EthCC[7] Deep Dive: The Hard Truth Behind Ethereum's Rollup-Centric Roadmap

This article was compiled and organized by BlockWeeks

Galaxy Research's Christine Kim attended the seventh Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC[7]). This year's conference was held in Brussels, Belgium for the first time, with the venue change made to avoid the 2024 Summer Olympics taking place concurrently in Paris, France. On the final day of the conference, Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey announced that EthCC will not return to Paris next year, and EthCC[8] will move to a brand-new destination in France, Cannes, in 2025. Below are the main observations and reflections Christine brought back from this year's conference.

Breaking Down the Impact of Rollup-Centric Future

During this year's EthCC, Christine arrived at an important realization about Ethereum protocol development: the Rollup-centric development roadmap means that Ethereum's protocol changes will become less important to end users over time. For the ecosystem, this is actually a fairly obvious conclusion that is positive on multiple levels, but it also implies some lesser-known and potentially quite thorny truths that deserve deeper analysis.

As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), other parts of the ecosystem will pay less attention to and participate less in protocol development. Ethereum's importance to users as an execution layer will decline, because users will use Rollups as their primary entry point for transferring value and interacting with decentralized applications (dapps). As a result, the responsibility for improving user experience—including transaction speed, ordering, and confirmation—will fall mainly on Rollup development teams. Therefore, the upgrades that matter most to users will happen on Rollups rather than on Ethereum. On the Ethereum side, protocol developers will prioritize optimizing the protocol as a DA layer, as already reflected in the code changes included in the Dencun and Pectra upgrades.

As protocol developers focus more and more on DA optimization, the technologies used to achieve breakthroughs in Ethereum user experience will also be built mainly by Rollup teams rather than client teams. The buzzwords that attracted investor and developer attention at EthCC—maximal extractable value (MEV), trusted execution environments (TEE), account abstraction, intents, preconfirmations—are becoming less relevant to Ethereum as a DA layer, while becoming more relevant to Rollups as the execution environment for the next wave of crypto adopters. Innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies researched to solve the thorniest problems in crypto user experience will increasingly be led by core development teams outside Ethereum. This will also lead more and more protocol developers and client teams to join Rollups to continue advancing Ethereum's mission. High-profile Ethereum core developers such as Ben Edgington and Protolambda, as well as client teams such as Prysmatic Labs, have all reached this conclusion and now work full-time for Rollup teams.

The values and philosophies of protocol developers that drive the development of Ethereum products and applications will have less visibility and influence. For most of Ethereum's history, code changes activated by hard forks directly affected user behavior—developers adjusted the pricing of certain opcodes, introduced new precompiled contracts, and removed features such as gas refunds. Although many Rollups today try their best to mimic Ethereum's execution environment, as Ethereum redefines itself as a DA layer, their maturation will bring greater divergence. Due to intensifying competition and a changing regulatory environment, the values that originally guided Ethereum, a nascent general-purpose blockchain, in making design choices may not influence Rollups to the same degree. As Ethereum's user base migrates to Rollups, protocol developers must face the fact that their ability to influence and correct on-chain user behavior through protocol changes will diminish.

The Importance of Ethereum Upgrades Is Decaying

The more seriously protocol developers pursue the Rollup-centric roadmap, the more the importance of Ethereum protocol changes will decay. In many ways, weakening Ethereum's role in the ecosystem has pros and cons quite similar to weakening the Ethereum Foundation's role in the ecosystem. Expanding the protocol's reach by shrinking its role is risky, but it is also necessary for decentralization. This vision was articulated most clearly by Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi when explaining her vision for the Foundation.

She said: "The best thing about Ethereum is that it is decentralized, and precisely because of this, this ecosystem faces unique challenges. I see 'subtraction' as a strategy for achieving two main goals... The first goal is to find the right balance. Building an EF empire and solving all problems ourselves might make us look good in the short term, but it would undermine others' confidence that this ecosystem is meant to be built by everyone together, and EF would become a single point of failure. If we keep adding, the ecosystem will always depend on EF."

At EthCC[7], there was a huge number of side events, which is nothing new during Europe's largest Ethereum conference. But what was more evident this year than in previous years is that the side events themselves became the main venue—new ideas, experimental technologies, and important discussions all appeared there, and these were the things most relevant to Ethereum users. Although protocol developers were fully represented at EthCC and Ethereum as a protocol topped the agenda, for many attendees it was not the focus of the week. The reason is that the building blocks of future finance are being built elsewhere—outside the protocol. Therefore, even if Ethereum protocol developers may make radical and ambitious code changes to the core protocol, their relevance to the ecosystem should decline over time. It is time for innovative solutions and new technologies built on Rollups and even more broadly to overshadow the relevance of Ethereum upgrades.