This week, the Ethereum ecosystem was rocked by a $654 million ETH transfer by the Ethereum Foundation. This began intense scrutiny of developer pay, transparency, and leadership, leading to the public resignation of core developer Péter Szilágyi and new criticism of governance practices.
At the same time, Polygon’s AggLayer upgrades are experiencing startup delays and network instability, intensifying debate over Layer 2 alignment, fragmentation, and Foundation support for external L2.
These developments, along with the instability of the POL token transition, the continued struggle to balance mainnet centralization and L2 sovereignty, and reactions to the Foundation’s previous leadership reorganization, add new urgency to the debate over Ethereum’s future direction and the sustainable growth of its scaling ecosystem.
Ethereum family feud
A few weeks after Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal took over as CEO of the Polygon Foundation and warned of Ethereum’s “existential” Layer 2 (L2) direction, Ethereum’s scaling architecture took a turn from a technical sidebar to a political-economic one when Vitalik Buterin praised Coinbase’s Base for “doing things the right way.”
The question that emerges from the competing visions is whether Ethereum will standardize the way L2 captures and settles value, or whether we will see liquidity fragment into parallel systems that bypass the mainnet.
This tension crystallized through three developments in mid-2025. Nailwal took over leadership of Polygon Foundation on June 11 amid a strategic reset, positioning the network as more independent from Ethereum’s rollup-centric tradition.
Polygon shipped AggLayer v0.3 on June 23rd, advancing chain-agnostic interoperability with PoS. PoS was expected to be connected by the end of the third quarter, but that had not happened at the time of this article.
Buterin’s public endorsement of Base in September reignited the debate over whether Ethereum’s leadership supports a particular L2, amplifying previous frictions as Nailwal questioned the lack of visibility from Ethereum’s core developers and warned that anti-L2 sentiment could destroy the ecosystem’s social fabric.
According to L2BEAT data, Arbitrum and Base account for the largest share of value secured on Ethereum Layer 2, followed by OP Mainnet and Linea.
Polygon zkEVM remains significantly smaller than proof-of-stake chains, both in terms of total value locked and transaction activity.
The Dune Sequencer Profit Dashboard reveals that Base and Arbitrum generate the majority of net sequencer profit less layer 1 data costs, with Base consistently ranking as the top profit generator through the end of 2025.
Buterin’s 2025 roadmap commentary focuses on simplification, mainnet resiliency, including improved privacy, and a Layer 2 user experience that relies heavily on Layer 1 security guarantees.
This guidance establishes alignment with what Ethereum leadership considers “good L2 citizenship”: proof of legitimate fraud or legitimacy, reliance on Ethereum for data availability, and new standards for light clients and shared sequences.
Polygon’s AggLayer pursues chain-agnostic shared liquidity, placing the network adjacent rather than within Ethereum’s rollup tradition.
Its Proof-of-Stake chain is moving to a zkEVM validium integration that leverages an alternative data availability layer.
Three paths to fee acquisition and market structure
The next 6-12 months will test whether Ethereum can standardize the flow of value across competing layer 2 architectures.
With a 50% to 60% chance of a soft adjustment scenario, Ethereum mainnet will earn 25% to 40% of total layer 2 fee revenue as costs stabilize due to blob compression and improved data availability.
Base and Arbitrum retain 60% to 70% of Layer 2’s net profits, and the prevalence of the OP stack maintains Base’s distribution advantage through Coinbase’s on-ramp infrastructure.
Polygon’s AggLayer connects the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem with the CDK chain to drive increased cross-chain liquidity. Still, Ethereum native transaction flows favor OP stack clusters with formal payment guarantees.
The performance of POL tokens in this scenario depends on the breadth of the ecosystem rather than rolled up legitimacy credentials.
In a 20% to 25% probability fragmentation scenario, Ethereum mainnet data availability returns will likely decline as activities shift to non-Ethereum DA layers, including verification and alternative availability services.
Layer 1 collects only 15% to 25% of Layer 2’s total fees, as competing liquidity centers such as AggLayer, OP Superchain, and application-specific ZK rollups divide users between incompatible standards.
Maximum extractable value (MEV) smoothing across Layer 2 has lagged in technical adoption and worsens the user experience during cross-rollup operations.
The Proof-of-Stake migration to AggLayer establishes a parallel liquidity hub partially decoupled from Ethereum’s social consensus mechanism, so Polygon gains mindshare with chain-agnostic routing in this scenario.
The probability of reconvergence under Ethereum-first standards is 20%-25%, driven by strong layer 2 minimalism through the use of lightweight clients, failure and plausibility proofs, shared sequences or proposer-builder separation, and also applies to rollups.
As infrastructure standards become more stringent, mainnets will collect 35% to 50% of the total Layer 2 fees. Base and Arbitrum reduce the burden on users to move assets between chains through OP Stack standardization and cross-rollup bridging, consolidating over 70% of layer 2 profit shares.
Polygon will strengthen Ethereum integration through ZK Proof and Ethereum data availability lanes on its flagship chain, positioning AggLayer as a user experience differentiator rather than a sovereign strategy competing with mainnet payments.
Dynamics of value capture and distribution
Ethereum investors face revenue generation issues that are directly related to their choice of Layer 2 architecture.
Ethereum’s increased reliance on data availability (DA) and canonical proof systems will increase mainnet toll collection, and trends in BLOB usage compared to advances in layer 2 compression will determine whether Ethereum’s toll road economics expand or decline.
The cross-rollup MEV market is still in its infancy, but once Ethereum-aligned proposer-builder separation standards extend to layer 2 sequencers, the extractable value will return to Ethereum validators. An alternative scenario in which MEVs are concentrated in layer 2 silos reduces the economic gravity of the mainnet.
Layer 2 tokens, including ARB, OP, and POL, derive the story from net sequencer profitability, increase sensitivity to monthly revenue leaderboards that indicate Base, and set user experience standards that pressure tokenized rollups to operate without native tokens and justify their value through revenue sharing, subsidies, or governance rights.
Polygon’s investment case improves if AggLayer drives composability that translates into liquidity retention rather than ephemeral bridging volume, regardless of its ranking as the largest pure rollup by traditional definition.
Monitoring AggLayer connection milestones and Proof-of-Stake migration progress provides a leading indicator for this scenario.
Builders optimizing distribution are faced with a real calculation that their OP stack and base infrastructure will gain short-term user acquisition through streamlined on-ramps and L2-to-L2 liquidity routing.
Teams that prioritize user experience and cross-chain operability are likely to perform better than teams that focus on doctrinal alignment discussions, especially as multi-chain user experience remains a challenge and network effects favor the largest distribution hubs.
Centralization and interoperability as structural forces
Coinbase’s Base’s public acclaim from Buterin has sharpened the debate over corporate influence and Ethereum’s social structure, especially as global regulatory frameworks, including MiCA and FATF guidance, favor a KYC-friendly L2 with a clear operator.
Polygon’s chain-agnostic AggLayer vision competes with OP Superchains and ZK Rollup Hubs in an interoperability race similar to the mobile platform race. There, a walled garden is contrasted with an open fluid mesh.
Ethereum’s mainnet is positioned as a fundamental infrastructure rather than an exclusive payment layer.
User gravity is focused on networks that solve multi-chain pain points, with Vitalik and Ethereum core researchers driving a simplified Layer 1-secured L2 user experience.
As user experience standards unify around a common light client implementation and proof verification, network effects will bring further benefits to the largest distribution hubs, including Base and Arbitrum.
The Polygon alternative will depend on AggLayer establishing enough cross-chain liquidity to allow developers and users to choose composability over formal Ethereum payments.
The outcome will determine whether Ethereum operates as a standardized payments layer that derives predictable fees from coordinated rollups, or as one option in a competing architecture where liquidity and users are distributed across networks with varying degrees of mainnet dependence.
Sequencer profit concentration, blob utilization, and AggLayer adoption metrics by mid-2026 will reveal which path the ecosystem will take and whether loyalty to Ethereum will become a measurable economic parameter rather than a social layer assumption.