Author: Shi Xingguo

I. Prologue: The Collapse of Consensus and the Turn of the "Lighthouse"

Blockchain is never short of news. More explosive than the recent Bitcoin crash is Vitalik's brief remarks, which struck at the heart of Rollups, adding a tragic footnote to this technological route that has spanned five springs and autumns.

In February 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a series of harsh reflections on social media and Ethereum research forums, undoubtedly a heavy bomb dropped into the deep waters of the industry. It triggered a widespread "Earthquake of the Scalability Roadmap" media storm. He pointed out that the current L2 ecosystem resembles a collection of independent islands pieced together by fragile bridges, rather than an organic part of the Ethereum system. This statement publicly acknowledged and deeply analyzed the serious limitations of the "Rollup-centric" scalability plan established since 2020 on a technical level.

Looking back to 2020, when Vitalik published the "Rollup-Centric Ethereum Roadmap," the consensus across the ecosystem was to position the Ethereum mainnet as a security and settlement layer while fully outsourcing execution functions to Rollups. However, five years later, Vitalik personally overturned this vision, stating that the original idea of viewing L2 as the "orthodox solution" for Ethereum scalability is no longer valid.

He made a highly damaging accusation: "If you create an EVM that processes 10,000 transactions per second, but its connection to L1 is only achieved through a multi-signature bridge, then what you are operating is merely a centralized database dressed in a blockchain shell." This argument directly hit the pain point of current mainstream L2s: no matter how high the throughput, if its security inheritance mechanism relies on "trusting a few people controlling a committee," it cannot uphold Ethereum's promise of decentralization. This directly tore away the glamorous facade of the Rollups route, revealing that many Rollups are essentially equivalent to off-chain processing or sidechains in disguise.

Once, Vitalik had a beautiful step-by-step evolution plan for Rollups. In the maturity framework he proposed in 2022, he believed that a true Rollup should gradually progress from Stage 0 (completely centralized) to Stage 2 (completely decentralized). However, the reality is stark; as of early 2026, data from L2BEAT shows that the vast majority of active L2s are still at Stage 0 or Stage 1, even sinking deeper into the centralized "auxiliary wheel."

II. Retrospective: The "Survival Philosophy" and Limitations of the Patch Era

Turning the clock back to 2020, it was a moment filled with anxiety. Faced with a congested mainnet and high gas fees, the Ethereum community made a difficult strategic choice: to establish a "Rollup-centric" roadmap.

At that time, this was undoubtedly a rational "survival philosophy." If complex engineering reconstruction were to be carried out on the underlying architecture of L1, it would set off a chain reaction. The community opted for a more pragmatic "outsourcing" strategy—moving complex computation off-chain (Layer 2) while only returning the final results for on-chain settlement.

This is akin to a bank opening numerous "franchise outlets" to alleviate the business pressure on its headquarters. The outlets can quickly process transactions, but the final account reconciliation and fund settlement still have to return to the headquarters, the only window.

This "patching" survival philosophy, while temporarily alleviating performance anxiety, brought about limitations that users could directly feel:

First is the fragmentation of experience. Users are forced to "island hop" between different L2s, with assets being fragmented by cross-chain bridges. Moving from Chain A to Chain B is as troublesome as going abroad; not only do you have to pay high "visa fees" (cross-chain transaction fees), but you also have to endure long waits.

Second is the overdrawn trust. In pursuit of efficiency, the ecosystem had to tolerate a regression in the decentralization of L2s. This "get on the bus first, pay later" mentality has led to the vast majority of L2s still relying on multi-signature wallet governance at a rudimentary stage. Users think they are using blockchain, but in reality, they may just be using a bookkeeping system controlled by a few individuals.

The most fundamental limitation lies in the physical performance bottleneck. No matter how optimized Rollups are, they still operate on a single-lane road (serial blockchain). When hundreds of L2s simultaneously submit data to L1, congestion merely shifts from on-chain to the interface between on-chain and off-chain. This architecture is destined to be unable to support the real-time high concurrency required for large-scale applications in the future Web3.

This is a typical case of technical debt. The temporary smoothness achieved through centralized efficiency and off-chain processing comes at a cost that ultimately must be repaid.

III. In-Depth Analysis: Why Upper Layer Scalability Cannot Fix Lower Layer Compaction?

On the surface, Rollups are merely the helpless result of a "survival philosophy," but the decisive inner truth is the coldness of physical laws. Why has L2 not achieved its initial scalability goals and instead caused unprecedented fragmentation in the Ethereum ecosystem? Because Rollups attempt to cover up architectural flaws at the system level with software-level stacking.

The "single-lane" dilemma of serial execution, whether L1 or L2, still has the underlying gene of "sequential processing" in mainstream blockchains. This is akin to a single-lane road; no matter how many elevated bridges (L2) you build on it, as long as the final exit (state update) is unique, congestion is inevitable.

The essence of Rollup is a "compressor." It does compress one hundred transactions into one, but this only reduces the data volume at the logical level without changing the "queuing" rules at the physical level. When on-chain activities surge, L2 still has to bid for the limited block space of L1. This architecture is destined to be unable to support high-frequency financial or AI agent businesses that require millisecond-level responses. More importantly, in the future Web3 world, there will be not only transfers but also a large amount of real-time state synchronization, which L2 cannot support at all.

The "island tax" of interoperability The biggest side effect of L2 is that it has cut the originally unified Ethereum liquidity into dozens of non-communicating islands. This fragmentation is not only experiential but also economic.

A typical example is the "seven-day challenge period" of Optimistic Rollup. For security reasons, users need to wait a full 7 days to withdraw from L2 back to L1. This is unimaginable in traditional finance—it is equivalent to a transfer taking T+7 to arrive. The cross-chain bridges and liquidity aggregators that arise from this are essentially imposing a "fragmentation business tax" on users. In our quest for scalability, we sacrificed the most precious feature of Web3: atomic composability.

The "involution" of business models Under a modular architecture, interests are divided too finely, making collaboration extremely difficult. The shutdown of shared sequencers (like Astria) is a microcosm: large projects are unwilling to share MEV profits, while small projects cannot bear the infrastructure costs. The result is that everyone is reinventing the wheel, establishing closed "local networks" instead of jointly building an open "wide area network."

The conclusion is harsh: running more virtual machines (L2) on a single-core CPU (serial L1) will not yield the performance of a supercomputer. What this industry needs is not more patches, but a fundamental reconstruction of the underlying architecture.

IV. New Demands of Web3: Beyond "Single Business Batch Processing" to Internet Real-Time Civilization

The richness and complexity of Web3 business far exceed that of cryptocurrencies. Raising the perspective a bit, this is actually the "generational leap" that Web3 is experiencing. The cryptocurrency era before Web3, represented by Bitcoin, was the "ledger" era, where the core task was to accurately record value transfers. The serial processing mechanism was not only sufficient but also the best guarantee of security.

But the world has changed, and we are on the eve of the Web3 dawn. The core demands of the industry are no longer merely low-frequency bookkeeping but "high-frequency state computing."

This change stems from the new demand list that the real world has placed on Web3. These demands are characterized by high concurrency, real-time performance, and complex interactions, which are difficult for any blockchain based on serial logic (whether L1 or L2) to support:

Imagine: billions of AI agents collaborating autonomously on-chain, requiring fiber-optic-like millisecond responses rather than "dial-up internet" style block confirmations; the global circulation of RWA assets, seeking 24/7 real-time certainty rather than long settlement waits; and the micropayments of massive devices in DePIN networks, which, if run on a congested serial chain, would instantly break their economic model due to expensive gas fees.

In this new paradigm, what we pursue is no longer simply "peak TPS," but "real-time certainty." We need an infrastructure that can support massive concurrency like internet servers while maintaining decentralized characteristics. This is not only an improvement in performance metrics but also an evolution of the underlying logic from "batch processing civilization" to "real-time civilization."

V. Paradigm Shift: The Ascension of Parallel Blockchains (Paralism)

Faced with the physical iron wall of single-core computing, the industry has gradually reached a consensus: relying solely on application layer patches cannot break through the performance ceiling of the underlying layer. True scalability must be a deep architectural reconstruction. Parallel blockchains, represented by Paralism, are such an "architecture-level" solution.

Structural Reconstruction: From Linear Constraints to Parallel Thoroughfares The crux of traditional blockchains lies in their "single-threaded" gene, forcing all businesses to queue and bid on the same timeline. Paralism introduces a dual-layer topology structure of "Hyper Block + Solo Chains." This is not merely adding lanes but constructing a multi-dimensional execution space. Each sub-chain can serve as an independent sovereign space, carrying specific high-frequency businesses—whether it is instant matching in DeFi or massive interactions in GameFi. They can process in parallel on their respective tracks without interference. This architecture allows blockchains to possess horizontal scaling capabilities similar to cloud computing for the first time, with performance no longer constrained by the physical limits of a single point.

Interactive Evolution: Endogenous Consistency
The most exquisite aspect of the parallel architecture lies in its resolution of the contradiction between "sharding" and "unity." Paralism, through the Buddy consensus algorithm, allows independently running sub-chains to achieve atomic-level alignment of the entire network's state within each brief cycle via hyperblocks. This means that cross-chain interactions no longer need to rely on fragile third-party bridges or lengthy confirmation periods. Under the rhythm of hyperblocks, asset interactions between Chain A and Chain B are instantaneous and strongly consistent. This "Native Interoperability" returns the flow of funds in Web3 to the smoothness and security akin to internal bank settlements, completely bidding farewell to the era of "cross-chain tax."

Business Sovereignty: Refusing to "Cut One's Foot to Fit the Shoe"
In the Ethereum paradigm, all applications must compromise to the standards of the EVM. However, the parallel architecture grants businesses significant adaptability. Applications are no longer tenants living under someone else's roof but architects with customization rights. High-frequency trading can pursue extreme millisecond-level consensus, while large asset storage can choose more robust security parameters. They share the liquidity and security of the mainnet without sacrificing their own business characteristics.

This is not merely an increase in throughput; it is a fundamental leap from "ledger logic" to "computational logic" in blockchain. It proves that the future of Web3 does not require more patches but rather a robust skeleton that is inherently parallel.

VI. Conclusion: From "Patch Stacking" to "Architectural Innovation," Embracing the Parallel Era
The historical tide has evolved to the brink of Web3, with demands never slowing down and accelerating in iteration. Rollups are not a dead end; they are an expensive yet necessary stress test that has fulfilled its historical mission over five years—forcing the entire industry to physically confront the limits of "layered patching" and ultimately awakening to the realization that attempting to stack skyscrapers on a single-threaded foundation is an unfulfillable engineering illusion.

Vitalik's candidness in early 2026 coincided with the eve of Ethereum's "Glamsterdam" upgrade, which is no coincidence. The upcoming "Glamsterdam" upgrade is essentially Ethereum's "single-core overclocking + multi-threaded patch." By squeezing execution time through ePBS and invoking multi-core computing power through BALs, the performance of Ethereum L1 will reach unprecedented heights in 2026. This indicates that Ethereum is still making difficult and roundabout attempts toward "parallelization."

If Glamsterdam represents an extreme struggle within the old serial paradigm, then Paralism signifies an evolution of another dimension—a "multi-core operating system" that inherently rejects queuing and is born parallel. It establishes a revolutionary data structure from "serial" to "parallel" at the genetic level. For the ultimate fate of Web3, Paralism represents the most thorough engineering realization of this parallel logic at the blockchain's foundational level.

The future of Web3 will undoubtedly be supported by a parallel underlying architecture capable of handling massive concurrent tasks. "Getting off at the station" is not just about bidding farewell to old routes but also about transferring to the parallel express train that leads to large-scale commercial applications.

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