Everything Will Be Ethereum Rollups
Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
June 23, 2025
Happy Monday, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- Unpacking the idea — hinted at by Solana’s co-founder — that blockchains could be specialized and interconnected, instead of competing
Plus:
- Crypto markets had a volatile weekend after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear sites
- Fintech giant Fiserv reveals ‘bank-friendly’ stablecoin
- Top global crypto exchange OKX is considering a U.S. IPO, its CMO told The Information
- Pomp’s firm announced it’s going public via SPAC merger, raising up to $1B for its BTC treasury
- SSV 2.0 And Based Applications: Decentralized Infrastructure for Secure, Scalable Ethereum Staking [SPONSORED]
- The Stellar Development Roadmap Paves Way for Expansion and Network Scalability [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
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In Messari’s words, “since the launch of USD₮0, Flare has seen its TVL increase by 300%. This new liquidity is helping to power FAssets like XRP, making XRPFI a reality.”
While banks warm up to stablecoins and fintechs retrofit them into legacy systems, DeFi is building for the ultimate use case: stables designed not just for moving capital, but for growing it. Sustainably.
A new generation of yield-bearing, institutional-grade stablecoins has emerged, going beyond payment rails as financial primitives in their own right. These composable, regulated stables are multi-asset backed, combining DeFi native performance with the resilience and trust of blue-chip RWAs. Their competitive APYs are counterbalanced by low risk profiles and compliance. These "all-weather" stablecoins are poised to scale beyond hype into long-term impact, but that means prioritizing the right infrastructure now.
Here's what that looks like — and why it matters for DAOs, institutions, and investors today.
Read more: Everyone’s Building with Stablecoins. Few Are Building Them Right
We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today
What Would Ethereum DApps Deployed on Solana Look Like?
Happy Monday Defiers!
The big story over the weekend in crypto was the extreme whipsaw caused by flaring tensions in the Iran-Israel war. Read our markets coverage for more on how these geopolitical tensions are impacting the crypto market.
We’ll talk about a much less dramatic, but nonetheless impactful story that points at a novel architecture for the blockchain ecosystem as a whole: The idea that blockchains will all be interconnected as Ethereum rollups.
This wasn’t brought up by the Ethereum Foundation or an ETH-fluencer. Actually, the co-founder of Ethereum arch-rival Solana floated the idea — even though it was a sardonic reference to the real hot war building in the Middle East.
Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted on Sunday, “we are not at war with Ethereum, we are at war with its centralized sequencer L2s.”
Expanding on the idea in a response to a separate question, he said:
“there are no blockers to build a data validating bridge with proofs and exit guarantees from eth to solana. All the same guarantees as OP or ARB are possible as soon as eth has enough blob capacity. Nothing in the solana protocol would even change to support it.”
Anatoly Yakovenko
On the surface, you might think Solana is admitting defeat against Ethereum — in effect saying “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Some were calling it “capitulation.”
But that’s not it. Yakovenko is offering a sort of composable partnership: keep Ethereum’s security, but use Solana’s speed and low costs.
As he laid out the idea, instead of packing all transaction records into expensive Ethereum blocks, dApps could send those records to Solana, which can handle thousands of transactions per second at a tiny fraction of the price. Ethereum would still be the backup referee. If Solana ever tried to cheat or lost data, people could submit a cryptographic proof back to Ethereum and get their money back. In other words, Solana would act like a fast courier for Ethereum transactions, but Ethereum would still be the final judge.
Both sides would win. Ethereum would get paid fees from the operators of this Solana bridge. If Solana is successful in getting Ethereum dApps to deploy on Solana, that would reduce demand on Ethereum blocks and ease gas fees, helping Ethereum scale. Solana, on the other hand, would attract Ethereum users and earn fresh fees every time those rollup batches touch its network, boosting transaction revenue for SOL stakers.
The Challenges
Of course, nothing is free. If dApps end up deploying on Solana, Ethereum would be missing out on those fees. It would also introduce new points of failure: if Solana’s network or the systems that ferry proofs back to Ethereum go down or misbehave, rollup users could be stuck or worried about withdrawals.
Solana would face its own challenges: building a reliable “bridge” that watches Solana, packages proofs and submits them on Ethereum is a tricky engineering feat, and that always equals high security stakes.
For existing Layer 2s like Arbitrum or Base, this presents real competition. Today, they control sequencer fees and data posting on Ethereum. If Ethereum users and devs can easily choose Solana while retaining Ethereum security, slower and more expensive networks will be under threat.
For comparison, in the past day, Solana processed almost 4,000 transactions per second, versus 15 for Ethereum, 101 for Base and 35 for Arbitrum, according to TokenTerminal data. Average fees per user were $0.26 on Solana, $4.1 on Ethereum, $0.25 on Base and $0.43 on Arbitrum.
From an Ethereum user’s view, the experience would be the same as interacting with an L2. You’d open your Ethereum wallet, choose to move ETH into this Solana-powered rollup, and see your trade finalize in under a second for cents. When you’re done, you’d hit “Withdraw” and wait the usual hour or two for the safety window, then get your ETH back on mainnet.
Solana would continue to control its consensus and tokenomics, but it would plug into Ethereum to get a slice of its activity. So, Yakovenko isn’t waving a white flag. Solana won’t become a thin client of Ethereum. Instead, it would offer itself as an optional, high-speed delivery service for anyone who wants Ethereum-level safety plus Solana-style performance.
This model hints at a future where blockchains don’t have to go head-to-head; they can specialize and plug into one another. As Ethereum Foundation co-director Tomasz Stańczak recently noted on our podcast, the lines between “Layer 1” and “Layer 2” are blurring, and we may soon see a web of chains each offering their own strengths while leaning on Ethereum’s security for settlement.
It might sound bold, but if networks can do this without giving up their own rules or tokenomics, a truly interconnected blockchain world could be closer than we think.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $101,664 | 2.33 % |
 | Ethereum | $2,268.59 | 3.89 % |
 | XRP | $2.01 | 3.66 % |
 | BNB | $621.04 | 1.98 % |
 | Solana | $134 | 3.77 % |
 MessariPortals | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
|---|---|---|
 Solana SOL | 6  | 41.55% |
 Avalanche AVAX | 20 | 28.95% |
 TRON TRX | 8  | -19.81% |
| Powered by Messari Portals | ||
This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs
- Crypto markets saw an uptick this morning after a weekend of volatility following news that the U.S. had bombed Iranian nuclear sites; BTC slid below the $100,000 mark on Sunday, but is now back above $101,000.
- Publicly traded payments titan Fiserv is entering the stablecoin race with its own Solana-based USD stablecoin, FIUSD, designed for financial institutions.
- The CMO of top-5 global centralized exchange, OKX, told The Information that the firm would consider an IPO in the U.S.; the statement comes just months after the CEX giant pleaded guilty to U.S. regulators for violating AML laws, settling for over $500 million.
- Bitcoin-focused firm ProCap BTC, founded by crypto investor and podcast personality Anthony Pompliano (aka Pomp), announced that it is going public in the U.S. via SPAC merger, creating an up to $1 billion Bitcoin treasury; the firm has already secured $750 million.
🎬WATCH
In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami spoke with Emin Gün Sirer, CEO and Founder of Ava Labs. They discuss the growth of gaming on Avalanche, how the chain compares to other top Layer 1s, and the role of stablecoins and central banks in Avalanche’s ecosystem.
That’s it for today — if you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends! https://thedefiant.io/subscribe
