Rollup-centric: Why Ethereum protocol upgrades are losing importance

Original title: The Truth About Ethereum's Rollup-Centric Roadmap

Original author: Christine, Galaxy Research

Original translation: Ismay, BlockBeats

Editor's note: As Ethereum gradually shifts to a Rollup-centric development roadmap, the importance of its protocol changes is gradually decreasing. This article delves into the reasons for this shift and its potential impact on the ecosystem. By analyzing the changes in priorities of Ethereum protocol developers, the author reveals that as Rollup matures, the direct impact of protocol-level changes on users will decrease. The article also quotes the views of Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, emphasizing the risks and necessity of reducing the roles of protocols and foundations. At the same time, this article points out that the core building blocks of future finance are being built outside the protocol, and Rollup and other innovative technologies will gradually surpass the importance of Ethereum upgrades in the ecosystem.

The following is the original text:

Christine Kim of Galaxy Research attended the 7th annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), which was held for the first time in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s venue was changed to avoid a conflict with the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. Jerome de Tychey, the president of Ethereum France, announced on the last day of EthCC that the conference will not return to Paris next year. EthCC[8] will be held in a brand new destination, Cannes, France in 2025.

In this note, Christine shares her key takeaways and learnings from the EthCC conference.

Unpacking the Impact of a Rollup-centric Future

At this year’s EthCC conference, I had an important realization about Ethereum protocol development. The Rollup-centric development roadmap means that changes to the Ethereum protocol will have less impact on end users over time. This is a fairly obvious and in many ways positive conclusion for the ecosystem, but there are some lesser-known and potentially difficult truths implied by it that are worth exploring in depth.

As Ethereum protocol developers focus more and more on optimizing for Data Availability (DA), the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem will pay less attention to and participate in protocol development.

Ethereum as an execution layer will become less relevant to users as users migrate to Rollup as the primary touchpoint for value transfer and interaction with decentralized applications (dapps). The primary responsibility for improving the user experience (such as transaction speed, ordering, and confirmation) will fall primarily on Rollup development teams.

As a result, the most important upgrades for users will happen on Rollup rather than Ethereum. On Ethereum, protocol developers will prioritize improving the functionality of the protocol as a DA layer. In fact, this has already been demonstrated through code changes in the Dencun and Pectra upgrades.

As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing data availability (DA), the technology required to achieve breakthroughs in Ethereum's user experience will be primarily built by Rollup teams rather than client teams. With all the buzzwords that have captured the attention of investors and developers on EthCC, such as Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Account Abstraction, Intent, and Pre-Confirmation, the relevance of Ethereum as a DA layer is waning, while the relevance of Rollup as an execution environment for the next wave of major cryptocurrency adopters is increasing.

Innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies being researched to solve the most difficult problems of crypto user experience will be increasingly led by core development teams outside of Ethereum. This will also lead to more and more protocol developers and client teams working for Rollup to continue to advance the mission of Ethereum, even as the use cases and functionality of the Ethereum protocol become increasingly narrow.

Already high-profile Ethereum core developers, such as Ben Edgington and "Protolambda", and client teams such as Prysmatic Labs, have reached this conclusion and now work full-time for Rollup teams.

As protocol developers increasingly focus on optimizing for Data Availability (DA), their visibility and influence on the values and ethos that drive product and application development on Ethereum will decrease.

For much of Ethereum’s history, code changes activated via hard forks had a direct impact on user behavior. Protocol developers adjusted the prices of certain opcodes, introduced new precompiles, and removed features like gas refunds.

While many Rollups today take great care to mimic Ethereum’s execution environment, their maturity will lead to greater deviations as Ethereum reshapes into a DA layer. Due to competition and the changing regulatory landscape, the same values that guided Ethereum’s design choices as an emerging general-purpose blockchain will not necessarily impact Rollups in the same way. As Ethereum’s user base migrates to Rollups, protocol developers must recognize that the ability to influence and correct on-chain user behavior through protocol changes will diminish.

The Diminishing Importance of Ethereum Upgrades

As protocol developers pursue Rollup-centric roadmaps more and more seriously, the importance of protocol changes on Ethereum will gradually diminish. In many ways, the pros and cons of minimizing Ethereum's role in the ecosystem are similar to the pros and cons of minimizing the Ethereum Foundation's role in the ecosystem.

The mentality of reducing the role of the protocol to help expand the scope of the protocol is risky, but also necessary for decentralization. This is a vision for Ethereum, and Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, explained her vision for the Ethereum Foundation:

"The best part of Ethereum is its decentralization, and because of that, the ecosystem has its own unique challenges. I see subtraction as a strategy to achieve two main goals. ... The first goal is to find the right balance. Building an Ethereum Foundation empire and solving all problems ourselves may make us look good in the short term, but it will make others feel that the ecosystem is not built for everyone, and the Ethereum Foundation will also become a single point of failure. If we keep adding, the ecosystem will always rely on the Ethereum Foundation."

At EthCC, there are a lot of side events, which is not a new phenomenon during the largest Ethereum conference in Europe. However, this year's side events are more important than in previous years, becoming the main event to showcase new ideas, experimental technologies, and important discussions most relevant to Ethereum users.

While protocol developers were well represented at EthCC, and the topic of Ethereum as a protocol was the headline topic on the EthCC agenda, it was not the focus of many attendees during the conference week, and this is because the building blocks of future finance are being built elsewhere, outside of the protocol.

Therefore, even though Ethereum protocol developers may make radical and ambitious code changes to the core protocol, their relevance in the ecosystem should diminish over time. It is time for the influence of innovative solutions and new technologies built on Rollups and beyond to surpass the importance of Ethereum upgrades.

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