On February 3, 2026, Vitalik published important reflections on Ethereum's scalability roadmap on X. As the real challenges of Layer 2 evolving towards a fully decentralized form are re-recognized, and the mainnet's throughput capacity is expected to significantly increase in the coming years, the original idea of purely relying on L2 for throughput expansion is being revised. L1 and L2 are forming a new 'settlement-service' collaborative paradigm: L1 focuses on providing the highest levels of security, anti-censorship, and settlement sovereignty, while L2 is evolving towards 'differentiated service providers' (such as privacy, AI, high-frequency trading). Ethereum's strategic focus is returning to the mainnet itself, reinforcing its positioning as the most trusted settlement layer globally. Scalability is no longer the sole goal; security, neutrality, and predictability are re-emerging as Ethereum's core assets.
In my opinion, the biggest blunder of this round $ETH is changing to PoW. If it were still the mining model of that year, wouldn't it have taken off with the AI computing power?