Written by: Adriano Feria
Translation: Plainspoken Blockchain
Introduction
The Ethereum ecosystem is experiencing a transformative wave of enterprise adoption. As some of the world's largest companies, including 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 interfacing with Ethereum to leverage its secure and trust-minimized foundation to create the next generation of products and services.
The participation of such institutions will pose unprecedented challenges to Ethereum's current and future data availability (DA) capabilities. As on-chain business scales, the complex ecosystem 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 mass market demands. Although this may seem to lead to fragmentation of the ecosystem, it actually showcases Ethereum's robust and flexible design—it can meet the enormous global demand for secure auditing and settlement services, ultimately surpassing any single traditional network.
1. Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: A Bridge to Enterprise Adoption
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was established in 2017 to bridge the gap between the Ethereum community and 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 solutions. EEA Executive Director Karen Scarbro recently stated, "If your business 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; it is providing a tangible pathway for enterprise adoption by fostering the Ethereum ecosystem. Scarbro pointed out that the membership of the EEA has reached an all-time high, including traditional financial giants like JPMorgan and Santander, as well as tech giants like Microsoft and EY. The mission of the EEA is to ensure that when enterprises think of 'Web3', they first think of 'Ethereum'.
2. Insights from Karen Scarbro: A Microsoft Perspective
As Microsoft's Technical Project Manager and EEA Executive Director, Scarbro possesses a unique perspective, being deeply embedded in both a global tech giant and the global Ethereum ecosystem. She pointed out several key points:
Enterprises are choosing Ethereum: many large financial and tech companies view Ethereum as their long-term settlement layer for 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 over the long term.
L2 and Modular Architecture: Scarbro emphasized that enterprises are not only focusing on Ethereum's mainnet but are also 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 stack in response to market demands and technological developments. These insights come from Microsoft, a cloud service giant 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 because it possesses robust security, composability, and a wide-ranging developer ecosystem. Enterprises choose Ethereum primarily because it offers a secure and trust-minimized environment, serving as a neutral platform that facilitates transactions and data verification across complex supply chains, financial products, and digital asset markets.
This adaptability is particularly appealing to enterprises that need to respond to change. Unlike traditional static monolithic infrastructures, Ethereum's modular design allows enterprises to flexibly navigate various trade-offs—as new solutions and optimization technologies emerge, enterprises can adjust in a timely manner to adapt to changes. This ensures that enterprises' deployments are always future-proof, highly flexible, and capable of integrating emerging standards and advanced cryptographic technologies without sacrificing security and trust guarantees.
Moreover, financial applications—often the riskiest and most heavily regulated—are more inclined to use Ethereum's L1 and L2 with native DA. Trust tiers 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 express concern that this may lead to fragmentation of liquidity and composability, in reality, this fragmentation is driven by massive demand, pushing the Ethereum ecosystem to expand in unprecedented ways. Over time, the total transaction volume across these layers will surpass any single monolithic network, indicating that what may seem like short-term trade-offs are actually manifestations of health and sustained long-term growth.
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 align with enterprise needs. The cultural fit of Ethereum—its 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 remain flexible in adjusting and optimizing their architectures in changing environments.
4. Pressures Facing Ethereum's Data Availability Layer
As more enterprises move from the proof-of-concept stage to production-level applications, the demand for Ethereum's data availability will surge dramatically. Data availability is central to Rollup scaling: it ensures that transaction data remains easily accessible even after compression, thus supporting trustless verification of off-chain state transitions.
Although Ethereum is introducing EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) and plans to improve data availability throughput through full danksharding, the growth of enterprise-level transaction volume—from supply chain verification to complex financial settlements—may exceed the capacity of these improvements. As the security of critical application systems relies on Ethereum, the demand for its 'premium data availability' resources will increase significantly.
5. Alternative Data Availability Layers: A Natural Response from the Market
In a future where global financial and tech companies rely on Ethereum for settlements, 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 mass consumer 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 select from multiple data availability sources, combining different solutions to balance cost, trust, and performance. As conditions change or new data availability solutions emerge, enterprises can adjust their configurations without having to rebuild the entire system—this is also a key reason why Ethereum is a long-term strategic choice.
This flexibility may lead to fragmentation of liquidity and composability between different data availability layers and Rollup. However, it is precisely because the demand is so strong and continually 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 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 EEA, heralds future trends. The world's largest enterprises are not just tentatively using Ethereum; they are preparing to deepen their collaboration with it. When Microsoft announced it would build on Ethereum, it sent a signal to other Fortune 500 companies: Ethereum is the most 'successful' platform—an environment worth long-term strategic investment.
As the demand for Ethereum settlements 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 golden standard of trust, even as it offloads part of the data availability burden to other emerging solutions. Ethereum's flexible modular foundation allows enterprises to keep pace with technological innovation, continuously adjusting frameworks and sources of data availability in line with the ecosystem's evolution.
7. Conclusion
We are standing on the threshold of a new era, as the rise of Ethereum's settlement layer will establish it as the de facto standard for enterprise-level solutions worldwide. Insights from Karen Scarbro, stemming from the core of Microsoft and EEA, demonstrate that global financial and technological giants are strategizing around Ethereum. The modular execution framework of Ethereum, its adaptability to data availability solutions, and the trust tiers from L1 to L2 ensure that enterprises can freely adjust their architectures according to market and technological changes as they build and scale.
What is the end result? The demand across layers—from L1 to L2—will soar, pushing Ethereum's data availability capacity to reach or even exceed its limits. While there may be some degree of fragmentation in liquidity and composability, this is precisely a reflection of 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 that Ethereum continues to occupy a central position in the multilayered, flexible future of global blockchain applications.
