The Development Direction of Ethereum in 2030: Achieving the Vision of a World Ledger through Rollup Technology Diversification

Ethereum has always been committed to maintaining trusted neutrality while promoting upper-layer innovation. Early discussions depicted a "Rollup-centric roadmap," where the underlying network is gradually simplified and solidified, with most activities migrating to L2. However, recent developments indicate that merely serving as a minimal consensus and data availability layer is insufficient: L1 must have the capacity to handle traffic and activities, as this is the foundation on which L2 ultimately relies. This means a need for faster block times, lower data costs, stronger proof mechanisms, and better interoperability.

The increase in L1 activity will drive the growth of L2 activity, which can be said to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

The upcoming Beam Chain consensus mechanism reconstruction aims to achieve faster final confirmation speeds and lower validator thresholds, further enhancing the neutrality of Ethereum while improving its original throughput. At the same time, there are proposals to consider migrating activities from the increasingly complex Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a RISC-V native virtual machine, which is expected to significantly improve the efficiency of provers while maintaining interoperability with traditional contracts.

These upgrades will reshape the L2 landscape. By 2030, Ethereum's roadmap centered around general Rollups will integrate in two directions within a range:

• Aligned Rollup: Prioritize deep integration with Ethereum ( such as shared ordering and native verification ), fully utilizing the liquidity of L1 under the premise of minimizing trust assumptions. This relationship is mutually beneficial, as aligned Rollups can directly obtain composability and security from L1.

• Performance Rollup: Prioritizes throughput and real-time user experience, sometimes achieving this through alternative data availability layers (DA layers ) or authorized participants ( such as centralized sorters, small security committees/multi-signatures ), while still using Ethereum as the ultimate settlement layer for credibility ( or for marketing purposes ).

When designing these Rollup solutions, each team must weigh the following three aspects:

• Liquidity Acquisition: How to obtain and utilize liquidity on Ethereum and possibly other Rollup solutions? What is the importance of synchronous or atomic-level composability?

• Security source: To what extent should the liquidity transferred from Ethereum to Rollup directly inherit the security of Ethereum, or rely on the Rollup provider?

• Execution expressiveness: How important is the compatibility of the Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM )? Given the rise of alternatives such as SVM and popular Rust smart contracts, will EVM compatibility still be important in the next five years?

Polarization on the Rollup Spectrum

Rollup projects are gradually clustering towards two extremes. One end is high-performance Rollups, which can provide maximum throughput and user experience ( high bandwidth, low latency ), but have a lower coupling degree with Ethereum L1; the other end is Ethereum-aligned Rollups (, such as L1-based Rollups, native Rollups, and ultra Rollups ). These Rollups fully utilize Ethereum's security, data, and consensus mechanisms, prioritizing decentralization, security, and trust neutrality, but sacrifice some performance due to L1 design constraints. Rollups that lie in the middle ground and attempt to balance the two may struggle to compete and ultimately drift towards one of the extremes, facing the risk of being eliminated.

The Rollup in the upper left corner of the chart focuses on performance: they may adopt centralized sorters, alternative data availability networks ( DA networks ), or specific application optimizations to achieve throughput far exceeding conventional L2(, such as MegaETH ). Some performance-oriented Rollups may lean more to the right in alignment (, for example, by adopting fast pre-confirmation-based technologies like Puffer UniFi and Rise, targeting the "ideal goal" in the upper right corner ), but their ultimate determinacy still depends on the specifications of L1. In contrast, the Rollups in the lower right corner maximize alignment with Ethereum: deeply integrating ETH into fees, transactions, and DeFi; solidifying transaction sorting and/or proof verification on L1; and prioritizing composability over raw speed (. For instance, Taiko is developing in this direction while also exploring permissioned pre-confirmation to optimize user experience ). By 2030, I expect many "moderate" L2s to either shift towards one of the aforementioned models or face the risk of being eliminated. Users and developers will tend to choose high-security, Ethereum-aligned environments ( for high-risk and composable DeFi scenarios ), or highly scalable, application-customized networks ( for mass user applications ). The roadmap for Ethereum in 2030 lays the foundation for both paths.

The definition of "alignment" is controversial and has not reached a consensus. For the purposes of this report, the above is a brief analytical framework for "performance" and "alignment". The charts presented earlier are based on this definition and may not be applicable to other interpretations of "alignment".

Why will the middle zone disappear?

Network effects will drive the market to consolidate around fewer, larger hubs. In markets like cryptocurrency where network effects play a dominant role, a pattern dominated by a few winners may eventually emerge, just like what we see in the CEX field. Due to network effects coalescing around the core advantages of a chain, ecosystems tend to integrate into a few "performance-maximized" and "security-maximized" platforms. A Rollup that only achieves mediocre alignment or performance on Ethereum may ultimately lack the security of the former and the usability of the latter.

As Rollup technology matures, economic activities will form layers based on the trade-off between "required security" and "cost of obtaining security." Scenarios that cannot afford settlement or governance risks, such as institutional-level DeFi, large on-chain vaults, and high-value collateral markets, may concentrate on chains that inherit Ethereum's complete security guarantees and neutrality, or on Ethereum L1 itself ###. On the other end, application scenarios aimed at the general public, such as Meme, trading, social, gaming, and retail payments, will gather on chains that offer the best user experience at the lowest cost. These chains may require customized throughput enhancement solutions or centralized ordering mechanisms. Therefore, general-purpose chains that are "adequate in speed but not the fastest, and acceptable in security but not optimal" will gradually lose their appeal. Especially by 2030, if cross-chain interoperability allows assets to flow freely between these two types of scenarios, the living space in this middle ground will be even more limited.

The Evolution of the Ethereum Technology Stack

The entire base layer of Ethereum ( has planned significant upgrades from execution, settlement, consensus to data availability ), aimed at enhancing L1 scalability and better adapting to the development model centered around Rollup. Key improvements (, as indicated by the arrows, will enhance performance, reduce complexity, and promote a more direct role for Ethereum in Rollup operations.

![Envisioning Ethereum 2030: A World Ledger with Dual Tracks of L1 and Rollup])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-7b8fd1446a356714f58131277e29edd0.webp(

) Execution Layer

By 2030, Ethereum's current execution environment (, which employs a 256-bit architecture and the traditional design of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ), may be replaced or enhanced by a more modern and efficient virtual machine. Vitalik has proposed upgrading the Ethereum Virtual Machine to a RISC-V based architecture. RISC-V is a streamlined modular instruction set that is expected to achieve significant breakthroughs in transaction execution and proof generation efficiency, potentially increasing efficiency by 50-100 times (. Its 32/64-bit instructions can be directly adapted to modern CPUs and are more efficient in zero-knowledge proofs. To mitigate the impact of technological iterations and avoid progress stagnation ), such as the previous community's dilemma of considering eWasm as a replacement for EVM (, a dual virtual machine model is planned: retaining EVM to ensure backward compatibility while introducing a new RISC-V virtual machine to handle new contracts ), similar to Arbitrum Stylus's compatibility solution for WASM + EVM contracts ###. This initiative aims to significantly simplify and accelerate the execution layer while enhancing the scalability of L1 and supporting Rollup capabilities.

(# Why do this?

The design of the EVM did not consider zero-knowledge proofs, therefore zk-EVM provers incur a lot of additional overhead when simulating state transitions, calculating root hashes/hashed trees, and handling EVM-specific mechanisms. In contrast, the RISC-V virtual machine adopts a simpler register logic, allowing for direct modeling and proof generation, significantly reducing the required constraints. Its friendliness to zero-knowledge proofs can eliminate inefficient aspects such as gas calculation and state management, greatly benefiting all Rollups that utilize zero-knowledge proofs: the generation of state transition proofs will be simpler, faster, and cheaper. Ultimately, upgrading the EVM to a RISC-V virtual machine can enhance overall proof throughput, making it possible for L1 to directly verify L2 execution ), as detailed below (, while also increasing the throughput limit of the performance-oriented Rollup's own virtual machine.

In addition, this will break through the niche of Solidity/Vyper, significantly expanding the Ethereum developer ecosystem and attracting the participation of more mainstream development communities such as Rust, C/C++, and Go.

) Settlement Layer

Ethereum plans to transition from a fragmented L2 settlement model to a unified, natively integrated settlement framework, which will fundamentally change the settlement approach for Rollups. Today, each Rollup needs to deploy independent L1 verification contracts ( for fraud proofs or validity proofs ), and these contracts are highly customized and independent of each other. By 2030, Ethereum may integrate a native feature (, the proposed EXECUTE precompiled function ), as a universal L2 execution validator. EXECUTE allows Ethereum validators to directly re-execute Rollup's state transitions and verify their correctness, essentially "cementing" the ability to validate any Rollup block at the protocol level.

This upgrade will give rise to "native Rollup", which is essentially a programmable execution shard ### similar to the design of NEAR (. Unlike ordinary L2, standard Rollup, or L1-based Rollup, the blocks of native Rollup are verified by Ethereum's own execution engine.

EXECUTE eliminates the complex custom infrastructure required for EVM simulation and maintenance such as fraud proof mechanisms, zero-knowledge proof circuits, and multi-signature "security committees", greatly simplifying the development of equivalent EVM Rollups, ultimately achieving a fully trustless L2 with almost no custom code required. Combined with next-generation real-time provers such as Fermah and Succinct, real-time settlement can be achieved on L1: Rollup transactions reach finality as soon as they are included in L1, without waiting for the fraud proof window or multi-period proof computations. By building the settlement layer as a globally shared infrastructure, Ethereum enhances trusted neutrality, allowing users to freely choose verification clients and composability without worrying about real-time proof issues in the same slot, significantly simplifying synchronous composability. All native or native + L1-based Rollups will use the same L1 settlement function, enabling standardized proofs and seamless interaction between Rollup shards.

) Consensus Layer

The Ethereum beacon chain ### Beacon Chain ( consensus layer is being restructured into the Beam Chain ), with testing planned for 2027-2029, aiming to upgrade the consensus mechanism through advanced cryptographic technologies (, including quantum resistance ), to enhance scalability and decentralization. Among the upgrades in six major research directions, the core features related to this article include:

• Shorter slots, faster finality: One of the core goals of Beam Chain is to improve finality speed. The current finality of about 15 minutes under the (Gasper mechanism spans 2 epochs, which is 32+32 slots of 12 seconds each, reducing it to 3 slots finality )3SF, 4 seconds per slot, about 12 seconds (, ultimately achieving single-slot finality )SSF, about 4 seconds (. The 3SF + 4 seconds slot means that final confirmation can be completed within 10 seconds after a transaction is on-chain, significantly improving the user experience of L1-based Rollups and native Rollups: the increase in L1 block speed will directly accelerate Rollup block generation. The time for transactions to be included in a block is approximately 4 seconds ), longer during high load (, resulting in a 3x increase in block speed for related Rollups ), although still slower than performance-based Rollups, alternative L1s, or credit card payments, making the pre-confirmation mechanism still very important (. Faster L1 finality can also ensure and accelerate settlement: Rollups can complete L1 finality in a matter of seconds.