There are currently more than fifty active Layer 2 networks built on Ethereum. This number will not survive the decade. The economics of blockchain infrastructure are not hospitable to fragmentation at this scale, and the user behavior data — liquidity concentration, developer activity, transaction volume — already shows the consolidation dynamic beginning.

The Layer 2 thesis was always that Ethereum’s base layer would serve as a settlement and data availability layer while the actual computation of user transactions moved to cheaper, faster chains that periodically committed their state back to Ethereum. The rollup architecture — optimistic and zero-knowledge — provided the cryptographic guarantees that made this delegation trustworthy. The thesis was sound. The execution produced an overcrowded market.