Written by: Adriano Feria
Translation: Vernacular Blockchain
Introduction
The Ethereum ecosystem is on the verge of a transformational wave of enterprise-level adoption. As the world's largest companies like Microsoft, JPMorgan, Santander, and EY collaborate through the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the network's reputation as a global settlement layer and innovation platform grows stronger. Recently, Karen Scarbro, Microsoft's Technical Project Manager and EEA Executive Director, emphasized how financial and tech giants are integrating with Ethereum to leverage its secure, trust-minimized foundation to build the next generation of products and services.
The participation of these institutions will pose unprecedented challenges to Ethereum's current and future data availability (DA) capabilities. As the scale of on-chain business for enterprises grows, the complex ecosystems of Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) solutions will need to evolve continuously. While Ethereum's own L2 and native DA resources will meet high-value use cases, alternative DA layers will emerge to cater to mainstream market demands. Although this may seem to lead to fragmentation of the ecosystem, it actually showcases Ethereum's powerful and flexible design—capable of addressing the vast global demand for secure auditing and settlement services, ultimately surpassing any single traditional network.
1. Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: A Bridge for Driving Enterprise Adoption
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was established in 2017 to bridge the Ethereum community with large enterprises. Initially, the EEA focused on private blockchain solutions but later shifted to support public Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, viewing it as the preferred platform for enterprise-level solutions. EEA Executive Director Karen Scarbro recently stated, "If your enterprise wants to participate in the Web3 economy, then building on Ethereum—settled by the mainnet and utilizing its L2—is the most pragmatic choice."
The EEA is not just promoting a technology but providing a tangible path for enterprise adoption by advancing the Ethereum ecosystem. Scarbro noted that EEA's membership has reached an all-time high, including traditional financial giants like JPMorgan and Santander as well as tech giants like Microsoft and EY. The EEA's mission is to ensure that when enterprises think of 'Web3,' the first thing that comes to mind is 'Ethereum.'
2. Insights from Karen Scarbro: A Microsoft Perspective
As Microsoft's Technical Project Manager and EEA Executive Director, Scarbro has a unique perspective that deeply integrates insights from a global tech giant like Microsoft with the Ethereum ecosystem. She pointed out several key points:
Enterprises are choosing Ethereum: Many large financial and tech companies view Ethereum as the long-term settlement layer for their blockchain solutions.
Clarity and stability are crucial: enterprises prefer ecosystems with clear development roadmaps, sustainable support, and long-term maintenance. Ethereum, with its deep trust foundation, development tools, and extensive community support, ensures that innovative projects can operate robustly for the long term.
L2 and Modular Architecture: Scarbro emphasized that enterprises are not just focused on Ethereum's mainnet, but are actively engaging with L2 solutions based on Ethereum's trust mechanism. This modular design—composed of multiple execution frameworks, DA providers, and aggregation architectures—allows enterprises to customize their technical architecture, degree of decentralization, and sources of data availability according to their needs.
This flexibility ensures that as new technologies emerge, enterprises can upgrade, adjust, and adapt their Ethereum-based tech stacks according to market demands and technological developments at any time. These insights stem from Microsoft, a cloud service giant historically known for its enterprise cloud services. This indicates that Microsoft and its peers are preparing to deploy products and infrastructure on Ethereum-based layers, fully leveraging their cloud integration capabilities and convenient deployment methods.
3. Why Enterprises Choose Ethereum: Technical and Cultural Reasons
Ethereum has become the global settlement layer due to its strong security, composability, and extensive developer ecosystem. Enterprises choose Ethereum primarily because it provides a secure and trust-minimized environment that can serve as a neutral platform for transaction settlement and data verification in complex supply chains, financial products, and digital asset markets.
This adaptability is particularly appealing to enterprises that need to cope with changes. Unlike traditional static monolithic infrastructures, Ethereum's modular design enables businesses to flexibly respond to various trade-offs—as new solutions and optimization technologies continuously emerge, businesses can adjust in a timely manner to adapt to changes. This ensures that enterprises' deployments remain future-proof, highly flexible, and capable of integrating emerging standards and advanced cryptographic technologies without losing security and trust.
Moreover, financial applications—often the most risky and heavily regulated—tend to prefer Ethereum's L1 and L2 with native DA. Trust levels naturally form: Ethereum's L1 sits at the top, followed by L2s utilizing Ethereum's own DA solutions, and then L2s relying on other DA providers. While some may worry this could lead to fragmentation of liquidity and composability, in reality, such fragmentation is driven by the enormous demand pushing the Ethereum ecosystem to expand in unprecedented ways. Over time, the total transaction volume of these layers will surpass that of any single monolithic network, indicating that what seems like short-term trade-offs are actually healthy, sustainable growth in the long run.
Scarbro mentioned in her speech that top consulting firms and financial institutions (such as EY and JPMorgan) are actively developing on Ethereum, launching privacy solutions and interoperable frameworks that meet enterprise needs. Ethereum's cultural fit—open-source spirit, global community, and solid track record of success—further solidifies its position as an innovation platform for large companies, while also ensuring that enterprises can flexibly adjust and optimize their architecture in a changing environment.
4. Pressures Facing Ethereum's Data Availability Layer
As more enterprises transition from proof-of-concept to production-grade applications, the demand for Ethereum's data availability will increase dramatically. Data availability is central to Rollup scalability: it ensures that transaction data remains easily accessible even after being compressed, thus supporting trustless verification of off-chain state transitions.
Although Ethereum is introducing EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) and plans to enhance data availability throughput through complete danksharding, the growth of enterprise-level transaction volumes—from supply chain verification to complex financial settlements—may exceed the capacity of these improvements. As the security of key application systems relies on Ethereum, the demand from enterprises for its 'premium data availability' resources will significantly increase.
5. Alternative Data Availability Layers: A Natural Response of the Market
In a future where global financial and tech companies rely on Ethereum for settlement, capacity bottlenecks are inevitable. The market's response will be the emergence of alternative data availability layers and chains optimized for data availability. Applications that do not need to pay Ethereum's high data availability costs—such as consumer-facing applications or non-critical enterprise data—will turn to these more cost-effective alternatives.
Here, Ethereum's modular design plays its advantage again: enterprises can flexibly choose from multiple sources of data availability, combining different solutions to balance cost, trust, and performance. As conditions change or new data availability solutions emerge, enterprises can adjust their configurations without needing to rebuild the entire system—this is also a crucial reason why Ethereum is considered an important long-term strategic choice.
This flexibility may lead to fragmentation of liquidity and composability between different data availability layers and Rollups. However, it is precisely because the demand is so strong and continuously growing that the coexistence of multiple layers is inevitable. The transaction volume and value supported by Ethereum as the ultimate settlement layer will far exceed that of any single monolithic chain, proving that this fragmentation is a natural expansion driven by the market.
6. The Pinnacle of Ethereum: A Global Settlement Platform for Enterprises
Karen Scarbro's speech, along with her dual role at Microsoft and the EEA, signifies future trends. The world's largest enterprises are not merely experimenting with Ethereum; they are preparing to deepen their collaboration with it. When Microsoft announced its intentions to build on Ethereum, it sent a message to other Fortune 500 companies: Ethereum is the most 'successful' platform—an environment worth long-term strategic investment.
As demand for Ethereum settlement increases, data availability will become scarcer, turning into a high-risk market. In such an environment, Ethereum will still be the most important settlement platform, becoming the gold standard of trust, even if it delegates part of the data availability load to other emerging solutions. Ethereum's flexible modular foundation allows enterprises to keep pace with technological innovations and continuously adjust their frameworks and data availability sources in line with ecosystem developments.
7. Conclusion
We are standing at the threshold of a new era, with the rise of Ethereum's settlement layer becoming the de facto standard for enterprise-level solutions globally. Insights from Karen Scarbro, rooted in Microsoft and the EEA, demonstrate that global financial and tech giants are positioning themselves around Ethereum. The modular execution framework of Ethereum, its adaptability to data availability solutions, and the trust levels from L1 to L2 ensure that enterprises can freely adjust their architectures in accordance with market and technological changes while building and scaling.
What is the ultimate outcome? The demand across layers—from L1 to L2—will surge, propelling Ethereum's data availability capacity to reach or even exceed its limits. Although there may be a certain degree of fragmentation in liquidity and composability, this precisely reflects Ethereum's rapid growth as a global auditing and settlement engine. Over time, the transaction volume of the entire Ethereum ecosystem will far exceed that of any single monolithic network, ensuring Ethereum continues to occupy a core position in the multi-layered, flexible future of global blockchain applications.
