Ethereum was 'forced' to become a rollup custodial chain, while @Polkadot was born for this purpose from the very beginning 🕶️

In the Ethereum ecosystem, L2 draws value from L1; whereas in Polkadot, the core product is rollup — not an optimization later on, but an integral part of its native design.

@gavofyork provided a complete explanation 👇

1/Polkadot foresaw this trend early on. From day one, its design goal has been to better accommodate rollup than Ethereum — more scalable, more secure, and more efficient. This is not a 'transformation,' but a roadmap established from the start.

2/Of course, Ethereum still has its advantages:

• First-mover advantage

• Stronger market influence

• L1 native support for smart contracts

While Polkadot initially did not have native contracts — but now it does. @Polkadot Hub is changing all of this: introducing a fast, native smart contract environment at the DOT mainnet layer.

3/@solana is taking another route: not doing rollup, but directly scaling a single chain quickly. The slogan is: '10 times faster than Ethereum — migrate your applications here.' This approach was indeed effective at first… but in the long run, vertical scaling will eventually hit a bottleneck.

4/The only sustainable path to scaling is: horizontal scaling, not vertical scaling. This is precisely Polkadot's way. Parachains are the solution for horizontal scaling, and cross-chain messaging on the relay chain is a native feature, not a patch. Assets flow seamlessly, value is not siphoned off, and always stays within the system. Whereas Ethereum's L2? Often isolated and fragmented.