Why We Should Care About Ethereum's Future

Ethereum's early marketing was focused on building an infinite garden. An open space, for experimentation and innovation of any kind.

No walled gardens. No closed systems. No incentive misalignment. That has changed, and its time to talk about how we can adjust our course as a community.

Ethereum’s shift towards a rollup-centric roadmap has been imperative for scaling. It’s led to the emergence of rollup clusters like Optimism’s Superchain and Arbitrum Orbit, each creating their own ecosystems within the larger Ethereum network. While this has been a necessary step for handling more transactions and reducing costs, it’s also introduced a new layer of complexity—fragmentation.

In the early days of Ethereum, composability—the ability for different DeFi applications to seamlessly interact with each other on L1 during DeFi Summer—was one of the platform’s strongest features (and still is, on the baselayer). The concept of “money legos” allowed developers and users to stack and integrate various protocols effortlessly. However, with the rise of rollup clusters and L2s in general, this once smooth experience has become more difficult to navigate for users.

This fragmentation poses a significant challenge to the Ethereum community, especially as other blockchains like Solana offer more unified environments. Solana’s approach, which prioritizes a single, contiguous ecosystem, has put pressure on Ethereum to address these composability issues. The competition is heating up, and it's clear that for Ethereum to remain at the forefront, it needs to regain that seamless user experience.

So, we invited Jill Gunter from Espresso Systems on the pod after seeing a ton of her written content around making Ethereum composable again.

We discussed the why behind Ethereum scaling, more than the how, which was a refreshing feel out of the weeds.

Towards the end, we did get into the tech of Espresso, which is building coordination system for block building via a marketplace approach. This allows different rollups to opt in and out as needed, offering flexibility while maintaining the benefits of coordinated block building.

We also asked Jill if Espresso is a shared sequencer...and the answer was pretty funny. We also asked what the next big hurdle is going to be once the Ethereum L2 landscape is re-bundled back together.

Hope you enjoy.

The Rollup