On February 20th, the Ethereum Foundation announced the launch of the Open Intents Framework, which is driven by over 30 teams from various fields in the Ethereum ecosystem to accelerate the development of full ecosystem interoperability. According to the official statement from the EF, this is a modular, open framework designed to allow any chain to seamlessly convey intents to users and enhance the user experience of Cross-Chain Interaction.

Apparently, the new framework of EF aims to further integrate liquidity and reduce costs between its L2 ecosystem. In recent months, there has been frequent discussion about ‘L2 feeding back to L1 capabilities.’ Due to the continued weak performance of ETH prices, dissatisfaction with the economic structure of the Ethereum ecosystem in the market has become stronger. Many believe that L2, as an important part of the ecosystem, cannot complete the value capture of ETH itself without it.

L2 crisis, more than just “feeding back”

L2 feeds back to L1, helping ETH capture value, this is the dominant imagination of the crypto industry for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem in the next few years. However, the “rental situation” of ETH L1 over the past year is far from the original vision of everyone.

Taking Arbitrum as an example, it charges a 10% fee to the Layer 3 platforms in its ecosystem, while as a Layer 2 platform, it only pays 2% fee to the ETH network. With the introduction of the Blob mechanism, the average operating cost of L2 has plummeted.

At the same time, the weak performance of the entire ETH ecosystem is directly reflected in the entire L2 sector, due to the strong impact of the Solana ecosystem. According to L2BEAT data, the total TVL of L2 has been continuously declining since the end of last year. In just one week in early February, the TVL of leading L2 protocols such as OP, ZKsync, and Starknet dropped by about 5%, and the activity and gas consumption of the L2 sector also plummeted.

However, in this scenario, EF is still persisting in promoting the L2 scaling and upgrade path in the past few months. In a recent official blog post, EF announced that the ETH Block Pectra network hard fork upgrade plan will go live on the ETH Block testnet Holesky at 05:55 on February 25th, Beijing time. Pectra is another significant upgrade following Dencun last year, with its main goal being to improve the scaling capacity of the L2 ecosystem.

Why is this?

In fact, even with the help of blob, L2 still faces the problem of fee competition. In October last year, Scroll initiated the SCR short selling, and the ETH network blob fee instantly surged to $4.52, reaching the highest point in several months. With the slowdown of L2 activity, the blob fee quickly dropped to near-zero cost.

Previously, there have been two significant increases in blob fees, once during the surge in L2 activity in July last year, and the other in the earlier month of March, during the Blobscriptions inscription frenzy.

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 for users to execute transactions and transfers on L2. In reality, the expansion mechanism of blobs is almost non-existent when the Ethereum ecosystem is highly active.

On the other hand, the battle for blob space also puts tremendous pressure on Base, the leader of L2 and the “sole hope of ETHereum”.

In January of this year, Base co-founder Jesse tweeted that the growth of L2 has been severely affected by the cost constraints of blobs, and some pressure driven by daily demand has led to periodic price surges in network fees. It is worth noting that Jesse has been emphasizing since the middle of last September that solving the scaling problem is currently the top priority for Base, and the solution is not relying on the native mechanism of the ETH network.

In January of this year, polynomialfi co-founder gauthamzzz mentioned in a blog post that the ETHereum L2 is facing a serious bottleneck, with only a few L2s consuming 55% of the blob space. According to the current growth trend of L2, the ETHereum L2 ecosystem will reach its maximum capacity in May 2025. If this issue is not resolved by then, the ETHereum ecosystem will face a collapse.

“Blob space is running out, is ETHereum L2 also on the brink of collapse?”

Currently, each Ethereum block only has 3 blobs, while in reality, dozens of L2 are competing for these 3 valuable storage slots, much like dozens of growing cities vying 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 still be difficult to save the current L2 dilemma.

Can ‘L2 Interoperability’ Solve the Problem?

In this context, ‘L2 interconnection’ has become an important way to solve the crisis. On the one hand, this can address the reality of liquidity fragmentation in the ETH ecosystem, and on the other hand, it can also distribute the storage needs of the head L2 to other L2s with demand.

In May last year, Vitalik said, “We need an open, decentralized (no operator, no management) protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another L2 and integrating it into the default sending interface of the wallet. But before being too obsessed with any fancy toys, do the groundwork first.” Vitalik said that the biggest user experience problem at the moment is that the L2-verse does not feel “like a unified Ethereum.”

In January this year, Vitalik once again emphasized the need for interoperability between L2 in a blog post. He said that L2 faces two main challenges: scale and heterogeneity. In addition to improving the hardware expansion capabilities of L1 and L2, it is also necessary to accelerate the improvement and standardization of interoperability between each Layer2 and wallet, making the ETH block more like a “single ecosystem rather than 34 different blockchains”.

However, the reality may not be so simple. Among the numerous L2s that have already gone live, most of them have issued their own native tokens, which means that these L2s have indirectly decoupled from the ETH and Ethereum ecosystem in terms of economics. In other words, the current majority of L2s still mainly profit from ‘selling tokens’ rather than relying solely on sequencer fees for revenue, like Base does.

This makes it so that most L2 will prioritize considering the value capture of their own tokens in the future ‘economic interest alignment’ issue, and tend to compete rather than share relationships with other L2, tending to be superficial in terms of ‘tribute’ to ETH itself. On the road to achieving the ‘great unified regime,’ the Ethereum dynasty seems to have little strong bargaining chips, and the actual results of ‘L2 interoperability’ still need time to be verified.