The Rollup Trap: How Incentives Are Shaping the Future of Ethereum
AI summary of the linked articleThe author argues that rollup incentives are inflating demand for blockspace without scaling real use cases on Ethereum. Describing a recurring cycle, the author says new L2s launch testnet and incentive programs, activity spikes before airdrops, and users then leave, while most dApps are clones or expansions by the same teams. Drawing on Parkinson's Law and induced demand, the author suggests that more blockspace supply could create an endless loop of demand, and concludes that projects should focus on useful applications and a shared rollup standard rather than separate chains and tokens. |
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2 comments The L2 farming process you described is pretty brutal, but there's a lot of truth to that. I also agree that we need to build a shared standard for all rollups. Otherwise, we end up in walled gardens, just bigger ones than the ones we have now: Optimism -> Superchain, zkSync -> Elastic Chain, etc. From the incentives POV, I don't think L2s are prone to do it because more successful ecosystems could lose their share of the pie and the strategic advantage. I think this cross-rollup communication should be eventually built into Mainnet. 0x45cC...BF22Submitter Yes - L2 ecosystems’ cross communication should be something to optimize even more, but not the standard / basic way. I could also see ‘enshrined’ L1 <> L2 communication a Frankenstein of all the current proposals from Superchain, ZKSync etc. and that would be good. But still, I guess that this is a few years away: every Rollup has slightly different rules (see: withdrawal periods) and we could only make this work if the primary assumption that the state is what you read is true. Otherwise we risk the cross-chain nightmare: multi-chain reorgs! |
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