Ye Zhang, co-founder of the Ethereum layer-2 platform Scroll, strongly criticized recent proposals aimed at imposing fees on Ethereum rollups, describing this strategy as “one of the most toxic ideas for Ethereum’s future.”
Taking to social media, Zhang expressed his concern that such tariffs on rollups would trade Ethereum’s long-term scalability and ecosystem potential for short-term financial gains, fundamentally misunderstanding Ethereum’s true value proposition. He emphasized that Ethereum’s strength lies in its role as a foundational asset, serving as the primary financial layer for numerous rollup ecosystems, rather than simply generating revenue through fees.
Data following Ethereum’s EIP-4488 upgrade, intended to enhance layer-2 scalability, suggests network fee revenues have declined significantly—from tens of millions daily down to roughly $570,000 per day by late March. Consequently, Ethereum stakeholders have debated ways to recapture lost fee revenue, including imposing new taxes on layer-2 solutions.
However, Zhang highlighted the example of Solana as vertically integrated, where the SOL token directly supports the core network services. In contrast, ETH is already established as the dominant asset across various major layer-2 scaling solutions including Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, and Scroll itself—even on networks where ETH isn’t utilized as the primary gas token, such as StarkNet.
Zhang warned that implementing fees on rollups risks unintended consequences, such as encouraging layer-2 ecosystems to adopt alternative non-Ethereum solutions for their data availability needs. Such migration could ultimately harm Ethereum’s dominance and relevance. He cautioned that Ethereum’s pursuit of short-term revenue through such taxes could undermine its position and limit scalability efforts.
Instead, Zhang proposed the Ethereum community focus on accelerating scalability innovations and deploying important upgrades faster. His call aligns with broader conversations within the Ethereum ecosystem about slow progress and delayed upgrade timelines. Recently, a former Ethereum Foundation expert cited internal conflicts and confusion as key factors behind repeated delays in essential Ethereum protocol updates.
