Ethereum announces new framework Open Intents Framework, why talk about L2 expansion?

On February 20th, the ETH Fang Foundation announced the launch of the Open Intents Framework, which is promoted by more than 30 teams in various fields of the ETH Fang ecosystem to accelerate the development of interoperability across the ecosystem. According to EF officials, this is a modular, open framework designed to enable any chain to seamlessly communicate intent to users and improve the Cross-Chain Interaction user experience.

Clearly, EF's new framework is designed to facilitate further integration of liquidity and fee reductions across its L2 ecosystem. In recent months, there has been a lot of discussion about "L2 feeding back L1 capabilities". Due to the continued weakness of ETH price performance, the market is increasingly dissatisfied with the ecological economic structure of ETH Square, and many people believe that L2, as an important part of the ecosystem, has not and cannot complete the value capture of ETH itself.

L2 crisis, not just about "feeding back"

L2 feeds back to L1, helping Ethereum capture value, which has been the dominant imagination of the crypto industry for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem in the past few years. However, the 'rental situation' of Ethereum L1 in the past year has been far from the initial vision.

Take Arbitrum as an example, it charges 10% of the fee to the Layer 3 platform in the ecosystem, while it only pays 2% of the fee to ETH as a Layer 2 platform. After the blob mechanism was launched, the average operating expenses of L2 plummeted.

At the same time, the weak performance of the entire Ethereum ecosystem is directly reflected in the entire L2 sector, due to the strong impact of the Solana ecosystem. According to L2 BEAT data, the total TVL of L2 has been continuously declining since the end of last year. In just one week in early February, the leading L2 TVL such as OP, ZKsync, and Starknet dropped by about 5%. The activity and gas consumption of the L2 sector also dropped to freezing point.

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However, in recent months, EF has continued to implement the L2 expansion route and upgrades. In a recent official blog post, EF announced that the ETH Pectra network hard fork upgrade plan will be launched on the ETH Workshop testnet Holesky at 05:55 Beijing time on February 25. Pectra is another major upgrade after last year's Dencun, with the main goal of improving the scalability of the L2 ecosystem.

Why is that?

In fact, even with the help of blob, L2 still faces the problem of cost competition. In October last year, Scroll initiated the SCR short claim, and the ETH network blob fee instantly soared to $4.52, reaching the highest point in several months. As L2 activities slowed down, the blob fee quickly fell back to near-zero cost.

There have been two previous instances of significant spikes in blob fees, one during a surge in L2 activity last July, and another time earlier in March, during the boom in Blobscriptions inscriptions.

Researchers have pointed out that the increase in blob fees is a double-edged sword for Ethereum, as more expensive blobs will result in paying more blob gas to the network, while also driving up the cost of executing transactions and transfers on L2 for users. In practice, the scalability mechanism of blob is almost non-existent whenever the Ethereum ecosystem is highly active.


On the other hand, the battle for blob space has also put tremendous pressure on Base, the leader of L2 and the 'Only Hope of ETH Block.'

In January of this year, Base co-founder Jesse tweeted that the growth of L2 has been severely affected by the cost constraints of blob, and some pressures driven by daily demand have led to periodic price spikes in network fees. It is worth noting that Jesse has been emphasizing since the middle of September last year that solving the expansion problem is currently the key focus of Base, and the solution is not relying on the native mechanism of the Ethereum network.

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

"Blob space is running out, is Ethereum L2 also on the brink of collapse?"

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Currently, there are only 3 blobs per block in ETH, and the reality is that dozens of L2s are vying for these 3 valuable storage slots, which is like dozens of growing cities competing for a three-lane highway.

Currently, the average utilization of blobs is close to 100%, and the usage of these blobs is highly concentrated in a few top L2s such as Base. More L2s either have no users or exhibit extremely high transaction costs when there is activity. Many community members believe that even after the Pectra upgrade, increasing the number of blobs per block from 3 to 6, it will be difficult to rescue the current L2 dilemma.

Can "L2 interoperability" solve the problem?

In this context, 'L2 interoperability' has become an important way to address and alleviate the crisis. On the one hand, this can solve the real situation of liquidity fragmentation in the ETH ecosystem, and on the other hand, it can also allocate the storage needs of the head L2 to other L2s in need.

As Vitalik said in May last year, "We need an open, decentralized (no operator, no management) protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another and integrating it into the wallet's default sending interface." But before you get too attached to any fancy toy, get the groundwork done." According to Vitalik, the biggest user experience problem right now is that the L2-verse doesn't feel "like a unified ETH house" enough.

! [ETH Workshop Announces New Open Intents Framework, Why Is L2 Still Talking About Scaling?] ](https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-08744440077dae13c93d49cd57d53916)

In January, Vitalik again highlighted the need for enhanced interoperability between L2s in a blog post. He said that L2 faces two main challenges: scale and heterogeneity challenges, in addition to improving the hardware scaling capabilities of L1 and L2, there is also a need to accelerate improvements and standardize interoperability between Layer 2 and wallets, so that ETH is 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 gone online, most L2s have issued their own native tokens, which means that these L2s have indirectly decoupled from the economic aspect of ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem. In other words, the current majority of L2 profit models still mainly rely on 'selling tokens' rather than solely generating revenue from sequencer fees like Base does.

This makes it so that most L2s will prioritize considering the value capture of their own tokens in the future 'economic alignment' issue, and tend to compete with other L2s rather than maintain a shared relationship, and the 'tribute' to ETH itself tends to be more superficial. On the road to realizing the 'great unified regime', the Ethereum dynasty seems to have not many strong chips, and the actual results of 'L2 interoperability' still need time to verify.