Many people are still focused on the TVL data of those leading L2s, thinking that as long as the data increases, the coin price will take off. Wake up. The current Ethereum L2 ecosystem is less about scaling and more about warlord fragmentation. Moving assets from $ARB to $OP, or from $BASE to $STRK, that kind of fragmented operational feel is enough to deter 90% of new investors.
What's wrong with Ethereum L2?
This fragmentation has directly led to the exhaustion of liquidity. The current situation is that everyone is playing their own game, each chain wants to create its own moat, which has dismantled the value capture ability of the Ethereum mainnet. This is one of the reasons why $ETH has performed poorly in the past six months. Previously, all transactions burned gas on the mainnet, but now they have all gone to play in the mud on L2, while the rent paid to the mainnet has become so cheap after the Dencun upgrade introduced Blob data packets, it’s practically like giving alms. The mainnet cannot receive rent, and the deflationary logic fails. This practice of sacrificing value capture for the sake of scaling may seem like technical progress in the short term, but in the long run, it's simply a slow suicide.
What’s even more frustrating is the progress of decentralization. V God has been sounding the alarm lately, saying that L2 must reach the first stage, which means there must be some level of decentralized proof of fraud prevention, and we can't always rely on a few administrators' multi-signature wallets to control hundreds of billions of dollars. But in reality, the vast majority of L2s are still highly centralized. In simple terms, many L2s today are like centralized servers wrapped in a blockchain shell. If the $ARB or $OP you hold exists merely as a governance token, without real dividends or buyback logic, then it is essentially just a point system issued by the project party to improve life.
The future has only two paths. Either we solve cross-chain interoperability completely with standards like ERC-7683, as V God said, so that users don't feel which chain they are using. Or the rise of Based Rollups, which directly sort based on the mainnet, will return sovereignty control to Ethereum. If the current fragmented situation doesn't change, L2 will soon face a major reshuffle. Those chains without ecological content that only rely on airdrop expectations to deceive traffic will most likely go to zero.
So stop being superstitious about the so-called prosperous era of ten thousand chains. What we lack most now is not faster TPS, but glue that can piece these fragments together. I just want to ask, those so-called king-level L2 tokens in your hands, which have been stuck for half a year and haven't been unlocked, do you really intend to hold onto them?
