Ethereum announces a new framework Open Intents Framework, why is L2 still discussing scalability?

Author: 0xFacai, BlockBeats

On February 20, the Ethereum Foundation announced the launch of the Open Intents Framework, driven by over 30 teams from various fields of the Ethereum ecosystem, to accelerate interoperability across the entire ecosystem. According to the EF official statement, this is a modular and open framework designed to allow any chain to seamlessly convey intents to users and enhance cross-chain user experience.

Clearly, this new framework from EF aims to promote further liquidity integration and cost reduction among its L2 ecosystems. In recent months, discussions about the "L2 feeding back L1 capabilities" have been quite frequent. Due to the continued weak performance of ETH prices, dissatisfaction with the economic landscape of the Ethereum ecosystem has intensified, with many believing that L2, as an important component of the ecosystem, has not and cannot capture the value of ETH itself.

L2 Crisis, More Than Just "Feeding Back"

L2 feeding back L1 to help ETH capture value has been the dominant imagination of the crypto industry regarding the future of the Ethereum ecosystem over the past few years. However, the "rental situation" of Ethereum L1 over the past year has been far from the initial vision.

Taking Arbitrum as an example, it charges a 10% fee to Layer 3 platforms within the ecosystem, while as a Layer 2 platform, it only pays 2% in fees to Ethereum. After the Blob mechanism went live, the average operating costs of L2 plummeted even further.

At the same time, impacted by the strong competition from the Solana ecosystem, the overall weak performance of the Ethereum ecosystem has been directly reflected in the entire L2 sector. According to L2BEAT data, the total TVL of L2 has been continuously declining since the end of last year, with leading L2s like OP, ZKsync, and Starknet dropping by about 5% in just one week at the beginning of February, and the activity and Gas consumption in the L2 sector have also hit rock bottom.

However, under these circumstances, EF has still insisted on promoting the L2 scaling route and upgrades in recent months. In a recent official blog, EF announced that the Ethereum Pectra network hard fork upgrade plan will go live on the Ethereum testnet Holesky at 05:55 Beijing time on February 25. Pectra is another major upgrade following last year's Dencun, with the main goal of improving the scaling capabilities of the L2 ecosystem.

Why is this?

In fact, even with the support of blobs, L2 still faces the issue of fee competition. In October last year, when Scroll launched the SCR airdrop claim, the blob fees on the Ethereum network skyrocketed to $4.52, reaching a multi-month high, but as L2 activities slowed down, blob fees quickly fell back to nearly zero costs.

Previously, there had been two significant increases in blob fees: one during the surge of L2 activities in July last year, and the other during the earlier boom of Blobscriptions in March.

Some researchers have pointed out that the increase in blob fees is a double-edged sword for Ethereum; more expensive blobs lead to higher blob gas payments to the network, but they also raise the costs for users executing transactions and transfers on L2. From the actual situation, whenever the Ethereum ecosystem is more active, the blob scaling mechanism is almost rendered ineffective.

On the other hand, the competition for blob space has put immense pressure on Base, the "only hope of Ethereum," which is a leading L2.

In January this year, Base co-founder Jesse stated in a tweet that the growth of L2 has been severely impacted by blob fees, with some pressures driven by daily demand causing periodic price spikes in network fees. Notably, Jesse has been emphasizing since mid-September last year that solving the scaling issue is Base's current priority, and the solution does not rely on the native mechanisms of the Ethereum network.

In January this year, polynomialfi co-founder gauthamzzz mentioned in a blog post that Ethereum L2 is facing serious bottlenecks, with 55% of blob space being completely consumed by a few L2s. According to the current growth trend of L2, the Ethereum L2 ecosystem will reach maximum capacity by May 2025, and if this issue is not resolved by then, the Ethereum ecosystem will face collapse.

Currently, each Ethereum block has only 3 blobs, while the reality is that dozens of L2s are competing for these 3 precious storage spots, akin to dozens of rapidly developing cities vying for a three-lane highway.

Currently, the average utilization rate of blobs is nearing 100%, and the usage of these blob storage is highly concentrated in a few leading L2s like Base. More L2s either have no users or exhibit extremely high transaction costs when they are popular. Many community members believe that even after the Pectra upgrade, increasing the number of blobs per block from 3 to 6 will hardly save the current L2 predicament.

Can "L2 Interoperability" Solve the Problem?

In this context, "L2 interoperability" has become an important way to alleviate the crisis. On one hand, it can address the reality of liquidity fragmentation within the Ethereum ecosystem; on the other hand, it can distribute the storage demands of leading L2s to other L2s that have needs.

In May last year, Vitalik stated: "We need an open decentralized (no operators, no management) protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another and integrating it into the default sending interface of wallets. But before getting too attached to any fancy toys, we should focus on the basics." Vitalik noted that the biggest user experience issue currently is that the L2-verse does not feel like a unified Ethereum.

In January this year, Vitalik reiterated the necessity of strengthening interoperability between L2s in a blog post. He stated that L2 faces two main challenges: scale and heterogeneity. In addition to enhancing the hardware scaling capabilities of L1 and L2, there is also a need to accelerate improvements and standardize interoperability among various Layer 2s and wallets, making Ethereum feel more like a "single ecosystem rather than 34 different blockchains."

However, the reality may not be so simple. Among the many L2s that have already launched, most have issued their own native tokens, which means that these L2s have indirectly decoupled from ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem on an economic level. In other words, the current profit models of most L2s still primarily rely on "selling tokens," rather than generating revenue solely from sequencer fees like Base.

This leads most L2s to prioritize their own token value capture in future "economic alignment" issues, leaning more towards maintaining competitive relationships with other L2s rather than sharing, and the "tribute" to ETH itself tends to be superficial. On the road to achieving a "unified regime," Ethereum, as a feudal dynasty, seems to have limited strong leverage, and the actual results of "L2 interoperability" will need time to verify.