Matthew Finestone: Ethereum-Enhancers Not Ethereum-Killers

The most interesting scaling battles are being waged above Ethereum on Layer 2s, not besides Ethereum on Layer 1s.One specific flavor of Ethereum L2 scaling solutions, Zk-rollups, are live and flourishing today.

Matthew Finestone leads business operations at Loopring, an Ethereum Zk-rollup protocol for scalable trading and payments.

CoinDesk's invest: ethereum economy event begins Oct. 14.This is not to say Ethereum killers have all failed.

While researchers and core devs are well into the process of materializing Eth 2.0 - the highly-anticipated upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain into a Proof-of-Stake, sharded system - Ethereum also enjoys the benefit from myriad L2 scaling solutions.

Eth-killers are actually competing with these L2 solutions, not Ethereum itself.

The term Layer 2 has become a bit of a catchall for anything that scales Ethereum that is not directly on Ethereum.

Describing how these constructions interact and rely on Ethereum is incredibly important for user education because something like Binance can also be strewn in as an L2 scaling solution.

If a separate base layer blockchain has Ethereum-enhancement near-front of mind - if it touts talking to Ethereum and its universe of assets as a prominent strength - then it is in my opinion a sidechain to Ethereum.

As the Ethereum base layer scaling effort presses on, and with a possible recalibration to prioritize rollups, and as rollups do today what many of the Eth-killers hope to do, I think the narrative has been neutered.

Each passing day brings clarity: if the steady state of global settlement/coordination layers turns out to be winner takes all, Ethereum is in the lead. We should not mince words.