ETH is the gravitational center of the Ethereum system. No matter what scaling solution you look at: rollups, validiums, or EigenLayer-enabled systems like MegaETH, everything still ultimately anchors back to onchain Ether. - Rollups settle their state roots on Ethereum L1, secured by validators who stake ETH and paid for with Ether-denominated fees. - Validiums keep data offchain but rely on Ethereum to verify proofs, secured again by ETH-staked validators. - EigenLayer extends Ethereum’s security to new services by restaking ETH itself, making Ether the direct collateral securing new decentralized systems. No matter how modular the architecture becomes, ETH will remain where value accrues, and what ties everything together. Yet despite Ether’s central role in scalability, the proliferation of Ethereum scalability solutions has not resulted in a flood of demand for ETH. The reason is simple: Ethereum’s scalability solutions are still immature. The onchain statistics demonstrate this: - Ethereum mainnet holds about $121 billion in total value locked. - The largest Layer 2 solution, Base, holds only about $2 billion — less than 2% of mainnet’s TVL. The market overwhelmingly still trusts Mainnet. Rollups, restaking, and other modular systems are early in their lifecycle, still earning credibility in security, uptime, and adoption. As these layers mature and the market gains confidence, more value will migrate outward, but it will remain anchored in Ether. If Ethereum’s modular scaling roadmap is successfully executed, then orders of magnitude more economic activity will occur on modular extensions of Ethereum than on Mainnet, and in such a scenario, the demand that these extensions will generate for ETH will become appreciable.