Vitalik's latest statement supports native Rollup, Ethereum L2 composability ushers in a key shift

January 19 News, Donnoh.eth, head of research at L2Beat, posted on X that native Rollup (eip-8079) aims to significantly simplify EVM-equivalent Rollups. Currently, apart from the initial Rollup team, almost no one fully understands the Rollup stack, and even within teams, few are truly familiar with it.

With native Rollup, as long as someone understands L1, someone will understand native Rollup. Moreover, as long as L1 is patched and upgraded, native Rollup will also be patched and upgraded, even if the original Rollup team has exited.

In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that he now “supports native Rollups more than in the past.” This shift in attitude is seen by the market as an important signal for Ethereum’s scaling route and Layer 2 architecture.

Vitalik recalled that his previous opposition to native Rollup was mainly due to technological maturity limitations. In early designs, native Rollup precompiles had to run in ZK Mode or Optimistic Mode, and at that time, ZK-EVM was not yet capable of supporting full zero-knowledge verification. When giving L2 operators two options—“wait 2–7 days for withdrawal with full trust guarantees from Ethereum” or “instant withdrawal but bear proof responsibility themselves”—most projects would choose the former, which would weaken the composability of the Ethereum ecosystem and promote the adoption of suboptimal solutions like multi-signature cross-chain bridges.

However, he pointed out that the situation has now changed. Ethereum’s adaptation pace for zero-knowledge proofs on Layer 1 is gradually aligning with the actual rollout schedule of native Rollup precompile functions, making the previous core contradiction invalid. This means that, without sacrificing security and composability, native Rollup is gradually becoming practically feasible.

Vitalik also mentioned that increasing research and engineering practices regard “synchronous composability” as the core value proposition of L2 verification mechanisms. His previously proposed scheme combining Rollup-based verification with low-latency pre-confirmation is also becoming a focus of discussion. This trend reinforces the strategic importance of native Rollup within Ethereum’s scaling system.

On the technical level, Vitalik called on the Ethereum community to more actively explore suitable precompile design paths. He envisions that if developers build Rollups with “EVM plus extension features,” they should be able to directly reuse EVM’s native Rollup precompiles and introduce dedicated verifiers for new features, or even achieve standardized connections through lookup tables.

This statement is interpreted as an important signal for Ethereum’s move toward a higher-performance, more composable Layer 2 ecosystem by 2026, and also provides a clear direction for the engineering implementation of native Rollup.