I was invited to attended the Ethereum Interop Forum (EIF) at DevCon last month along with the Polymer team. There was no press. No panels. No booths. Just rooms full of Ethereum builders discussing one thing in solidarity:
Uniting Ethereum
Vitalik went full founder mode, and asked a very sobering question:
“What standards would we have built if Ethereum moved forward with sharding, instead of passing the baton to independent L2s?”
The message was clear—Fragmentation is an existential threat. Unless we work together to address the elephant in the room, Ethereum will shatter.
For the past four years, builders have been grinding non-stop to scale Ethereum. There are more apps, bridges, rollups, and funding than ever before; but we have also never been more fragmented.
EIF changed everything. It marked the first time the Ethereum community has truly assembled to tackle anything head-on since the modular roadmap began. Seeing everyone come together to advance interoperability was the absolute peak of my five years working in interop.
All of us gathered to share our perspectives on overcoming fragmentation. We relentlessly challenged each other’s thinking, and put our egos aside to answer difficult questions. It was clear to me that everyone is preparing for ‘The Big Bang’ moment of Ethereum’s rollup-centric future. And we are working together to make it happen.
How Do We Unite Ethereum?
As the industry embraces the reality of hundreds—soon to be thousands—of rollups, it’s becoming evident that the only sustainable solution is to bring interoperability on-chain and leverage Ethereum as much as possible, i.e. native interoperability - the answer to Vitalik’s question.
Put simply, native interoperability relies primarily on on-chain information routed through Ethereum and its L2s to enable cross-rollup communication.
This was the most hotly discussed topic at EIF, but it isn’t an entirely new concept. Earlier this year, Polymer co-founder Bo (prev. 0xshake) used a similar analogy of Ethereum acting as the data bus to communicate with all rollups settling on Ethereum.
Banger take from @0xshake:
— David Hoffman (@TrustlessState) February 27, 2024
“Ethereum is a secure I/O bus that transfers data between L2s” pic.twitter.com/mO1HUXZfiW
Matter of fact, infrastructure for enabling native interop already exists. But it has historically been slow and expensive, with most teams being too focused on building walled gardens. EIF gave Polymer the chance to have focused discussions with our users, to gather firsthand knowledge of their pain points, preferences, and insights on the best way to make native interop a reality.
Here are the key takeaways:
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Scaling for a Connected Future: Developers are finally diving deep into how to design scalable systems that accommodate and expand with the growing number of chains, with active discussions about existing bottlenecks like shared bridges led by Mohammad (Scroll) and shared settlement by Ellie (Espresso).
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Requests for Native Intent Settlement: Across and OneBalance led the charge with intent systems as the best solution for near-term UX fragmentation. There was a strong emphasis on the need for a common call interface for solvers to collect orders and for wallets to evolve.
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Unopinionated Systems: Discussions extended beyond workshops to all the RIPs leading up to it, like ERC7802, RIP7786, Resource locks and RIP7789. With so many standards emerging, there’s a push towards alignment while remaining neutral and supporting these solutions out of the box for interoperability.
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Scalable Native Interop: The goal is to onboard new rollups quickly and with minimal overhead, reducing cross-chain latency—making Ethereum feel like one unified chain again, all while keeping everything on-chain and avoiding massive gas costs.
Now, only one question remains: what can we do about this?
Any Action. Any Chain.
Polymer is releasing an open API to harness native interoperability, making it lightning fast at scale. The goal is to create a unified plug-n-play interface for apps and infrastructure protocols to access ALL Ethereum rollups in block time.
Here’s what to expect:
- Interop without cross-chain messaging (yes, you read that correctly).
- Atomically prove any on-chain action, event, or storage across all connected chains
- Extreme developer flexibility—bring your own API and event structures. No contract modifications needed
- Out of the box support for any token standard, wallet standard, and EVM rollup stack.
- Significantly reduced fees and settlement times for intents and solver networks
We would love to collaborate with more teams as we roll this out. Please reach out here for early access. We’re ready for you.
It’s time to accelerate the Infinite Garden—our future depends on it.
Let’s make Ethereum great again!
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