The Development Direction of Ethereum in 2030: The Realization of the World Ledger Vision under Rollup Technology

Parallel Simplified L1 with Performance-oriented and Aligned Rollup Solutions

Ethereum is committed to maintaining trusted neutrality while promoting high-level innovation. The early roadmap centered around Rollup, aiming to simplify the underlying network. However, recent developments indicate that L1 needs to have the capability to handle traffic and activity, which is the foundation of L2. This means the need for faster block speeds, lower data costs, stronger proof mechanisms, and better interoperability.

The increase in L1 activity will drive the growth of L2 activity. The upcoming Beam Chain consensus restructuring aims to achieve faster final confirmation speeds and lower validation thresholds, enhancing throughput and strengthening neutrality. At the same time, there are proposals to consider migrating activities from EVM to RISC-V native virtual machines, which is expected to significantly improve proof efficiency.

These upgrades will reshape the L2 landscape. By 2030, Ethereum's Rollup roadmap may integrate in two directions:

• Aligned Rollup: Prioritize deep integration with Ethereum, minimizing trust assumptions.
• Performance Rollup: Prioritizes throughput and user experience, may use alternative DA layers or authorized participants.

Designing a Rollup solution requires balancing liquidity acquisition, security sources, and execution expressiveness.

Polarization of Rollup lineage

Rollup projects are gradually converging towards two extremes: on one end are high-performance Rollups, and on the other end are Ethereum-aligned Rollups. Rollups in the middle ground may struggle to compete and will eventually lean towards the two extremes.

Network effects will drive the market to cluster around a few large hubs. Economic activities will be layered according to security demands and costs. High-risk scenarios may concentrate on chains that inherit the complete security guarantees of Ethereum, while applications aimed at the general public will gather on chains with the best user experience.

The evolution of the Ethereum technology stack

Execution Layer

By 2030, Ethereum may adopt a new virtual machine based on RISC-V, significantly improving transaction execution and proof generation efficiency. The plan is to adopt a dual virtual machine model, retaining EVM compatibility while introducing a new virtual machine to handle new contracts.

Settlement Layer

Ethereum plans to transition from a fragmented L2 settlement model to a unified native integrated settlement framework. The EXECUTE precompiled function will allow Ethereum validators to directly validate the state transitions of Rollups, giving rise to "native Rollups".

Consensus Layer

The Beam Chain reconstruction plan enhances finality speed, reduces consensus costs through SNARKification, and lowers the staking threshold to enhance decentralization. This will make the underlying layer more compatible with Rollup requirements.

Data Availability Layer

Fully implemented danksharding is expected to achieve a DA throughput of about 2 MB/s. Combined with data compression and off-chain scaling, it can support higher throughput. Performance-oriented Rollups may still need to rely on alternative DA solutions.

The vision of the Ethereum world ledger

By 2030, Ethereum will be better suited for the role of a "world ledger," supporting two types of Rollup models:

• Aligned Rollup: Ensures high-value applications receive strong security guarantees, boosting ETH value accumulation.
• Performance Rollup: Covers scenarios that require large-scale processing capabilities, with Ethereum as the final settlement layer.

This coexistence enables the Ethereum ecosystem to support both top-tier security and top-tier throughput applications simultaneously. In the long run, an ecosystem composed of a few core hubs with clear value propositions will outperform hundreds of homogeneous systems.