This post is taking part in the Lens x Kiwi Writing Contest
L2s have so far proven that Ethereum can scale in a cost-effective way. Billions of dollars of assets are flowing through various L2s, secured and settled at the base layer of Ethereum.
But the cost of this expansion is the complexity that the user has to deal with. More and more L2s are cropping up, amounting so far to a staggering number of 70+ blockchains.
If the Ethereum ecosystem has any chance of going mainstream (as in adopted by a substantial proportion of the population), it needs much more than the technical ability to scale.
What Ethereum needs is good UX. Similar to a neobank, it should be easy to deposit funds, use dApps and protocols and transfer in and out, regardless of the underlying L2 chain.
Wallets that abstract the complexity away are the first help for the user. Rabby Wallet is doing a good job here, supporting straight out the box the majority of these L2s and making switching between them almost seamless. It also provides a great overview of the user's assets, and which dApps they are using.
But you can only go this far with the wallets themselves. There needs to be interoperability baked into the L2s so that dApps can leverage it and make cross-chain asset transfers even more seamless. One should not care that they are depositing onto this L2 or the other one, as long as they are using the same dApp.
Projects like Polygon's AggLayer, Optimism's Superchain, zkSync's Elastic Chain and Hyperlane are, to name a few, working towards chain interoperability, although we have yet to see practical use-cases of such systems. I guess the endgame for Ethereum is an open standard that all roll-ups can use, in order for the user to maximally benefit from the ease of use that results from such standard.
Following the period of rapid expansion should come a period of convergence towards a common open standard. Once that is unlocked, wallets can utilize it and thus allow dApps to perform operations at an abstract level, where the L2 technology is abstracted away from the regular user.
Should users even care about which L2 they use?
Not all chains are created equally, and some might have stricter security, while others are focused more on speed. Providing the user the same experience might not be possible in all of these cases.
And I believe there will always be pioneers, pushing the Ethereum ecosystem to its limits and exploring the untouched ground. Users that understand the risks will also understand that this new technology comes at a convenience cost.
But for the majority of the users, a base Ethereum, helped by an open standard and scaled by homogenous roll-ups will be sufficient.
