Crypto News & Market Updates

ChainCatcher news, Token Terminal data cited by Arbitrum shows that as of the time the reference post was published, the market value of stablecoins on Arbitrum One increased by $91.8 million in the previous 24 hours.

Deep Tide TechFlow news, on November 15, according to a post by Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor, banks' adoption of Bitcoin may drive its next bull market. Saylor stated that he discussed bank adoption, macro tailwinds, and regulatory support at the Cantor Convergence event, as well as how Strategy transforms digital capital into digital credit and digital equity.

According to TechFlow on November 15, Fundstrat Capital's Chief Investment Officer Tom Lee stated that although the fundamentals of the crypto industry are generally positive, prices have recently faced significant selling pressure. He believes that the decline in AI and semiconductor stocks may trigger margin calls, especially affecting retail investors in Asia. Lee also believes that the upcoming Anthropic IPO may prompt investors to sell stocks and crypto assets to raise subscription funds, and that U.S. scrutiny of chip sales to Asia and China could further heighten market concerns. He remains optimistic about the long-term role of crypto assets in trade settlement and capital markets, and says ETH is the future of finance.

Odaily Planet Daily reports that in the next phase, users will be allowed to lock DOT in a collateral vault to mint dotUSD. This mechanism is inspired by the Liquity model and includes oracles, a stability pool, and liquidation mechanisms.

Deep Tide TechFlow news, on November 14, according to CoinDesk, the National Bank of Kazakhstan plans to cooperate with the Ministry of Finance to issue tokenized government bonds. The central bank governor Timur Suleimenov stated that the most likely issuance time is the first quarter of 2027. Earlier this month, the National Bank of Kazakhstan sold 5 billion tenge of 91-day central bank notes through the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, of which 1 billion tenge was issued in tokenized form, equivalent to about 22.3 million USD. The weighted average yield of the notes was 15.72%, with total demand 1.4 times the issuance volume. The exchange's digital asset platform uses the Solana blockchain, with BitGo providing custody infrastructure; it is not yet determined whether either will participate in the proposed government bond issuance.

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Solana posted on the X platform stating that Leap is a new trading application launched by Solana Labs, supporting 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, currencies, and cryptocurrencies. Leap's General Manager Chris Osborn (@aliquotchris) will attend Breakpoint.

Author: imToken Original link: https://www.techflowpost.com/article/35304 Disclaimer: This article is a reprint. Readers can obtain more information through the original link. If the author has any objections to the form of reprinting, please contact us, and we will make modifications according to the author's requirements. The reprint is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice, nor does it represent the views and positions of Wu Shuo. Is L2 eating away at the value of L1? Is Ethereum losing its global composability? During the two years when the Rollup narrative was at its peak, such anxieties almost filled the entire Ethereum community. The market logic at the time was that since the transaction costs on the mainnet were getting higher, more applications, assets, and users should migrate to independent L2s. However, entering 2026, some interesting changes began to emerge. From Synthetix deploying a new perpetual contract exchange back to the Ethereum mainnet, to ENS abandoning the long-prepared Namechain, and projects like Trueo and Superseed choosing L1 again, project teams seem to feel that maintaining an independent L2 is no longer the optimal solution. Even some L2s have started to shrink operations or shut down. For example, in early October, Blast, which once had over $2 billion TVL, announced a gradual cessation of operations, followed by Abstract announcing it will shut down its network in December. On the other hand, the Ethereum Foundation, by integrating the three strategic lines of "Scale," "Improve UX," and "Harden the L1," has pushed mainnet performance into a new stage of engineering delivery. So what exactly has happened to Ethereum from "everything can be Rollup" to "returning to the Ethereum mainnet"? From the "exodus" to the "mainnet return" wave In recent years, limited by Ethereum mainnet's high Gas fees, building your own L2 or deploying core business to other Rollups has become a standard move for many leading protocols. But recently, the on-chain ecosystem is undergoing an interesting reverse adjustment, especially different types of projects are starting to reassess the choice between L1 and L2 from the perspectives of infrastructure cost, asset security, and ecosystem liquidity. The most representative case is ENS. In 2024, ENS Labs planned a dedicated ZK Rollup (Namechain) for ENSv2, hoping to reduce domain registration and management costs through an independent execution environment. But by February 2026, ENS co-founder Nick Johnson announced the project would stop developing Namechain, and ENSv2 would be deployed directly on the Ethereum mainnet. His reason was straightforward: Ethereum L1's scaling speed far exceeded expectations from two years ago. According to data disclosed by ENS Labs, with the increase of Ethereum Gas Limit, the average Gas cost for ENS domain registration dropped about 99% in the past year, from nearly $5 to less than $0.05. Meanwhile, maintaining an independent L2 not only requires bearing node and infrastructure costs but also handling cross-chain resolution, bridging, security audits, and ongoing operations. If a business can already be completed on the mainnet at very low cost, continuing to maintain an independent Rollup might make the product architecture more complex. Similar changes have appeared in the DeFi field. In June 2025, Synthetix, which had actively promoted the Ethereum L2 ecosystem, published "L2s are Dead, Long Live Ethereum," bluntly stating that the past L2 scaling path brought liquidity fragmentation and infrastructure instability to applications. In December of the same year, Synthetix's new generation perpetual contract exchange officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. In the second half of 2026, there were more specific migration moves: Trueo: Announced in September that it would mainly redeploy from Base back to Ethereum L1, hoping to leverage the mainnet's stronger integration capabilities, network effects, and neutrality to build a more trustworthy prediction market and outcome oracle; ShapeShift: On October 1, migrated the rFOX staking program from Arbitrum to the Ethereum mainnet. The reason was practical: the vast majority of FOX tokens are held on the mainnet, so making users cross chains just to participate in staking was unnecessary; Superseed: Stopped its original L2 network in August, planning to shift the core products of the entire ecosystem to the Ethereum mainnet, no longer relying on independent chain Gas revenue to support lending repayments, but achieving original product goals through application-layer revenue strategies; Nillion: Launched Blacklight L1 in October, migrating node operations originally running on Nillion L2 to the Ethereum mainnet, and plans to gradually phase out the original L2 network. Of course, these cases cannot be simply understood as all protocols withdrawing from L2, but at least indicate that more and more project teams are starting to choose infrastructure based on the real needs of security, liquidity, and execution efficiency. More notably, the operational pressure of some independent L2s has also begun to surface. On October 2, Blast announced it would cease operations, citing that the cost of maintaining the network had exceeded the revenue generated by L2, and no reliable path to economic sustainability was seen. Subsequently, Abstract also announced plans to shut down its network on December 15. Although it had connected to more than 144 applications and attracted over 400,000 users, insufficient liquidity, limited DeFi ecosystem, and lack of institutional participation ultimately made independent operation of a consumer-grade public chain unsustainable. This also shows that for many L2s, having a chain does not equal having a sustainable business model. Especially against the backdrop of Ethereum continuously lowering L2 data publishing costs and mainnet performance steadily improving, relying solely on low Gas and token incentives to attract users is becoming increasingly difficult to form long-term competitiveness. Reconstructing the L1 and L2 relationship: "State stays on mainnet, computation outsourced" Why are project teams no longer obsessed with maintaining a "big and comprehensive" L2? Besides economic calculations, there is a more fundamental issue: as more applications and liquidity are dispersed across different networks, what impact is Ethereum's originally most important global composability facing? In the initial Rollup-centric roadmap, the division of labor was very clear: L1 is responsible for security, data availability, and final settlement; L2 is responsible for extreme scaling and low Gas. In the era when mainnet Gas fees were tens of dollars per transaction, this was almost the only feasible answer. But reality has been more complex than expected. As of November 2026, ETHBEAT (formerly L2BEAT) data has recorded dozens of different types of L2s, but only a handful have reached Stage 2, with asset volumes almost negligible. In contrast, major Rollups like Base, Arbitrum One, and OP Mainnet remain at Stage 1. Ultimately, the speed of L2 advancing to Stage 2 is far slower than expected; meanwhile, L1's own scaling progress is accelerating. As Vitalik Buterin summarized, with the mainnet's own scaling accelerating, "the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer holds." More importantly, some L2s may choose to remain at Stage 1 long-term due to regulatory, business model, or client control considerations. This does not mean they are necessarily wrong. For institutional applications that need to meet specific regulatory requirements, retaining certain management and upgrade rights may be part of product design. But if they rely long-term on a few entities controlling key upgrade rights and state adjudication, they should not be simply equated with a fully decentralized shard of the Ethereum mainnet. Therefore, in specific application architectures, a consistent compromise practice is to keep assets and key states on L1, while outsourcing high-frequency, complex computations to off-chain or other execution environments. Synthetix's new generation perpetual contract exchange is a typical example. It uses a hybrid architecture where user assets are still custodied by Ethereum L1 contracts, order matching is handled by an off-chain high-performance CLOB (central limit order book) engine, and trade results are batch settled back to the mainnet. This way, users do not need to bridge large amounts of assets to another chain for trading speed, while enjoying an order matching experience close to centralized exchanges. Of course, this does not completely eliminate trust issues. Synthetix still relies partially on off-chain order books for margin management, and the off-chain matching system itself requires scrutiny. But asset custody and final withdrawal are guaranteed by mainnet contracts, so users do not have to entrust all their funds' security to an independent L2 sequencer and bridging system. This actually provides another idea: it is not necessary to move all computation on-chain to achieve true on-chain finance; the key is which parts must be provided with irreplaceable trust guarantees by on-chain rules. From a longer-term perspective, Vitalik's promoted Native Rollup research direction may be a more ideal solution. Simply put, it uses Ethereum-native ZK-EVM verification mechanisms to allow the mainnet to directly verify Rollup's EVM execution results, reducing reliance on external security committees, and creating conditions for more trustworthy interoperability and synchronous composability among different Rollups. Meanwhile, solutions like Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) are also trying to achieve tighter synchronous interaction between different Rollups and the mainnet. These technologies are still in various stages of research and validation but point to a common direction: users should not be forced to accept fragmented assets, liquidity, and trust systems just because they use different execution environments. Of course, L2s will not disappear. For high-frequency trading, gaming, privacy computing, and applications needing autonomous control of execution environments, L2s still hold important value. What really needs to change is the past mindset that "scaling" is the sole core mission of L2. When both L1 and L2 become cheap, how does ETH capture value? The previous discussion was about infrastructure and application architecture changes, but ultimately it comes back to a more realistic question: if the Ethereum mainnet becomes stronger and more applications return to L1, will ETH's value logic also change accordingly? In recent years, the crypto market's valuation of ETH has largely relied on the fee-burning mechanism brought by EIP-1559. According to this mechanism, the base fee in transaction fees paid by users is burned, while the priority fee is paid to validators. When network transaction demand is strong and block space tight, the base fee tends to rise, increasing ETH burn volume. This was the important foundation of the "Ultrasound Money" narrative. If the network continues to grow, fee burning could offset or even exceed ETH issuance, making ETH net deflationary. But the problem lies here. As upgrades like Dencun and Fusaka continuously reduce the cost of L2 submitting data to the mainnet, and the mainnet keeps raising the Gas Limit, the cost and fee income per transaction may decline. Even if the ecosystem's transaction scale continues to expand, it does not necessarily mean ETH burn volume grows accordingly. Relying solely on raising Gas fees to support ETH valuation may instead impose higher costs on ordinary users and real applications, ultimately harming the network's long-term competitiveness. Vitalik Buterin has specifically discussed ETH's value positioning. His view is clear: rather than mainly understanding ETH as an asset whose value comes from fee burning, he believes ETH's positioning as a store of value asset is more worthy of Ethereum's long-term investment. Vitalik does not deny EIP-1559 nor advocate canceling the fee-burning mechanism. On the contrary, he thinks this mechanism remains reasonable and should be retained. Even if future fee burning can only offset less than 10% of break-even issuance in the long term, holders should not be disappointed because ETH's value does not rely solely on burning. Why? First, the periods when ETH burn volume was highest largely came from speculative activities within the crypto industry. For example, Yuga Labs' Otherdeed NFT minting in 2022 generated about $180 million in fee burning in a single day, but this income was not truly external demand. If the crypto market shrinks overall and users' speculative ability declines, such transactions and fee income may disappear simultaneously. Therefore, deducing ETH's long-term valuation solely from historical burn data cannot form a reliable value floor. Second, if supporting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar ETH market cap requires the network to continuously generate high fee income, Ethereum might have to increase R&D investment, adjust product directions, and conduct more active governance interventions like large commercial companies. This is not fully consistent with Ethereum's long-term commitment to decentralization and resistance to control. More importantly, deliberately maintaining high Gas fees to increase burn volume may exclude ordinary users who most need privacy, security, and open financial services. So, apart from fee burning, what should ETH's long-term value be based on? In Vitalik's view, the answer is Ethereum's truly unique competitiveness: decentralization, and the CROPS characteristics he summarized—Censorship and Capture Resistance, Open Source, Privacy, and Security. These attributes ultimately point to a more pragmatic value: stability, and the network's ability to continue operating amid changing external environments. Especially in an era of accelerating AI technology development and evolving traditional finance and digital infrastructure, a financial infrastructure that can remain neutral, reliable, and hard to be controlled by external forces long-term may be far more valuable than high fee income at any given stage. From this perspective, L1 strengthening is actually solidifying ETH's long-term value foundation from three dimensions. Core state and settlement capability build Ethereum's most important network effect: computation itself can be commoditized and execution environments replicated, but a shared settlement layer with massive assets, mature financial protocols, and deep liquidity is hard to rebuild quickly. This means ETH's status as the underlying Gas asset, native collateral, and settlement asset has the opportunity to be reinforced as core financial activities reconverge; Mainnet scaling makes ETH's value no longer dependent on high single-transaction fees: In the past two years, Ethereum has been trying to solve a long-standing contradiction—how to increase throughput without letting node hardware requirements spiral out of control. If a series of technologies mature, Ethereum has the chance to evolve from a "low-frequency, high-price" settlement network to a global financial infrastructure with higher throughput and lower usage costs; Staking mechanism and economic security establish a more solid underlying demand for ETH: From the whole network perspective, ETH's value is forming more diversified support. It is not only the native resource needed for network operation and the economic collateral for PoS consensus but also an important collateral and liquidity asset in DeFi and on-chain finance. This is a much more complete explanation of ETH's long-term value than relying solely on fee burning. Final thoughts If the past few years of Ethereum's development path are seen as a scaling experiment, then the changes in 2026 look more like Ethereum beginning to find a new balance for the entire ecosystem. L2s will not disappear, nor should they. They remain an important part of Ethereum's expansion of application scenarios, carrying differentiated execution environments and serving more users. But at the same time, L1 cannot remain long-term as a base layer only responsible for data availability and final settlement. It needs to re-strengthen its execution capability, liquidity centrality, censorship resistance, and economic security, so that the most important assets and financial states can settle in a sufficiently trustworthy environment. As Lean Ethereum philosophy conveys: subtract redundancy and friction, and put the core security, censorship resistance, and state consensus back at the protocol center. When the most valuable state and liquidity reconverge on the mainnet, a more powerful, unified experience, and more solid value foundation Ethereum is opening a new chapter for its next decade.

ChainCatcher news: On-chain data analytics platform Glassnode announced that stablecoin supply is rapidly contracting, with a total supply decrease of $17 billion in the past month, the largest decline since 2022. Glassnode stated that holders are converting stablecoins into fiat currency, withdrawing purchasing power that could be used for Bitcoin and the crypto market. Glassnode also noted that a bull market requires funds entering this ecosystem, not leaving it.