It's funny watching CT singing praises of L2s after years of bashing the rollup-centric roadmap, but to me the very framing of L2s being a result of the rollup-centric roadmap is misleading. L2s exist not because of any top-down roadmap -- they emerged naturally due to a combination of 1) Ethereum's core technical properties, and 2) market demand. In other words, short of ceasing to be itself, Ethereum could not have stopped L2s from existing even if it wanted to. Credits must go to the EF for accelerating the success of rollups by pursuing the rollup-centric roadmap, but we must not get the cause and effect wrong -- the rollup-centric roadmap was a reaction to the emergence of rollups, not the cause of it. (note that I will be using the terms "rollup" and "L2" interchangeably for readability, even though they are not technically the same thing) At its core, a rollup is an off-chain program that posts its input data and commits its state to the L1, alongside a smart contract "verifier" that can verify the state transitions. If you examine this definition, you can derive the core technical properties that a L1 must have for L2s to exist: - L1 must allow for posting data, so that input data and state commitments can be posted. - L1 must support a general programming environment, so that verifiers can be implemented. But most L1s, including alt L1s like Solana and Sui, have these technical properties, so it's worth asking why we don't see rollups flourishing in those ecosystems. This is because Ethereum also has a set of other properties that no other L1s have: - Ethereum is maximally decentralized, which makes its block space 1) credibly persistent (i.e. you can believe that Ethereum will last forever), and 2) widely accessible. This enables rollups built on Ethereum to inherit its persistence and accessibility, giving credence to the idea that rollup users can enjoy high-performance execution without giving up the benefits of decentralization. - To achieve maximal decentralization, Ethereum runs a very large validator set, which makes Ethereum blocks expensive and slow to produce. The high gas price and latency of Ethereum blocks therefore lead to market demand for cheap and fast block space, a void that rollups are perfectly positioned to fill. - As a direct result of the decentralization, Ethereum has become the best home for on-chain liquidity, simply because people want their liquidity to sit where it can 1) last forever, and 2) be maximally accessible. Therefore, L2s building on Ethereum do not have to bootstrap their liquidity from scratch, but rather can funnel Ethereum's liquidity into the rollup via trustless canonical bridges. - As another consequence of decentralization, Ethereum is capture-and-censorship-resistant. But sometimes, capture and censorship are actually desired features, in which case they are known as regulation and compliance. So market also demands L2s because they can be regulated, since Ethereum itself cannot be. In short, for as long as Ethereum keeps embracing decentralization, it will be the best home for L2s. As Ethereum builders, our job is to preserve and enforce Ethereum's core decentralization properties, while creating and improving technologies such as blobs and interop to facilitate the growth of highly scalable L2s. Ethereum and L2s will help each other win. Let's build towards it.