The zkEVM Rallying Cry ($)

gm Bankless Nation,
It's no secret that Ethereum ecosystem morale needs a shot in the arm. Thankfully, the most bullish system upgrade of all time is on the horizon; it's time to get excited about the zkEVM. Today, David lays out the case.

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The ecosystem is still digesting Vitalik’s “rollup-centrism no longer makes sense” tweet. Reactions range from frustration to relief to outright anxiety about Ethereum’s direction.

If rollups are no longer the north star of Ethereum, what is?

The answer is clear: it's the zkEVM.

In the past, Ethereum has rallied around singular, unifying upgrades – The Merge, EIP-1559, EIP-4844, etc. Each of those moments gave the ecosystem narrative power, developer focus, and external legitimacy. With the strength of these upgrades, Ethereum commanded attention from the world. 

The zkEVM upgrade is poised to be the strongest update Ethereum has ever had.

• It’s stronger than the Merge, which merely fixed a flawed consensus mechanism.
• It’s stronger than EIP-1559, which faded into irrelevancy as blockspace became abundant.
• It’s stronger than EIP-4844, which contributed to the lostness that has plagued Ethereum’s direction. 

The zkEVM upgrade is directly in the crosshairs of what everyone wants: Massive L1 scalability. 

What does the zkEVM do for Ethereum? 

The zkEVM enables the L1 to accept validity proofs of EVM execution as an alternative to re-executing blocks. This is the original aspiration for sharding and rollups in the first place – just have the L1 verify validity rather than recompute every single block. It gives Ethereum the room to raise the block gas limit because proof verification is much cheaper than everyone re-executing everything. 

Once this zkEVM precompile is hard-forked into the Ethereum L1, the L1 becomes a ZK Rollup. Literally an order-of-magnitude scalability upgrade to the Ethereum L1. 

This has always been Ethereum’s Manhattan project, and part of the motivation behind Vitalik’s “Rollup Non-Centrism” comes from the fact that zkEVM progress has far exceeded expectations, and the long-term goal of ZKing the L1 is now within striking distance, and we need to orient ourselves around that future. 

This is the endgame for Ethereum. 

Massive L1 scalability to host an incredibly large amount of global finance on the same layer. 

It’s important for the Ethereum community to understand this and digest this information, and elevate this as a part of our cultural mimetics. 

Ecosystem morale, narrative control, and ETH price all do well when we have a collective rallying cry. The zkEVM needs to become our new banner. 

It’s what the world wants from Ethereum. Those that have detracted from Ethereum due to its misguided rollup-centrism are in agreement that the zkEVM is the sickest thing ever. The zkEVM gives Ethereum the opportunity regain its lost ground while it unsuccessfully tried to coalesce the rollup-centric roadmap into a coherent singular ecosystem. 

While many, myself included, feel a great loss for the last few years of progress in Ethereum, the good news is that zkEVM progress was actually accelerated by the rollup-centric roadmap. We can successfully capture the fruits of the otherwise misguided RCR by implementing the zkEVM on the L1. 

The Ethereum core developers need to lock in on getting the zkEVM into the L1. 

The Ethereum community needs to get loud about the zkEVM and what it does for Ethereum. 

This is how we win. Let’s get the job done. 

📈 The Asset

• Ethereum’s DeFi TVL ($59B) is now 8x larger than the second-closest network
• Revolut has now staked ~60,000 ETH
• Bitmine staked nearly 900,000 ETH over the past week

🏛️ The Protocol

• Vitalik proposed scaling Ethereum state by adopting a tiered storage system
• The EF released its Trillion Dollar Security dashboard and announced its 2026 PhD Fellowship Program
• Ethereum processed 70M transactions in January, a new record

📱 The Apps

• ENS unveiled the new ENS App Alpha and the new Explorer Alpha; it’s also ditching Namechain and instead deploying ENSv2 on Ethereum
• Yearn rolled out stYFI
• Fidelity officially introduced its dollar-pegged FIDD stablecoin
• Kraken’s new DeFi Earn offering has now passed $30M TVL
• Tally developed an ICO platform powered by Uniswap’s CCA
• Universal deployed USDU, a dollar-pegged stablecoin registered with the Central Bank of the UAE
• Y Combinator startups can now opt for USDC funding on Base

🤫 The Privacy Stack

• Payy announced Payy Network, a new privacy-focused EVM L2

🐸 The Culture

• Vitalik: “How I would do creator coins”; “The original vision of L2s … no longer makes sense”; and “We don’t need more copypasta EVM chains”
• Geode Labs released the ETHStars Opportunity Board and published a deep dive on Vietnam’s Ethereum community

💽 The Tech

• ERC-8004 was rolled out on Arbitrum, Base, Celo, Gnosis, Polygon, Scroll, and Taiko.
• Wonderland introduced Interoperable Addresses

Crypto enters a full-blown pain market as Bitcoin, ETH, tech stocks, and even gold sell off together.

Ryan and David break down why crowded trades are unwinding across markets, what the Warsh Fed chair pick means for rates and risk assets, and whether crypto has become uniquely fragile in this cycle. They dig into Vitalik’s L2 pivot and what it signals about Ethereum’s next era, unpack massive institutional paper losses at Strategy, BitMine, and Galaxy, and analyze Polymarket odds on where Bitcoin goes next. Plus: OGs selling to ETF buyers, the Clarity Act standoff between banks and crypto, and how to survive the psychology of a real bear market.

Tune into this week’s Rollup! 👇

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