Protocol | March 24, 2026

Ethereum Reframes The L1-L2 Deal

A new Ethereum Foundation post says mainnet should stay the settlement and liquidity core, while layer 2s compete by offering their own features, control, and distribution.

The Ethereum Foundation says the old rollup story is too narrow. In a new post, its Platform team argues that Ethereum should now be understood as one system with two jobs: L1 as the permissionless base for settlement, shared state, liquidity, and DeFi, and L2s as the place where new features, tighter control, and distinct go-to-market strategies can be built.

That is a shift in emphasis. A few years ago, the main case for rollups was scale. The Foundation now says the bigger lever is differentiation. L2s still help Ethereum reach more users, but they also give teams room to specialize around privacy, compliance, latency, pricing, governance, and application design in ways the base layer cannot.