Ethereum Is Building Reunification Machinery

One of the critiques of Ethereum’s rollup era is that Layer 2s were supposed to be extensions of Ethereum, but they’ve drifted into being de facto chains that just buy data availability from the L1.

It’s a fair critique, even if there’s room for nuance.

Yet over the past 18 months, two research arcs have been maturing that could dissolve this argument entirely. The first arc is native rollups, i.e. packaging L2 blocks as proof-carrying transactions that Ethereum L1Ethereum is the largest smart contact blockchain platform with an extensive decentralized ecosystem.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Ethereum verifies directly.

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The Final Piece of Ethereum

This concept has bounced around the Ethereum community in recent years (originally known as “enshrined rollups”), and then the EIP-8079 draft formalized an initial approach in November 2025. To understand why it matters, consider how things work now.

Today, every rollup deploys and maintains its own verifier contracts on L1, i.e. bespoke stacks of code that prove the L2’s blocks are valid. These verifiers are complex, gas-heavy, and risky to upgrade. For example, Taiko’s stack alone spans six contracts.

In contrast, L2BEAT’s Head of Research Luca Donno has estimated that major rollups could shed in the ballpark of ~39% of their onchain verifier code under a native approach:

Specifically native rollups would delete that extra load by making Ethereum the verifier, and L2s built this way would inherit L1 security and every future EVM upgrade automatically, with no migration scrambles required. And this architecture is no longer just theory, either.

Earlier this year, the ethrex client team released a full demo of an L2 settling to L1 via re-execution and with working deposits and withdrawals. And per L2BEAT’s new dedicated Native Rollups tracker page, ecosystem-wide development milestones are slated through 2027, including a devnet targeted for this December.

All that said, the second key arc here is fast finality. Right now, Ethereum blocks arrive every ~12 seconds, though finality, i.e. the point where a block becomes practically irreversible, takes roughly 15 minutes. That lag caps how “final” any L2 settling to Ethereum can feel.

The fix has long been on the roadmap in the form of single slot finality research, and breakthroughs are nearing.

For instance, researcher Francesco D’Amato, one of the minds behind Ethereum’s SSF and PeerDAS work, just announced his move from the Ethereum Foundation to Ethlabs with a stated mission of making Ethereum “finalize much faster, as soon as possible.”

This vision is also not a distant dream. D’Amato’s fast confirmation rule, already running on Glamsterdam’s devnets, was replayed against a full year of mainnet data and produced zero false confirmations while delivering 1-slot confirmation more than 95% of the time.

In other words, near-instant strong assurances are demonstrably achievable without sacrificing safety.

Now, of course, native rollups and fast finality are great in their own rights, but combined they’re transformative. Native verification makes L2 blocks something Ethereum personally checks, and fast finality will make these checks land in seconds rather than minutes.

In this paradigm, an L2’s state could finalize with full L1 security almost immediately, i.e. not like a separate chain posting data to Ethereum but more like Ethereum simply having more blockspace.

Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot recently pushed this framing even further, noting that the L1 itself will likely eventually verify its own blocks via proofs, effectively becoming “a rollup of itself.” If this pans out, the L1-vs-L2 distinction will blur into a matter of how composable everyone’s state is, and more composability on Ethereum should accrue more value to Ethereum.

To be sure, it will take time for these advances to actualize and synergize. EIP-8079 is still just a draft, and so on. The earliest this full meld could come together is likely late 2027. And there’s also the sovereignty angle to consider. Today’s major L2s differentiate partly through their custom stacks, so some may simply decline tighter integration.

Overall, then, the big open question is how much tighter technical coupling will translate into how much economic flowback for Ethereum. For his part, Monnot summed up the optimistic case well:

“The more external domains/sequencers have the ability to compose with L1 state, e.g., leveraging its liquidity, the more value accrues to it, vs ‘islands of state’ bootstrapping their own economies without Ethereum’s added value.”

So Ethereum may have spent years outsourcing its scaling, yes, but now it’s definitively building the machinery to bring its offspring back into the fold, faster and more unified than ever before. Keep these arcs and their potential on your radar accordingly.