This week, the Ethereum ecosystem was rocked by a $654 million ETH transfer from the Ethereum Foundation. This led to intense scrutiny of developer pay, transparency and leadership, culminating in the public resignation of core developer Péter Szilágyi and renewed criticism of governance practices.
At the same time, Polygon’s AggLayer upgrade has suffered launch delays and network instability, intensifying the debate over Layer-2 alignment, fragmentation, and the Foundation’s support for external L2s.
These developments, in addition to the volatility of POL token migration, the ongoing struggle to balance mainnet centralization with L2 sovereignty, and the response to the Foundation’s previous governance restructuring, have added new urgency to the disputes over Ethereum’s future direction and the sustainable growth of its scaling ecosystem.
Ethereum family feud
Ethereum’s scaling architecture underwent a transformation from a technical sidebar to a political economy when Vitalik Buterin praised Coinbase’s Base for “doing things the right way,” weeks after Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal took on the role of CEO at the Polygon Foundation and issued warnings about Ethereum’s “existential” layer-2 (L2) direction.
The question emerging from competing views is whether Ethereum will standardize how L2s earn and settle value, or see liquidity fragmented into parallel systems that route instead of through the mainnet.
In mid-2025, the tension crystallized into three developments. Nailwal took control of the Polygon Foundation on June 11, amid a strategy reset, making the network more independent from Ethereum’s rollup-oriented orthodoxy.
Polygon shipped AggLayer v0.3 on June 23, furthering chain-agnostic interoperability with Polygon PoS, which was expected to connect by the end of Q3 but did not at the time of writing.
Buterin’s public endorsement of Base in September reignited debates over whether Ethereum’s leadership favors specific L2s, reinforcing earlier friction when Nailwal questioned the low recognition of Ethereum’s core developers and warned that anti-L2 sentiment could damage the ecosystem’s social fabric.
Data from L2BEAT shows the Arbitrum and Base command the largest value share secured on Ethereum layer-2s, with OP Mainnet and Linea at the back.
The Polygon zkEVM remains significantly smaller than its Proof-of-Stake chain, both in terms of total value capture and transaction activity.
Dune sequencer’s profit dashboards show that Base and Arbitrum generate the majority of net sequencer revenue after deducting tier 1 data costs, with Base consistently ranking as the largest profit generator through late summer 2025.
Buterin’s 2025 roadmap commentary focuses on simplification, mainnet resilience, including privacy improvements, and a layer 2 user experience that relies more heavily on layer 1 security guarantees.
These guidelines establish what Ethereum leadership considers “good L2 citizenship”: canonical fraud or validity proofs, dependence on Ethereum for data availability, and alignment with emerging standards for lightweight clients and shared sequencing.
Polygon’s AggLayer pursues chain-agnostic shared liquidity, positioning the network alongside, rather than within, Ethereum’s rollup orthodoxy.
The Proof-of-Stake chain migrates to zkEVM validium integration, using alternative data availability layers.
Three paths for capturing fees and market structure
The next six to twelve months will test whether Ethereum can standardize value streams across competing layer 2 architectures.
In a soft alignment scenario with a 50% to 60% probability, the Ethereum mainnet captures 25% to 40% of gross revenue from layer 2 as improvements in blob compression and data availability stabilize costs.
Base and Arbitrum retain 60% to 70% of Tier 2 net profits, with OP Stack’s proliferation supporting Base’s distribution advantage through Coinbase’s on-ramp infrastructure.
Polygon’s AggLayer connects its Proof-of-Stake ecosystem and CDK chains to drive cross-chain liquidity growth. Still, Ethereum native transaction flows prioritize OP Stack clusters due to canonical settlement guarantees.
The performance of POL tokens in this scenario depends on the breadth of the ecosystem and not on the orthodoxy credentials.
A fragmentation scenario with a 20% to 25% probability will cause Ethereum mainnet data availability revenues to underperform as activity shifts to non-Ethereum DA layers, including validiums and alternative availability services.
Tier 1 only includes 15% to 25% of tier 2 gross fees because competing liquidity centers, such as AggLayer, OP Superchain, and application-specific ZK rollups, divide users across incompatible standards.
Smoothing the maximum extractable value (MEV) across layer 2s lags behind the technical implementation, degrading the user experience during cross-rollup operations.
Polygon gains market share with chain-agnostic routing in this scenario, because Proof-of-Stake migration to AggLayer establishes a parallel liquidity hub that is partially decoupled from Ethereum’s social consensus mechanisms.
Reconvergence under Ethereum-first standards has a 20% to 25% probability, driven by stronger layer-2 minimalism through the use of light clients, error and validity proofs, and shared sequencing or proposer-builder separation, which also extends to rollups.
Mainnet captures 35% to 50% of tier 2 gross rates as infrastructure standards become more stringent. Consolidate Basis and Arbitrum more than 70% of the layer 2 profit sharewhere OP Stack standardization and cross-rollup bridging reduce friction for users moving assets between chains.
Polygon tightens Ethereum alignment through ZK proofs and Ethereum data availability lines for flagship chains, while positioning AggLayer as a user experience differentiator rather than a sovereignty play that competes with mainnet settlement.
Value capture and distribution dynamics
Ethereum investors are faced with a monetization question that is directly related to layer 2 architecture choices.
Greater reliance on Ethereum’s data availability (DA) and canonical proof systems increases mainnet fee receipts, with blob usage trends relative to layer 2 compression progress determining whether Ethereum’s toll road economy expands or erodes.
Cross-rollup MEV markets continue to emerge, but as Ethereum-aligned proposer-builder separation standards extend to layer 2 sequencers, extractable value flows back to Ethereum validators. Alternative scenarios in which MEV is concentrated in layer 2 silos reduce the economic gravity of the main grid.
Layer-2 tokens, including ARB, OP, and POL, derive their stories from net sequencer profitability, creating sensitivity to monthly earnings rankings that show Base operating without a native token, and setting user experience standards that pressure tokenized rollups to justify their value through revenue sharing, subsidies, or governance power.
Polygon’s investment case improves as AggLayer drives composability that converts to retained liquidity rather than temporary bridge volume, regardless of ranking as the largest pure rollup by orthodox definitions.
Monitoring the AggLayer connection milestones and Proof-of-Stake migration progress provide leading indicators for this scenario.
Builders optimizing for distribution face a pragmatic calculus where OP Stack and Base infrastructure win near-term user acquisition through streamlined on-ramps and L2 to L2 liquidity routing.
Teams that prioritize user experience and cross-chain operability can outperform teams that focus on doctrinal alignment debates, especially as multi-chain user experiences remain a challenge and network effects favor the largest distribution centers.
Centralization and interoperability as structural forces
Coinbase’s Base, which is drawing public praise from Buterin, is exacerbating debates over corporate influence versus Ethereum’s social fabric, especially as global regulatory frameworks, including MiCA and FATF guidelines, favor KYC-friendly L2s with clear operating entities.
Polygon’s chain-agnostic AggLayer vision competes with OP Superchain and ZK rollup hubs in an interoperability arms race analogous to competition on mobile platforms, contrasting walled gardens with open liquidity networks.
The Ethereum mainnet is positioned as foundational infrastructure rather than an exclusive settlement layer.
User gravity is concentrated in networks that solve multi-chain pain points, with core researchers at Vitalik and Ethereum pushing for a simplified, layer-1 secure L2 user experience.
As user experience standards coalesce around common light-client implementations and proof verification, network effects can increase benefits for the largest distribution hubs, including Base and Arbitrum.
Polygon’s alternative path depends on AggLayer creating enough cross-chain liquidity, allowing developers and users to choose composability over canonical Ethereum settlement.
The outcome will determine whether Ethereum functions as a standardized settlement layer that captures predictable fees from aligned rollups, or as an option under competing architectures where liquidity and users are distributed across networks with varying degrees of dependency on the mainnet.
The sequencer profit concentration, blob utilization rate, and AggLayer adoption metrics through mid-2026 will reveal the path the ecosystem takes, and whether loyalty to Ethereum becomes a measurable economic parameter rather than a social layer assumption.
