On February 20, the Ethereum Foundation announced the launch of the Open Intents Framework, which is driven by more than 30 teams in various fields of the Ethereum ecosystem to accelerate the development of interoperability across the entire ecosystem. According to EF officials, this is a modular, open framework designed to allow any chain to seamlessly pass intent to users and improve cross-chain user experience.
Obviously, this new framework of EF aims to promote further liquidity integration and cost reduction between its L2 ecosystem. In recent months, discussions about L2s ability to feed back L1 have been frequent. Due to the continued weakness of ETH prices, the markets dissatisfaction with the economic structure of the Ethereum ecosystem has become increasingly strong. Many people believe that L2, as an important part of the ecosystem, has not and cannot capture the value of ETH itself.
L2 crisis, not just about “giving back”
L2 feeds back to L1 and helps ETH realize value capture. This has been the dominant imagination of the crypto industry in the past few years about the future of the Ethereum ecosystem. However, the rent collection situation of Ethereum L1 in the past year is far from everyones original vision.
Take Arbitrum as an example. It charges 10% handling fee to Layer 3 platforms in its ecosystem, while it only pays 2% fee to Ethereum as a Layer 2 platform. After the Blob mechanism was launched, the average operating cost of L2 plummeted.
At the same time, under the strong impact of Solana ecology, the weak performance of the entire Ethereum ecology is directly reflected in the entire L2 sector. According to L2 BEAT data, the total TVL of L2 has continued to decline since the end of last year. In just one week in early February, the TVL of the top L2s such as OP, ZKsync and Starknet fell by about 5%, and the face activity and gas consumption of the L2 sector also fell to the freezing point.
However, under such circumstances, EF has still insisted on promoting the expansion route and upgrade of L2 in recent months. In a recent official blog , EF announced that the Ethereum Pectra network hard fork upgrade plan will be launched on the Ethereum test network Holesky at 05:55 Beijing time on February 25. Pectra is also another major upgrade after Dencun last year, and its main goal is to improve the expansion capacity of the L2 ecosystem.
Why is this?
In fact, even with the help of blob, L2 still faces the problem of fee competition. In October last year, Scroll opened SCR short claims, and the blob fee of the Ethereum network was instantly pushed up to $4.52, reaching a high point in several months. As L2 activities slowed down, the blob fee quickly fell back to near zero cost.
Previously, blob fees have increased significantly twice, once during the surge in L2 activity in July last year, and again in March during the Blobscriptions boom.
Some researchers have pointed out that the increase in blob fees is a double-edged sword for Ethereum. More expensive blobs will result in more blob gas being paid to the network, but at the same time they are also pushing up the cost for users to execute transactions and transfers on L2. In reality, whenever the Ethereum ecosystem is highly active, the blob expansion mechanism is almost non-existent.
On the other hand, the battle for blob space has also put tremendous pressure on Base, the L2 leader and Ethereums only hope.
In January this year, Jesse, co-founder of Base, said in a tweet that the growth of L2 has been severely affected by the blob fee limit, and some pressure driven by daily demand has caused periodic price spikes in network fees. It is worth noting that Jesse has been emphasizing that solving the expansion problem is the current focus of Base since mid-September last year, and the solution to the problem does not rely on the native mechanism of the Ethereum network.
In January this year, polynomialfi co-founder gauthamzzz mentioned in a blog post that Ethereum L2 is facing a serious bottleneck. Currently, 55% of the blob space is completely consumed by a few L2s. According to the current growth trend of L2, the Ethereum L2 ecosystem will reach its maximum capacity in May 2025. If the problem is not solved by then, the Ethereum ecosystem will face collapse.
Insufficient Blob space, is Ethereum L2 also on the verge of collapse?
Currently, Ethereum has only 3 blobs per block, and the reality is that dozens of L2s are competing for these 3 precious storage locations, which is like dozens of growing cities competing for a highway with only three lanes.
Currently, the average usage rate of blobs is close to 100%, and the usage of these blobs is highly concentrated in a few head L2s such as Base. Most L2s are either not used or have extremely high transaction costs when they are popular. Many community members believe that even after the Pectra upgrade, the number of blobs per block will increase from 3 to 6, which will hardly save the current L2 dilemma.
Can “L2 interoperability” solve the problem?
In this context, L2 interoperability has become an important way to solve and alleviate the crisis. On the one hand, this can solve the reality of the fragmentation of Ethereums ecological liquidity. On the other hand, it can also evenly distribute the storage needs of the head L2 to other L2s in need.
Last May, Vitalik said: We need an open decentralized (no operator, no management) protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another L2, and integrate it into the wallets default sending interface. But before you get too obsessed with any fancy toys, do the basic work first. Vitalik said that the biggest user experience problem at the moment is that L2-verse does not feel like a unified Ethereum enough.
In January this year, Vitalik once again emphasized the necessity of strengthening interoperability between L2 in a blog post . He said that L2 faces two major challenges: scale and heterogeneity. In addition to improving the hardware expansion capabilities of L1 and L2, it is also necessary to accelerate the improvement and standardize interoperability between each Layer 2 and wallet to make Ethereum more like a single ecosystem, rather than 34 different blockchains.
However, the reality may not be that simple. Among the many L2s that have been launched, most of them have issued their own native tokens, which means that these L2s have been indirectly decoupled from ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem at the economic level. In other words, most of the current L2 profit models are still based on selling coins rather than simply relying on sorter fees to generate revenue like Base.
This makes most L2s give priority to the value capture of their own tokens in the future economic interest alignment issue, tending to maintain competition with other L2s rather than sharing relationships, and the tribute to ETH itself is even more superficial. On the road to achieving a unified regime, Ethereum, a feudal dynasty, does not seem to have too many strong chips, and the actual results of L2 interoperability still need to wait for time to verify.
