After a Long Focus on Layer 2s, Ethereum Foundation Turns Its Attention Back to Mainnet

After a long focus on Layer 2s, the Ethereum Foundation is finally turning its attention to scaling the base layer that underpins the ecosystem.

There’s a simple reason for that, according to Mallesh Pai, senior director of research at Ethereum-focused blockchain and Web3 software company Consensys.

“Ethereum settled upon the Layer 2 (L2) roadmap in the early part of this decade as its preferred way to achieve scale without centralizing the base layer,” Pai told The Defiant in an email. “Since then, L2s have scaled, and indeed, other newer Layer 1s (L1) also offer significantly higher performance,” like lower block times and higher transactions per second.

Popular Layer 1 blockchain Solana has a block time of 400 milliseconds, compared to Ethereum’s roughly 12 seconds, for example.

“Meanwhile, execution on the Ethereum base layer has not kept pace: it is essentially unchanged since 2022,” he said, pointing to metrics like block times and gas per block.

“The increased focus on the L1 is an attempt to correct this,” Pai added. “To make base layer execution keep pace so that users can use and builders can build on even the base layer.”

The Ethereum Foundation’s Three Goals

In an April 13 X post, Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz K. Stańczak pointed to a “simplified roadmap” with just three goals.

These are scaling the Ethereum L1, improving the user experience, and scaling blobs.

Blobs are a temporary data storage solution introduced by the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. They attach to Ethereum blocks for a limited period of about 18 days, giving L2s the ability to post data to the Ethereum L1 very cheaply — some say too cheaply for Ethereum’s own good. Part of the upcoming Pectra update will increase the number of blobs per block.

Optimizing blobs is L1 work, Pai said.

Then, there is the growing demand from real-world apps and institutions. “They need predictable, cheap, and scalable infrastructure,” he said. “That requires L1 upgrades both for itself and to support more robust L2s.”

Besides that, to achieve security guarantees just for the L2 roadmap, a lot more L1 scaling is needed, Pai said, noting that the modular design of the Ethereum project “still depends on a strong base.”

The greater throughput of a scaled L1 will support more apps and higher activity, Pai said, while faster block times mean faster confirmations, improving the user experience.