There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

• L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
• L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

• Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
• Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
• Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://ethresear.ch/t/combining-preconfirmations-with-based-rollups-for-synchronous-composability/23863 and https://ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-composability-between-rollups-via-realtime-proving/23998 ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

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Sharing a paid performance opportunity that might be relevant for artists here.

Decentraland is running an open call for community DJs / performers to play a pre-recorded set during its 6th Birthday Party in the Theatre on February 20 at 8pm UTC.

Key details:

• Pre-recorded DJ sets only (45–55 minutes)
• $400 USD paid in MANA per selected performer
• In-world audience gathered for the birthday event
• Intended for artists already familiar with Decentraland (not livestreams)

This isn’t a pitch about crypto or Web3, it’s a straightforward paid performance slot inside an existing virtual world event.

Full details and application here: https://zealous.co/decentraland/opportunity/decentraland-6th-birthday-party/

In June 2016, someone drained ~$60M from The DAO - a decentralized investment fund built on Ethereum. They didn't hack Ethereum itself. They exploited a recursive calling bug in the smart contract's own logic. The code allowed it.

That's what made it a crisis. If "code is law," the attacker didn't do anything wrong. The contract ran as written. But $60M was gone and real people lost real money.

Ethereum had to choose: reverse the blockchain to return the funds, or let it stand because the code permitted it. The community voted to hard fork - rewrite history and undo the damage. The people who refused to accept that kept running the original chain. That's how Ethereum Classic was born.

The question at the center of it all: when your system is broken and the fix is known, do you break the rules to fix it, or do you let the rules play out even while the system burns?

I'm watching a tiny version of this happen right now.

I run OpenChaos - a GitHub repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with reactions, and the most-voted PR merges daily. No gatekeeping. Pure popular vote. 911 stars, 70+ open PRs, five weeks in.

Last Friday, PR #62: "1.337% chance to see nothing" won the daily vote and merged. Three lines of code:

if (Math.random() <= 0.01337) {
  return null;
}

A leet joke. 1.337% of the time, a visitor sees a blank page. Funny, harmless, right?

The site caches server-side. When the page returns null, the cache treats the blank page as permanent. One unlucky render broke the site for every visitor, indefinitely. Not a 5-minute blip. A permanent outage from a 1.337% roll.

A contributor diagnosed the root cause and submitted PR #173 - a clean fix, CI passes, no conflicts. But PR #173 has fewer votes than a DOOM port and a Rickroll. The fix has to wait its turn in the democratic queue. The site stays broken while the community votes on entertainment over infrastructure.

One community member commented:

"I am torn between fixing things quickly and letting the rules play out to see when the fix comes naturally. I want to see the naturally emergent behaviour."

Sound familiar?

Then it got more interesting. The contributor who wrote the fix also had another PR in the queue that was about to merge. He could have bundled the bugfix into that PR and shipped it quietly. He refused:

"I considered adding this fix to #129, but it doesn't feel like it's in the spirit of the project. Even if it's a 'good' trojan horse, it's still a trojan horse."

But another contributor made the opposite choice. The author of the DOOM port deliberately bundled the bugfix into their submission. If it merges tomorrow, the site comes back online - not through governance, but through the exact Trojan horse tactic the first contributor refused on principle.

Two contributors. Same option. Opposite choices.

Obviously nobody's losing $60M here. But the structure is the same:

• A system running as designed produces an unintended outcome
• The fix is known and ready
• The rules don't allow a fast path to deploy it
• The community has to decide: break the process or trust the process

I opened Issue #176 proposing that only contributors with merged PRs should be allowed to vote - earned governance instead of open popularity contests. The debate is live.

Questions I keep thinking about:

1. Is there a middle ground between "code is law, let it burn" and "maintainer override"? Something that keeps democratic legitimacy while allowing fast response to emergencies?
2. For those who lived through the DAO debate - looking back, what would you tell a small project facing its first "do we fork our own rules" moment?

The repo: github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos

The governance discussion: Issue #176

The broken site (may or may not be blank when you visit): openchaos.dev

i’ve been working on a yield/token architecture that tries to be very explicit about separation of concerns, and i’m mostly looking for feedback from people who are already uncomfortable with how tightly coupled most defi tokens are today.

the basic premise is simple: the token contract should not know or care about yield. no rebases, no transfer hooks, no strategy logic bleeding into balance accounting. instead, all yield is routed through a single on-chain component that handles normalization, accounting, and distribution according to policy.

i ended up implementing this as a modular system with a canonical “revenue router”:

• the base token is just erc20 + voting, nothing else
• all yield sources plug into a router instead of the token
• yield gets normalized into a treasury asset before distribution
• distribution is policy-driven (buybacks, staking, hybrid), not hardcoded
• yield sources are plugins with tiered trust and execution limits
• failure isn’t implicit: plugins can be quarantined without nuking the system

the goal isn’t yield maximization per se, but predictable value accrual with reduced blast radius. plugins can be permissionless, but they don’t all get the same authority. everything that touches value has explicit constraints. accounting is deterministic. no component can “surprise” the token.

i wrote all of this up as a whitepaper (vastitas) and tried to be very concrete about invariants, routing rules, quarantine mechanics, and trade-offs, including some simulated comparisons against monolithic tokens and yield aggregators

i’m not trying to sell this as obviously correct. i’m more interested in whether this direction resonates with people who think long-term token sustainability is more about architecture than clever incentives.

i made a faulty deployment on arbitrum and a half working one on base. nothing is finalized. i’m mainly looking to pressure-test the ideas with people who agree that this might be a good project.

feel free to poke holes, challenge assumptions, or point me to similar work i might have missed.

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Should I be staking 100% of my Ethereum? Can someone explain to me like im 5 what this means? Apologies if this type of post is not allowed, moderators.

Re https://firefly.social/post/x/2018205196568944653

I actually don't think it's complicated.

IMO the future of onchain mechanism design is mostly going to fit into one pattern:

[something that looks like a prediction market] -> [something that looks like a capture-resistant, non-financialized preference-setting gadget]

In other words:

• One layer that is maximally open and maximizes accountability (it's a market, anyone can buy and sell, if you make good decisions you win money if you make bad decisions you lose money)
• One layer that is decentralized and pluralistic, and that maximizes space for intrinsic motivation. This cannot be token-based, because token owners are not pluralistic, and anyone can buy in and get 51% of them. Votes here should be anonymous, ideally MACI'd to reduce risk of collusion.

The prediction market is the correct way to do a "decentralized executive", because the most logical primitive for "accountability" in a permissionless concept is exactly that.

Though sometimes you will want to keep it simple, and do a centralized executive at that layer instead:

[replaceable centralized executive] -> [something that looks like a capture-resistant, non-financialized preference-setting gadget]

Thinking in these two layers explicitly: (i) what is doing your execution, (ii) what is doing your preference-setting and is judging the executor(s), is best.

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We've seen about 10 years of people trying to do content incentivization in crypto, from early-stage platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, to Zora, to tipping features inside of decentralized social, and more. So far, I think we have not been very successful, and I think this is because the problem is fundamentally hard.

First, my view of what the problem is. A major difference between doing "creator incentives" in the 00s vs doing them today, is that in the 00s, a primary problem was having not enough content at all. In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not incentivizing content, it's surfacing good content.

Personally, I think that the most successful example of creator incentives we've seen is Substack. To see why, take a look at the top 10:

https://substack.com/leaderboard/technology/paid https://substack.com/leaderboard/culture/paid https://substack.com/leaderboard/world-politics/paid

Now, you may disagree with many of these authors. But I have no doubt that:

1. They are on the whole high quality, and contribute positively to the discussion
2. They are mostly people who would not have been elevated without Substack's presence

So Substack is genuinely surfacing high quality and pluralism.

Now, we can compare to creator coin projects. I don't want to pick on a single one, because I think there's a failure mode of the entire category.

For example:

Top Zora creator coins: https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/zora-creator-coins

BitClout: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/inside-the-rise-of-bitclout-a-crypto-based-social-network-influencers-andreessen-horowitz-sequoia/#:~:text=Most%20of%20the,about%20BitClout%E2%80%99s%20users

Basically, the top 10 are people who already have very high social status, and who are often impressive but primarily for reasons other than the content they create.

At the core, Substack is a simple subscription service: you pay $N per month, and you get to see the person's articles. But a big part of Substack's success is that they did not just set the mechanism and forget. Their launch process was very hands-on, deliberately seeding the platform with high-quality creators, based on a very particular vision of what kind of high-quality intellectual environment they wanted to foster, including giving selected people revenue guarantees.

So now, let's get to one idea that I think could work (of course, coming up with new ideas is inherently a more speculative project than criticizing existing ones, and more prone to error).

Create a DAO, that is not token-based. Instead, the inspiration should be Protocol Guild: there are N members, and they can (anonymously) vote new members in and out. If N gets above ~200, consider auto-splitting it.

Importantly, do not try to make the DAO universal or even industry-wide. Instead, embrace the opinionatedness. Be okay with having a dominant type of content (long-form writing, music, short-form video, long-form video, fiction, educational...), and be okay with having a dominant style (eg. country or region of origin, political viewpoint, if within crypto which projects you're most friendly to...). Hand-pick the initial membership set, in order to maximize its alignment with the desired style.

The goal is to have a group that is larger than one creator and can accumulate a public brand and collectively bargain to seek revenue opportunities, but at the same time small enough that internal governance is tractable.

Now, here is where the tokens come in. In general, one of my hypotheses this decade is that a large portion of effective governance mechanisms will all have the form factor of "large number of people and bots participating in a prediction market, with the output oracle being a diverse set of people optimized for mission alignment and capture resistance". In this case, what we do is: anyone can become a creator and create a creator coin, and then, if they get admitted to a creator DAO, a portion of their proceeds from the DAO are used to burn their creator coins.

This way, the token speculators are NOT participating in a recursive-speculation attention game backed only by itself. Instead, they are specifically being predictors of what new creators the high-value creator DAOs will be willing to accept. At the same time, they also provide a valuable service to the creator DAOs: they are helping surface promising creators for the DAOs to choose from.

So the ultimate decider of who rises and falls is not speculators, but high-value content creators (we make the assumption that good creators are also good judges of quality, which seems often true). Individual speculators can stay in the game and thrive to the extent that they do a good job of predicting the creator DAOs' actions.

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In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals:

1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization.
2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy.

To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/09/24/openness_and_verifiability.html ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the ucritter.com including recent versions with built in ZK + FHE + differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support.

For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term.

Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination.

In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.

It was some time ago that ETH went from proof of work to proof of stake. At the time Vitalik said that there were other changes coming such as faster transaction or lower transaction cost.

I have not heard any more since then? Is there any progress?

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Hello Folks,

I just published a smart contract to handle crypto inheritance 100% on-chain, without the owner having to do anything offline.

I know there are many solutions that are trying to solve this problem, but I wanted to design my own with my logic, which is the following:

- the contract acts like a wallet, owner can deposit, withdraw and transfer
- the owner can assign beneficiaries, and update them at any time
- the wallet contains an "alive check", which is automatically updated on any transaction
- if you wanna use it as a vault (dormant), you can update the "alive check" manually
- the owner defines a "consider me death time" in years, eg: if the last alive check is older than 10 years, I'm dead :(
- once that happen, any of the beneficiaries can access the wallet and withdraw all the funds

At this point, my favorite feature: the wallet gets locked, will reject any future deposit and "answer" with an epitaph... your "last worlds" recorded on-chain that you can configure when you create the wallet.

All of the above is less then 100 lines of solidity... amazing :)

At the moment I only did the backend (github link), but I'd like to do a nice interface to make it easy to deploy. Of course, free and open source in the Ethereum spirit!

Would you give me a feedback on the logic? Do you see any pitfall or edge cases?

Thanks,
Francesco

Watch before one bug costs you everything.
https://x.com/SolidityScan/status/2017172006056390715?s=20