Ethereum Just Abandoned Its L2s. Here's What Comes Next.

Vitalik announced that the rollup-centric roadmap is over. Sovereign L1s are the future. Cosmos was built for exactly this moment, and it's better than ever.

On February 3rd, Vitalik Buterin posted what many in the industry are calling a watershed moment for Ethereum: The original vision of Layer 2s as "branded shards" of Ethereum no longer makes sense.

This wasn't a subtle pivot. He explicitly acknowledged that L2 decentralization has progressed "far slower and more difficult than originally expected," that many L2s will never reach trustless operation, and that Ethereum itself is now scaling its base layer fast enough to compete directly with its own rollups.

His advice to L2 teams? "Identify a value-add other than scaling.” In other words, the platform you built on is now competing against you, and you need to figure out why you exist.

For Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, and the dozens of rollups built on their frameworks, this creates real, urgent questions about platform risk, independence, and long-term technology and commercial viability.

What is the best platform to be the best appchain possible? Cosmos. Absolute freedom in tech and design. This moment is validation of a thesis we've held since day one.

The Promise That Couldn't Be Kept

The rollup-centric roadmap promised L2s would function as seamless extensions of Ethereum. Six years later, most L2s still run on single-operator sequencer models, interoperability between them doesn’t work well, and Ethereum is now aggressively scaling its base layer, undercutting L2s' core value proposition.

More to the point, if you’re an Ethereum L2, your supply chain is controlled by a competitor. You can't build a durable business or earn the trust of end users or financial institutions that think in decades this way. This would be like TikTok running on Meta's data centers.

The Bigger Picture

Step back and look at where the industry is heading. This isn't just an Ethereum story. It coincides with a much larger trend: the businesses making the most consequential blockchain infrastructure decisions are choosing sovereign L1s.

Stripe is building a sovereign EVM L1 for payments. Circle launched its own L1. Hyperliquid, the breakout chain of the last cycle, is an L1. Canton, the leading institutional network, is an L1. Figure, the leading issuer of real-world assets, is a Cosmos L1. Ondo is building a Cosmos L1.

Why? Because at scale, being someone else's tenant (or worse, being a competitor’s tenant) creates real commercial and technology risks that can sink a business:

Unpredictable cost structures tied to someone else's economics.
Limited control over product performance, capabilities, and deployment timelines
Limited ability to adhere to requirements that demand full authority and configurability over your infrastructure.

These are the concrete risks every Ethereum L2 is facing right now.

A Cosmos L1 is a better alternative

We've heard the historical objections to building on Cosmos instead of an Ethereum L2. Over the last year, we've been hard at work to eliminate every one of them.

"Running a Cosmos chain is expensive and complicated. You need a lot of validators and an inflationary token." Not anymore. New native Proof-of-Authority support means you can run a Cosmos L1 without launching and managing an inflationary token or recruiting a large validator set. You can run with as few as 4 validators of your choice. There are no complex token economics to design, and no inflation to manage. You get a simple, affordable, and predictable operating model that is decentralized on day one. Operational costs can be a fraction of L2 sequencer infrastructure and Ethereum data availability fees, and they will scale predictably with your decentralization needs. Transition to proof-of-stake when your business needs it.
"Cosmos doesn't support EVM." It does now. Cosmos EVM gives you the identical developer experience to building on Ethereum, Base, or any other EVM chain. Deploy your existing Solidity contracts. Use Foundry, Hardhat, and MetaMask. Everything just works. Your developers don't need to learn anything new. Your contracts migrate directly. See Cosmos EVM on GitHub.
"Cosmos is too slow for financial applications." Every layer of the stack has been optimized to improve performance for critical, time-sensitive financial workloads. In March, we’re shipping a boatload of performance improvements: parallel execution, 30x faster database writes, faster and more reliable block times through a networking overhaul, and concurrent block processing. The result is that Cosmos chains support thousands of transactions per second with sub-second block times and reliable block production under heavy load. This is already a production reality, as demonstrated by the most performant Cosmos chains, such as Injective.
"Cosmos only connects to Cosmos." IBC already connects 200+ chains. With IBC v2, new Attestor light clients, and a multi-VM first-party token standard shipping in March 2026, your Cosmos L1 will have native connections to Ethereum, EVM rollups, Solana, and even Hyperledger networks. No third-party bridges or tokens. No finality delays from fraud-proof windows or slow ZK proofs. Your chain becomes a peer in a network of networks, instead of a tenant on someone else's platform.

See the Cosmos Stack roadmap.

What This Means for L2 Teams Right Now

If you're running or building an Ethereum L2 today, here's the practical reality:

Your main supplier just told you they’re competing with you, and they have the resources to do it. Your scaling advantage is eroding as Ethereum L1 throughput increases. Architectural innovation has stalled at centralized sequencers. Your interoperability story is limited to the Ethereum ecosystem plus whatever third-party bridges you can cobble together and pay for.

Fortunately, migrating to a Cosmos EVM L1 preserves everything that's working: your Solidity contracts, your developer tools, your team's expertise. Plus, it gives you full control over your platform, lowers your supply chain risk, dramatically improves performance, lowers operating costs, and enables 1st-party connectivity to every major blockchain ecosystem.

The migration path is real, and it's straightforward. Cosmos Labs can help you directly, and a growing network of managed service providers with deep Cosmos expertise are actively helping teams make this transition. Service providers are available to help with everything from chain architecture and contract migration to validator operations and ongoing infrastructure support. Contracts deploy directly. IBC connects you back to Ethereum and to everything else. And you never have to worry about your platform's founder posting that your existence "no longer makes sense."

The Future Is Connected L1s

The rollup-centric roadmap had a good run. It pushed the industry forward on scaling research and proved that modular blockchain architectures could work. But the vision of L2s as seamless extensions of Ethereum didn't play out, and now even its strongest advocate is moving on.

What comes next is a world of independent, interoperable networks, each purpose-built for its use case, each controlling its own destiny, each connecting freely with the broader ecosystem of chains.

Cosmos was built for this world. And if you're an L2 team looking for what comes next, we'd love to talk.