Ethereum rollups have hit the milestone of $10bn of assets and 2 million weekly active users! Scaling and adoption is finally here.

With the launch of Base, Linea and Mantle in the last few days, we now have 27 independent teams competing to scale Ethereum, and they've hit some big adoption milestones.

Source: https://l2beat.com

If you haven't used a rollup yet, they're incredibly fast, cheap and rapidly growing in adoption as liquidity and utility increases. You can also now transfer directly to each chain from most popular exchanges, avoiding any gas fees involved in using mainnet, which alongside significant developer adoption, means they're now the main centre of gravity for crypto growth - and imo will be the catalyst for the next bull cycle.

Some of the more important of these 27 chains to keep an eye on are:

It's been some years since the concept of a "roll-up centric" roadmap and an approach to sharding execution across multiple independent VMs that utilise validity and fraud proofs for compression was suggested, but through years of incredibly hard engineering work and chewing glass, we're now through the hard part of becoming mainnet ready, and the focus is now on building utility at the application layer, and decentralising core infrastructure.

It's also important to note that every roll-up has different dapps and uses slightly different modular architectures, so it's worth finding one that you're comfortable with - again, L2beat has a great page on each with more information around security, decentralisation roadmap and specific trade-offs that have been made. Some are better for gaming (Arbitrum Nova), some are better for DeFi (Arbitrum) and some are just very new and growing rapidly (Starknet, Polygon zkEVM, zkSync).

Weekly users and usage continues to grow exponentially:

Source: https://growthepie.xyz (Note: only tracks five chains, not all)

If you haven't yet tried out a rollup, now is a good time to get familiar with them. It's always good to be early to new ecosystems, and to get in before the bull cycle, not after, if you can.

Note: Not just a rollup maxi post - It's also good to diversify your interests, and monolithic chains like Solana, alternative VMs like Move (Aptos, Sui) and alternative sovereign and roll-app designs (Polkadot, Cosmos, NEAR) are also very credible and innovating in slightly different directions and creating great application ecosystems. I expect each of them to also thrive, as complementary approaches. But it's safe to say that the era of "Ethereum Killers" from 2018-2022 is officially over.