Ethereum Layer 2 Scroll Claims to Achieve ‘Stage 1’ Decentralization

With the launch of its Euclid upgrade, Ethereum Layer 2 network Scroll claims to have become the first zero-knowledge rollup to have reached a Stage 1 level of decentralization.

Stage 1 is based on a set of parameters set out by Vitalik Buterin in 2022 that categorize rollups according to their level of decentralization. It is described by L2Beat as “limited training wheels,” in which “the rollup transitions to being governed by smart contracts.”

However, in this definition, a security council may remain in place to address potential bugs.

Scroll said it “recently transferred control to the Security Council, an independent body of 12 reputable members, forming a 9/12 multisig.” The Euclid upgrade is the first to be executed by the new council.

The upgrade comes as Scroll’s total value locked (TVL) and token price have plummeted since October, when it launched its SCR token airdrop, according to DeFiLlama. SCR trades at a $53 million market cap, down 80% from its December all-time high, according to Coingecko.

Scroll currently has a TVL of around $100 million, down more than 90% from its peak of $1.2 billion in October 2024.

Euclid Upgrade

Scroll is moving to a new prover built on OpenVM. A prover is the protocol component that attempts to demonstrate the truthfulness of a statement without revealing all underlying data.

This will make it easier to audit code and to reuse code among different components, reduce costs and latency, and will clear up a bottleneck on sequencer throughput — the system that processes and orders transactions before they are batched and sent to the Ethereum Layer 1 — making Scroll a lot faster, it said.

Scroll is also adopting Ethereum’s native MPT, which allows for more efficient storage and verification of data, ensuring data integrity and consistency. Additionally, various optimizations will reduce data availability costs by up to 90%.

Euclid will implement EIP-7702 and RIP-7212, bringing smart account technology to Scroll in parallel with Ethereum's Pectra upgrade. What that means is that Scroll users will have a better user experience.

“The days of seed phrases and complicated wallet setups are numbered,” Scroll said, adding that it “is helping to usher in a new era of user-friendly crypto.”