Ethereum has long had a clear plan; the base layer was supposed to remain important while the real work was offloaded to Layer 2 networks, known as rollups. Rollups were heralded as the go-to scaling solution, and the entire ecosystem agreed on the idea. But at the beginning of 2026, Vitalik Buterin openly said that this plan no longer reflects reality. The reason is not the downfall of Ethereum, but its development in a different way than expected.
Bitcoin was the first to show that the global transfer of value could work without banks and central control. “Everyone’s verifiable record of transactions without subsequent modification” gives people a new freedom, one expert said. Ethereum expanded on that idea with smart contracts, which promise automated rules and public verifiability without intermediaries. However, in early 2017, CryptoKitties choked the network; it was not a bug, but a warning. The network has shown its limitations as each block must be globally verifiable.
Since 2020, rollups have become an investment thesis and developer strategy. The idea was for L2 networks to do the real work while L1 serves as an arbiter and archive. But progress toward Stage 2 security has been slow, interoperability between L2 networks has stalled, and the market has produced generic clones. Vitalik announced, “L2 did not deliver the coordinated system we expected. Ethereum’s base layer has started to scale, fees have dropped, gas limits have increased, and ZK technologies and execution optimizations make L1 more capable than we thought.”
He emphasized that L2 networks are not a mistake; they only make sense if they are specialized and do things that the base layer cannot or will not do. Arbitrum shows how DeFi with many interactions can work quickly and cheaply, Base enables distribution without its own token, and Polygon offers a platform for applications that would not be possible on the base layer.
Vitalik’s shift marks the end of the dogma that L2 is a replacement for the base layer; they are add-on, specialized tools. Ethereum is now preparing for a market clash with projects that have made scaling a cornerstone. This is not the end of the L2 world, but a new phase in which it will be clearer who is building the infrastructure of the future.
