Scroll co-founder Ye Zhang criticized proposals to impose charges on Ethereum rollups, arguing they’d hurt long-term development for short-term income.
Ye Zhang, co-founder of the layer-2 sensible contract platform Scroll, slammed the concept of charging charges on Ethereum rollups, calling it “probably the most poisonous concepts for Ethereum’s future.”
In a collection of posts on X, Zhang argued that this method would sacrifice “long-term scalability and ecosystem development for short-term income,” including that measuring ETH’s (ETH) worth by Ethereum’s income “misses the purpose.”
1/6 Tariffing L2s is without doubt one of the most poisonous concepts for Ethereum’s future. It trades long-term scalability and ecosystem development for short-term income — a technique match for centralized corps, not credibly impartial platforms.
— Ye Zhang 📜 (@yezhang1998) April 2, 2025
In line with Zhang, Ethereum’s power is in being “the hub asset throughout hundreds of rollup ecosystems,” not in gathering charges from them. Knowledge from DefiLlama reveals that after the EIP-4488 improve, which boosted layer-2 scalability, Ethereum’s charges dropped from tens of hundreds of thousands per day to round $570,000 by late March.
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Zhang famous that whereas Solana’s community is “vertically built-in” with its Solana (SOL) token as its core asset, ETH is “already the dominant asset on Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, Scroll — and even the place it’s not the gasoline token (like StarkNet).”
The Scroll co-founder additionally warned that charging charges on rollups might backfire. He mentioned it would push them towards various information availability options. That, in flip, might weaken Ethereum’s place within the ecosystem. Zhang added that if Ethereum will get “grasping” and begins taxing layer-2s, the community would lose “relevance whereas nonetheless failing to scale.”
As a substitute of extracting worth from rollups, Zhang steered Ethereum ought to give attention to scaling and ship upgrades sooner. And Zhang isn’t the one one who appears to have considerations about Ethereum’s tempo. As crypto.information reported earlier, former Ethereum Basis Solidity knowledgeable Harikrishnan Mulackal steered that inner confusion might have led to frequent disagreements, with key updates reportedly dealing with repeated delays within the Ethereum improvement group.
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