Etherean Narrative is Being Rewritten: When L1 zkEVM Becomes the Endgame, When Will the Next Revolution Arrive?

From the Fusaka upgrade to Glamsterdam, and the long-term plans for the next three years surrounding topics like kEVM, post-quantum 暗号graphy, and the Gas Limit, Ethereum has densely released multiple roadmap documents covering three to five years within just a few months.

This pace itself is a signal.

If you read the latest roadmap carefully, you will find a clearer and more radical direction emerging: Ethereum is transforming itself into a verifiable computer, and the end point of this path is the L1 zkEVM.

1. The Three Shifts in Ethereum’s Narrative Focus

On February 26, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on social media that the Ethereum Foundation had proposed a roadmap draft named Strawmap, outlining the upgrade direction for the Ethereum L1 protocol in the coming years.

The roadmap proposes five core goals: a faster L1 (second-level finality), a “Gigagas” L1 achieving 10,000 TPS via zkEVM, high-throughput L2s based on Data Availability Sampling (DAS), a post-quantum cryptography system, and native privacy transfer functionality; it also plans for seven protocol forks by 2029, averaging about one every six months.

It can be said that over the past decade, Ethereum’s development has always been accompanied by the continuous evolution of its narrative and technical roadmap.

The first phase (2015–2020) was the programmable ledger.

This was Ethereum’s initial narrative core, the “Turing-complete smart contract.” At that time, Ethereum’s biggest advantage was that it could do more than Bitcoin, with products of this narrative including DeFi, NFT, and DAOs. A large number of decentralized finance protocols began operating on-chain, from lending and DEXs to stablecoins, gradually establishing Ethereum as the primary settlement network for the crypto economy.

The second phase (2021–2023) saw the narrative taken over by L2s.

As gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet soared, making transaction costs prohibitive for ordinary users, Rollups began to take center stage for scaling. Ethereum gradually repositioned itself as a settlement layer, aiming to be the foundational security base for L2s.

Simply put, this involved offloading most execution-layer computations to L2s for scaling via Rollups, while L1 focused on data availability and final settlement. Upgrades like The Merge and EIP-4844 served this narrative, aiming to make L2s cheaper and more secure by leveraging Ethereum’s trust.

The third phase (2024–2025) focused on internal competition and reflection within the narrative.

As is well known, the prosperity of L2s brought an unintended problem: Ethereum L1 itself became less important. Users began operating more on Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, etc., with less direct interaction with L1. The price performance of ETH also reflected this anxiety.

This led the community to debate: if L2s capture all the users and activity, where is L1’s value capture? This logic is undergoing a profound evolution, culminating in the internal turbulence within Ethereum in 2025 and the series of roadmaps laid out in 2026.

In fact, reviewing the core technical directions since 2025—Verkle Trees, Stateless Clients, EVM Formal Verification, native ZK support—these repeatedly point to the same goal: endowing Ethereum L1 itself with verifiability. It’s important to note that this isn’t just about allowing L2 proofs to be verified on L1, but about enabling every single state transition on L1 to be compressed and verified via zero-knowledge proofs.

This is precisely the ambition of L1 zkEVM. Unlike L2 zkEVMs, L1 zkEVM (in-shell zkEVM) means integrating zero-knowledge proof technology directly into the Ethereum consensus layer.

It is not a replica of L2 zkEVMs (like zkSync, Starknet, Scroll), but rather transforming Ethereum’s execution layer itself into a ZK-friendly system. So, if L2 zkEVM is about building a ZK world on top of Ethereum, then L1 zkEVM is about turning Ethereum itself into that ZK world.

Once this goal is achieved, Ethereum’s narrative will upgrade from being a settlement layer for L2s to the “root of trust for verifiable computation.”

This will be a qualitative leap, not the incremental change of the past few years.

2. What is a True L1 zkEVM?

To reiterate a common point: in the traditional model, validators need to “re-execute” every transaction to verify a block. In the zkEVM model, validators only need to verify a ZK Proof. This allows Ethereum to increase the Gas Limit to 100 million or higher without increasing node burden (see extended reading: “The ‘Dawn Moment’ of the ZK Roadmap: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Roadmap Accelerating?”).

However, transforming Ethereum L1 into a zkEVM is far from a single-point breakthrough; it requires simultaneous progress in eight directions, each a multi-year engineering endeavor.

Workstream 1: EVM Formalization

The prerequisite for any ZK proof is that the object being proven has a precise mathematical デフィnition. However, today’s EVM behavior is defined by client implementations (Geth, Nethermind, etc.), not by a strict formal specification. Different clients may behave inconsistently in edge cases, making writing ZK circuits for the EVM extremely difficult—you can’t write proofs for a vaguely defined system.

Therefore, the goal of this workstream is to write every EVM instruction and every state transition rule into a machine-verifiable formal specification. This is the foundation for the entire L1 zkEVM project. Without it, everything else is building on sand.

Workstream 2: ZK-Friendly Hash Function Replacement

Ethereum currently heavily uses Keccak-256 as its hash function. Keccak is extremely unfriendly to ZK circuits, with massive computational overhead, significantly increasing proof generation time and cost.

The core task of this workstream is to gradually replace Ethereum’s internal use of Keccak with ZK-friendly hash functions (like Poseidon, Blake series), especially in state trees and Merkle proof paths. This is a change that affects everything, as hash functions permeate every corner of the Ethereum protocol.

Workstream 3: Verkle Tree Replacing Merkle Patricia Tree

This is one of the most anticipated changes in the 2025–2027 roadmap. Ethereum currently uses the Merkle Patricia Tree (MPT) to store global state. Verkle Trees use vector commitments instead of hash links, compressing witness size by tens of times.

For L1 zkEVM, this means the data required to prove each block is drastically reduced, and proof generation speed is significantly increased. It also means the introduction of Verkle Trees is a key infrastructure prerequisite for the feasibility of L1 zkEVM.

Workstream 4: Stateless Clients

Stateless clients refer to nodes that can verify blocks without locally storing the complete Ethereum state database, requiring only the witness data attached to the block itself.

This workstream is deeply intertwined with Verkle Trees, as stateless clients are only practical if witnesses are small enough. Their significance for L1 zkEVM is twofold: on one hand, they drastically lower the hardware barrier for running nodes, aiding decentralization; on the other, they provide clear input boundaries for ZK proofs, so provers only need to handle data contained in the witness, not the entire world state.

Workstream 5: Standardization and Integration of ZK Proof Systems

L1 zkEVM requires a mature ZK proof system to generate proofs for block execution. However, the current ZK technology landscape is highly fragmented with no consensus on an optimal solution. The goal of this workstream is to define a standardized proof interface at the Ethereum protocol layer, allowing different proof systems to compete for integration rather than mandating a specific one.

This maintains technological openness while leaving room for the continuous evolution of proof systems. The Ethereum Foundation’s PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) team has substantial groundwork in this direction.

Workstream 6: Decoupling Execution and Consensus Layers (Engine API Evolution)

Currently, Ethereum’s Execution Layer (EL) and Consensus Layer (CL) communicate via the Engine API. Under the L1 zkEVM architecture, each state transition in the execution layer requires generating a ZK proof, and the time to generate this proof may far exceed a block interval.

The core problem this workstream needs to solve is how to decouple execution and proof generation without breaking the consensus mechanism—execution can complete quickly first, and proofs can be generated asynchronously later, with validators performing final confirmation at an appropriate time. This involves deep modifications to the block finality model.

Workstream 7: Recursive Proofs and Proof Aggregation

The cost of generating a ZK proof for a single block is high. However, if proofs for multiple blocks can be recursively aggregated into one proof, the verification cost is significantly amortized. Progress in this workstream will directly determine how cost-effectively L1 zkEVM can operate.

Workstream 8: Developer 道具chain and EVM Compatibility Guarantees

All underlying technical transformations must ultimately be transparent to smart contract developers on Ethereum. The hundreds of thousands of existing contracts cannot fail due to the introduction of zkEVM, and developer toolchains cannot be forced to rewrite.

This workstream is the most easily underestimated but often the most time-consuming. Every historical EVM upgrade required extensive backward compatibility testing and toolchain adaptation. The scope of changes for L1 zkEVM far exceeds past upgrades, so the workload for toolchains and compatibility will increase by orders of magnitude.

3. Why is Now the Right Time to Understand This?

The release of Strawmap coincides with a time of market skepticism regarding ETH’s price performance. From this perspective, the most important value of this roadmap lies in redefining Ethereum as “infrastructure.”

For builders, primarily developers, Strawmap provides directional certainty. For users, these technical upgrades will ultimately translate into tangible experiences: transactions finalized in seconds, assets flowing seamlessly between L1 and L2, and privacy protection becoming a built-in feature rather than a plugin.

Objectively speaking, L1 zkEVM is not a product that will be delivered in the near term; its full implementation may take until 2028-2029 or even later.

But at the very least, it redefines Ethereum’s value proposition. If L1 zkEVM succeeds, Ethereum will no longer be just a settlement layer for L2s, but the verifiable root of trust for the entire Web3 world. It would allow any on-chain state to be mathematically traced back to Ethereum’s ZK proof chain, which is decisive for Ethereum’s long-term value capture.

Secondly, it also influences the long-term positioning of L2s. After all, when L1 itself possesses ZK capabilities, the role of L2s will change—evolving from “security scaling solutions” to “specialized execution environments.” Which L2s can find their place in this new landscape will be one of the most interesting ecological evolutions to observe in the coming years.

Most importantly, the author believes it is also an excellent window into Ethereum’s developer culture—the ability to simultaneously advance eight interdependent technical workstreams, each a multi-year engineering project, while maintaining a decentralized coordination method, is itself Ethereum’s unique capability as a protocol.

Understanding this helps in more accurately assessing Ethereum’s true position amidst various competitive narratives.

Overall, from the “Rollup-centric” approach of 2020 to the Strawmap of 2026, the evolution of Ethereum’s narrative reflects a clear trajectory: scaling cannot rely solely on L2s; L1 and L2 must co-evolve.

Therefore, the eight workstreams of L1 zkEVM are the technical manifestation of this cognitive shift. They collectively point towards one goal: enabling the Ethereum mainnet to achieve orders-of-magnitude performance improvements without sacrificing decentralization. This is not a negation of the L2 roadmap, but its refinement and complement.

Over the next three years, this “Ship of Theseus” will undergo seven forks and replace countless “planks.” When it arrives at the next station in 2029, we may witness a truly “global settlement layer”—fast, secure, private, and as open as ever.

Let’s wait and see.

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