Ethereum's Integrated Era
2025-05-31 15:02:41 Reading

Any successful blockchain must create a flywheel that looks like this.

  • Economic progress (TVL, price, REV, volume, etc.) must bring awareness and visibility to a chain so that: ⤵️
  • New apps can get funding, new developers can learn the tech, and new users can take advantage of everything we've built to improve their lives, inevitably leading to: ⤵️
  • Innovation, and the improvement of infra and apps to bring efficiency and explore new use cases and architectures. The innovation phase is part of the cycle where coordination is most crucial, but also the phase where natural incentives seem to push teams apart. Innovation leads to Economic progress, and the cycle begins again. 🔃

The problem that  Ethereum has faced is simple – we have broken every part of this flywheel.Note: This article approaches the high level technical roadmap of Ethereum and does not focus on the social layer roadmap. These two must exist together for a full picture.

First, Accept the Problem

New apps, developers, and users are on L2s! Innovation takes place on L2s! And economic progress is shifting towards L2s as well.

This would not be a problem for Ethereum if those L2s fed back into the flywheel themselves, but too often this is not the case.

Where is the root of this break in the flywheel?

Ethereum (circa 2020 onwards) thought scaling with rollups was the only way to scale, and it drastically overestimated how much L2s would contribute back to the broader flywheel of Ethereum.

Rollups were presented as a scaling solution. When compared to sharding, rollups seemed simpler, avoided diluting the security of Ethereum L1, and could even bring better composability. 

But rollups are more than just a scaling architecture, they are an incentives architecture too. A simplified train of logic might look like this:

  1. We need to scale Ethereum.
  2. Some form of sharding is necessary to scale a blockchain with the properties we want.

Disclaimer: This specification is preliminary and is subject to change at any time without notice. CryptoCNN assumes no responsibility for any errors contained herein.

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