Ethereum in wartime: Standardize, align, accelerate

The past week has seen a pronounced shift in the level of optimism around Ethereum. 

Across sequencing, interoperability and consensus development, teams are working under wartime conditions to standardize, consolidate and deliver on Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap.

The urgency isn’t just about speed, but about coordination: making sure the protocol evolves in a way that’s both extensible and durable.

That was the message from Optimism’s Ben Jones, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, and others on a recent developer call. Although superficially gathering to chat sequencing and preconfirmations, the call was primarily an exercise in ecosystem alignment. That spirit has carried on in the days since, with further team calls centered on interoperability as well as Thursday’s regular All-Core Developers call.

Sequencing: From fragmentation to alignment

Ethereum’s sequencing landscape is chaotic. Today, every rollup builds its own isolated sequencing mechanism, with little interoperability. The push toward Ethereum-aligned sequencing —whether through proposer commitments, shared sequencing or native rollups — is an attempt to solve this.

On the sequencing call, Jones framed the moment: “The idea isn’t just about individual rollups optimizing for their own benefit, but about creating a shared sequencing architecture that aligns incentives while preserving autonomy.”

An important shift came from Steve Goldfeder of Offchain Labs, who admitted that Vitalik’s recent blog post changed his perspective on native rollups:

“Up until a day or two ago, I was pretty bearish on the idea of native rollups, because my understanding was that it was very binary,” Goldfeder said. “But Vitalik spoke about this extendable, expandable version, which I think is absolutely fantastic.”

Instead of forcing every rollup to conform to a single rigid standard, the goal is to find common ground, standardizing what makes sense (e.g., proofs, commitments, core infrastructure) while leaving space for innovation. And getting all relevant stakeholders in a room together to resolve any disagreements that may persist.

It’s a radical change of tone for Ethereum, reinforcing a commitment to solve UX pain points that have fragmented the ecosystem’s user base and capital.

Solving interop and process pain points

The L2 Interop Working Group is tackling another wartime front: how to make cross-rollup transactions as seamless as same-chain transactions. ERC-7786 is emerging as a standardized cross-chain messaging API, ensuring that rollups can pass data between each other without reinventing the wheel.

But even with shared messaging interfaces, execution must be fast and trustless. The target? Sub-three-slot finality for cross-rollup transactions — meaning interop between Optimism and Arbitrum could settle in as little as six seconds. That would go a long way toward making rollups feel less like islands and more like unified Ethereum extensions.

Ethereum’s base layer isn’t standing still, either. Thursday’s ACD call firmed up the date that the Pectra fork will hit the testnets — Feb. 19 for Holesky’s, followed by Sepolia on Feb. 25 — with mainnet upgrades targeted for mid-March.

Even long-standing debates over planning and alignment seemed to be making progress. Core developers agreed on the need for disciplined feature scoping, and to prioritize fully implemented and tested proposals rather than overloading devnets with speculative upgrades — a course correction of sorts, according to Tim Seiko.

“What we should not do, and what we did wrong with Pectra and caused months of delay, is schedule 10 unimplemented things for inclusion,” Seiko said. Instead, the goal is to move towards a structured development cadence, where each fork is well-defined and tested before new complexities are introduced.

A new mentality

Ethereum’s roadmap isn’t dictated solely by external competition, but more so the internal drive to build a coherent, durable system. The goal is not just to scale, but to scale the right way — with shared sequencing, deep interop and a resilient neutral L1. But everyone agrees that processes need to accelerate.

As Jones put it: “The difference between peacetime and wartime Ethereum is whether we assume we can just build without friction, or whether we recognize we’re in an adversarial environment. Right now, it’s wartime.”

---

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.