- The Ethereum Foundation is charting the next phase of Ethereum, proposing an Interoperability Layer to enable one-wallet access across all L2s.
- Layer-2 rollups have boosted Ethereum’s throughput, but they have simultaneously created fragmentation across networks.
The Ethereum Foundation has revealed a technical roadmap that will make Layer-2 (L2) rollups feel like a single, seamless Ethereum chain. The report, posted yesterday by Yoav Weiss and the Account & Chain Abstraction Team, coincided with the Devconnect conference in Argentina, where the event’s opening featured an address by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The problem the foundation aims to address is that rollups have fragmented assets and user experience. Users currently manage tokens across chains such as Arbitrum, Base, Scroll, or Linea, relying on bridges, relayers, and manual steps to move and interact with their assets.
The idea was first introduced in August through a blog post outlining a focus on three strategic initiatives: scaling L1, scaling blobs, and improving user experience. To achieve this, the work is organized into three streams: Initialisation, Acceleration, and Finalisation.
The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) is spearheaded by the Chain and Account Abstraction team, the creators of the ERC-4337 protocol, and is built on the ERC-4337 standard.
The team framed their initiative with a thought-provoking question:
What if all the L2s felt like a single, unified Ethereum? No bridges to think about, no chain names to recognize, no fragmented balances or assets. That’s the vision of the Ethereum Interop Layer: making Ethereum feel like one chain again.
To illustrate the concept, the team explained that users would simply open their wallet, choose an asset and an address, and hit Send. Behind the scenes, the wallet would determine which chain the transaction is on and handle delivery automatically.
Whether minting an NFT, moving tokens, or trading assets, it would no longer matter which rollup the user or counterparty is on, or where the dApp is deployed. As new networks join the ecosystem, the wallet would continue to work with them, without requiring custom integrations or relying on off-chain operators.
The team also made an analogy to highlight its impact of EIL: “In a sense, EIL is to Ethereum what HTTP was to the early Internet.”
Ethereum UX Upgrade
EIL was designed according to the Trustless Manifesto that emphasizes several core principles: No critical secrets, No indispensable intermediaries, and No unverifiable outcomes.
Transactions occur directly between users across all chains, and liquidity providers operate in a trustless manner, supplying capital without ever engaging with users or accessing their transaction data.
They explain that instead of thinking, “I trust a bridge operator to move my funds,” users can rely on verifiable rules executed by their wallet and smart contracts.
Early crypto relied heavily on centralized exchanges (CEXs), exposing users to counterparty risk. With Ethereum, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) emerged, enabling users to transact trustlessly without relying on custodians. EIL seeks to extend this trustless model to cross-L2 interoperability.
Today, cross-L2 solutions still mirror a CEX-like setup, depending on bridge operators, relayers, solvers, and opaque off-chain processes. EIL removes these intermediaries by executing all logic on-chain via the user’s wallet, making transfers, swaps, and minting fully trustless.
From the user’s viewpoint, the experience is simple: “Send, mint, swap, I just do what I want.”
A suite of standards will be used to provide a consistent set of design principles that guide interactions. Key components include interoperable addresses (ERC-7828 and ERC-7930), which enable consistent identification of accounts across different chains, asset consolidation (ERC-7811) to streamline the management of tokens and other digital assets, and multi-calls (ERC-5792).
The standards also provide a neutral message-passing infrastructure, which ensures reliable communication between chains and protocols. This includes an intent standard (ERC-7683) that enables transactions and actions to be expressed in a structured, verifiable way, and (ERC-7786) that standardizes how messages are sent and received across different systems.
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