants is more about the switching costs growing higher every quarter than competing on TVL; liquidity depth on Arbitrum took years to build. The developer relationships, audited protocol deployments, and institutional integrations that make Base's DeFi ecosystem function are not replicable with an incentive programme. Katana's 256% TVL growth and Ink's $523M are genuine signals that niche momentum is still possible. But for any new general-purpose L2, the relevant question is no longer whether it can attract users. It is whether it can attract users away from ecosystems where every month of inactivity widens the gap further.

The chains that survived the extraction era and built genuine differentiation do not just have a head start. They have structural advantages in revenue, tooling, liquidity, and talent that become self-reinforcing. The window for catching them is narrowing.

Conclusion

The path forward was always hiding in plain sight, it was in the incentives. The early bootstrap phase did what it needed to do: it pulled people in, kickstarted activity, and built the foundation. Then came the extraction phase, where the cracks started to show and misaligned incentives became harder to ignore. What we are moving into now is a phase of real differentiation where both the tech and the economics push builders toward creating something meaningfully distinct, not just because they believe in it, but because it actually makes sense.

Ethereum needs chains that expand its surface area doing the things it can’t do itself, while still relying on it for what it does best. That’s where the next wave comes from: privacy-focused chains, alternative VM ecosystems, sovereign institutional chains, ultra-high-performance systems. They don’t matter because they are loyal, they matter because they are useful.

And maybe that’s the point, all the noise, all the hype cycles, it had to play out. Now that it has, what’s left is clearer, the signal was always there.

Disclaimer: This analyst take is produced by A1 Research for informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or an endorsement of any project, token, or protocol mentioned herein.