Vitalik's been dropping hints on this for a while.
Let's see who takes what role:
@ether_fi do settlement on @Scroll_ZKP with their cards - killer use case.
@StarkWareLtd & @aztecnetwork own the privacy game.
@arbitrum & @OptimismFND: speed for advanced DEXes.
How about the rest?
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://t.co/9jy6v1X6Fw and https://t.co/gZmu3YjebM ). 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.
Found a great simple tool to aggregate all my conversations and chats from Claude, OpenAI, and Perplexity in one place - @OwnYourChat. Of course, it's self-hosted and open source. Already added a couple of PRs for search and filter tools. Now it's simply a great tool. Kudos to @topcatnocap
Going public with @Bakuutin! Intro talk about https://t.co/UU38715Vf5 — how to keep your privacy and build a fully self-hosted AI memory during Buenos Aires @EFDevcon week.
Thanks @cyberacademydev for the great event!
https://t.co/4hcMiEEbjp
Petr Korolev @skywinder & Tigor Bakutin show why your AI memory must stay local — and how self-hosted models can give you superhuman recall without handing your life to Google or Meta
https://t.co/Bbdw226DaC
@0xmikko_eth 141 Savant vs. 26 from Nethermind — that’s wild! 💥
Really curious to see the comparison:
- how many are real issues?
- how many are false positives or duplicates?
Super impressive work. When can we expect the full analysis, @0xmikko_eth ? 🙂
Good weekend! Let’s build the @omedotme 😎
❌.. Failed to get camera frame buffer
💥 Disconnected (read failed: [Errno 6] Device not configured)
💨 And then… magic smoke!
Definitely not my day.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
I feel you—and honestly, I feel a lot of the same things.
The values that brought so many of us into open source and crypto—BUIDLing, curiosity, innovation, collaboration—are getting buried under incentives, metrics, and noise.
What once felt like pure promise now feels like just another race for hype and yield.
I’m tired.
Everything I love about software: craft, care, community is being gutted.
AI slop PRs for airdrops. Fake activity to juice metrics for retro funding. DAO politics and governance favors. OSS reduced to a game of farming points and politics.
Crypto didn’t liberate anything. It just strapped a token to every soul and called it progress.
I vented to a friend. They said: "That’s not crypto. That’s money. Money corrupts everything it touches."
And yeah maybe that's the problem.
As time passes the case of a crypto critique becomes clearer and clearer. We need more criticism and self-reflection.
The direction is wrong.
@TonioMacaronio I believe the price for normal audits will remain the same—it’s just a great booster.
The AI audits themselves are still in the early stage.
Manual audits will be in even higher demand, especially with 100x more vibe-coded smart contracts popping up :)
Been skeptical about AI in auditing? Same here.
So we ran @savantchat on a well-known DeFi project (~3k SLOC) already audited by leading firms.
It flagged new logic issues, edge cases, and gave actionable PoCs.
Not a replacement for humans — but a strong sidekick. Worth trying!
🟠 1/ We recently tested @savantchat — an AI-powered auditing tool — on a real DeFi project (~3k SLOC), previously audited by multiple top firms.
The question: can AI surface anything meaningful post-audit?
Spoiler: it can. And it made us rethink how automation can augment human reviews. 👇
Me: “I won’t start another project this weekend.”
Also me: New dev kits just landed — break, build, ship, repeat!
Our Hackerspace is buzzing.
Huge thanks to @kodjima33 for the lightning-fast reply + shipment.
Let’s goooo! New features loading 🚀
@kodjima33 Full-day video? Only if the glasses come with a just 10,000 mAh in each earpiece battery + forehead fan.
But a timelapse life in 1-min shots? Now we’re talking!
Build mode: ON 🚀