You've been watching Ethereum's layer 2 expansion for years. The rollup-centric roadmap. The focus on scaling through abstraction.

The celebration of every new L2 launch. But something fundamental is changing.

The Ethereum community is experiencing a quiet but profound shift in thinking. After years of pushing users to layer 2s, there's a growing realization that the core layer 1 has been neglected—at a cost.

This isn't just technical debate. It's existential. When all your best app developers become chain developers instead, what happens to your ecosystem?

When your layer 1 stops accruing revenue because everyone's building elsewhere, what happens to ETH's value proposition?

The signs are everywhere.

ETH/BTC peaked in December 2021 and has been sliding since.

Meanwhile, Solana's TVL and usage are surging. Layer 2s are thriving but primarily benefiting themselves, not the Ethereum core.

The pivot now underway is simple but profound: Ethereum must make its own layer 1 competitive again.

Not just as a settlement layer for rollups, but as a destination for users and developers in its own right.

A larger, more powerful Ethereum core that captures value directly. This creates tension. Some layer 2 founders feel threatened by this shift. They've benefited from branding themselves as "Ethereum" while capturing value that might have otherwise flowed to the layer 1.

But the uncomfortable truth is that a weak layer 1 creates perverse incentives. When the foundation is fragile, everything built on top becomes extractive rather than additive.

What's the future? Perhaps it's what one layer 2 is already demonstrating—Uniswap maintaining both layer 1 presence and its own chain, creating a natural experiment in what users truly value.

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Bitcoin maximalists might say "I told you so"—that 21 million fixed supply beats infinite scalability options. But that misses the point. Bitcoin and Ethereum are solving fundamentally different problems.

The path forward isn't about abandoning layer 2s. It's about proper prioritization—ensuring the core is robust enough to sustain a thriving ecosystem above it.

Like interest rates balancing an economy, Ethereum needs to find the equilibrium where layer 2s must truly justify their existence while the layer 1 remains the beating heart of the ecosystem.

The unstoppable computer needs to become unstoppable again.