Web3 growth will be synonymous with Ethereum growth

Opinion by: Dominic Schwenter, chief operating officer of Lisk

Rumors of Ethereum’s flipping have been exaggerated for many years. The main chain still leads its closest competitor, Solana, by an order of magnitude regarding total value locked (TVL), one metric that can gauge people’s trust in various decentralized networks. The picture is even more apparent when we factor in the metrics from the quickly growing layer-2 (L2) rollup ecosystem built on top of the Ethereum layer 1.

Ethereum remains the most robust and widely adopted blockchain, and Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility continues to be the standard for Web3 development even beyond its direct ecosystem. While some seek only to find flaws, Ethereum should be celebrated for continuing to thrive among the competition after nearly a decade, with its dedication to ecosystem-wide contribution on all levels of its roadmap. 

With L2 rollups providing the scaling layer that previously hindered Ethereum’s full potential, the ecosystem is poised to accelerate further and gain further Web3 market share. 

The Superchain’s growth is shifting the narrative

Ethereum’s strength lies in its robustness as the most trusted decentralized settlement layer and its broader ecosystem, which includes a strong and vast technical community of independent teams. These teams are all building their innovations while contributing to and aligning with the larger Ethereum ecosystem goals and priorities. 

Over the past 18 months, we have seen many top teams selecting to build L2s over L1s, most of them joining the Superchain. The Superchain is a collective of L2s that use Optimism’s OP Stack and are working collectively to scale the Ethereum network, values and Web3 technology. Projects such as Base (Coinbase), World Chain (Worldcoin), Ink (Kraken), Soneium (Sony), Unichain (Uniswap) and others have joined this collective thus far.

Recent: Ether ETF net inflows hit $2.6B in December

This supernetwork of chains, Ethereum’s growing consumer layer, is driving a surge in transaction volume. In the last month, over 47% of all Ethereum L2 transactions came from the Superchain, and the network is just starting. 

In this new paradigm, L1 ecosystems will have an even more significant challenge competing with L2 supernetworks as more chains with existing user bases are added to the collective, with interoperability among these chains set to be rolled out in the future. Ethereum mainnet will act as an ideal settlement layer for all this development. 

How Ethereum will drive Web3 expansion 

With L2 fees generally averaging less than $0.01, we can expect to see a few markets where Ethereum is poised to grow the most as we move through 2025. Web3 adoption is already highest in emerging markets, especially in the form of stablecoins. Stablecoins’ product market fits around providing access to stable currencies and cheaper remittances in these regions. However, due to high network fees, applications on Ethereum have always been cut out of competing in these cost-sensitive regions.

L2 fees are now often significantly lower than L1 chains that have seen the most adoption to date, such as Tron and BNB Smart Chain, providing a bullish outlook on current and future adoption migrating to Ethereum in large part. Since several top L2s specifically focus on supporting developers and applications in these markets, other growth verticals will be through DeFi and chain consolidation. 

DeFi 

The Ethereum ecosystem’s dominance in almost every Web3 use case is crucial here. Once users in emerging markets explore Web3 beyond their immediate needs for stablecoins in payments and remittances, they must jump straight to the Ethereum ecosystem, where they find all the best-in-class Web3 applications.

That is especially true for users experimenting with DeFi applications. Ethereum remains the dominant platform for DeFi, holding 60% of the TVL in this vertical. Base, an Ethereum L2, surged 370% to $2.28 billion in TVL in 2024, primarily due to its adoption among DeFi users drawn by lower fees and more scalable infrastructure.

Chain consolidation

DeFi is only the beginning. The scalability of Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem will soon draw crowds from the Web3 gaming sector and other consumer applications. Thanks to its large community of highly skilled infrastructure developers working collaboratively, they will find increasingly better user experiences and security guarantees existing on Ethereum L2s than on any other chain.

Adopting Ethereum-based or Ethereum-adjacent products in emerging markets will extend Ethereum’s dominance even further among competing chains. We will see a shift away from the Binance Smart Chains and Trons of the world and onto Ethereum-based solutions. This trend, especially in emerging markets, will further solidify Ethereum’s position as the primary blockchain for decentralized applications.

Altogether, this paints a bright future for Ethereum as Web3 adoption grows. Once L2 rollups are battle-tested, they will provide Ethereum’s long-awaited initial scalability layer. 

Expect Ethereum’s dominance to accelerate again thanks to its robustness as a settlement layer, an unmatched ecosystem of developers and collaboration across contributing teams. 

Opinion by: Dominic Schwenter, chief operating officer of Lisk.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.