Ethereum has been left behind in this bull market. As rivals like Solana gain ground in metrics such as speed, cost, and developer mindshare, questions are being raised about whether Ethereum’s reliance on Layer 2 solutions is the right path forward—or if it needs a more fundamental redesign.
In this episode, Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, and Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, discuss the trade-offs of native and based rollups, execution capacity, and Ethereum’s ability to maintain its dominance. They debate how Ethereum should address fragmentation across rollups, whether ETH has strayed from its ultrasound money narrative, and whether its deliberate pace of innovation could make it vulnerable in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Whose ideas will lead Ethereum out of this dark forest?
Show highlights:
- 03:10 Why Justin is so optimistic about pre confirmations and Ethereum scaling its throughput
- 06:15 Whether Ethereum could reach “maintenance mode” within 5 years
- 08:20 Whether Ethereum can solve the problem of fragmentation
- 20:21 The difference between based rollups and native rollups
- 25:29 Why Martin believes that Ethereum is not building for developers
- 34:21 What real-time proving is and why it is relevant
- 37:46 How programmable native rollups could have different business models from Ethereum but the same security
- 44:51 Why most assets on L2s might not actually be secured by Ethereum
- 50:24 Whether Ethereum’s consensus layer might see a “clean slate” redesign with the Beam Chain
- 58:59 Whether Ethereum’s slow pace of change could leave it vulnerable to competition
- 01:06:55 How Ethereum's shift to rollups and blob data has reshaped its ultrasound money narrative by transforming the primary sources of fee burn
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