Ethereum is driving global enterprise adoption through the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, with its modular design and flexible data availability (DA) layer supporting the platform becoming the core of the global settlement layer in the face of growing demand.
Original: Ethereum's Settlement Apex: The Rise of Multiple DA Layers and the Enterprise Wave
Author: Adriano Feria
Translated by: Bai Hua Blockchain
Introduction
Ethereum's ecosystem is undergoing a transformative wave of enterprise-level adoption. As global giants 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 is growing stronger. Recently, Karen Scarbro, a technical project manager at Microsoft and executive director of the EEA, emphasized in a keynote how financial and tech behemoths are integrating with Ethereum, leveraging its secure, trust-minimized foundation to build the next generation of products and services.
This institutional participation will pose unprecedented challenges to Ethereum's current and future data availability (DA) capabilities. As the scale of on-chain enterprise business grows, the complex ecosystem of Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) solutions will need to continually evolve. While Ethereum's own L2 and native DA resources will satisfy high-value use cases, alternative DA layers will emerge to accommodate mass-market demands. Although this may appear to lead to ecosystem fragmentation, it actually showcases Ethereum's robust and flexible design - one that can address the massive global demand for secure auditing and settlement services, ultimately surpassing any single traditional network.
1、Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: The bridge to drive enterprise adoption
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was founded in 2017 to build a bridge between the Ethereum community and large enterprises. Initially, the EEA focused on private Blockchain solutions, but later shifted to supporting the public Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, believing this to be the preferred platform for enterprise-grade solutions. According to Karen Scarbro, the Executive Director of the EEA, "If your enterprise wants to participate in the Web3 economy, then building on Ethereum - settled on the mainnet and leveraging its L2s - is the most pragmatic choice."
By driving the Ethereum ecosystem, the EEA is not just promoting a technology, but providing a tangible path for enterprise adoption. Scarbro points out that the EEA has reached a historic high in membership, including traditional financial giants like JPMorgan Chase and Santander, as well as tech giants like Microsoft and Ernst & Young. The EEA's mission is to ensure that when enterprises think about "Web3", the first thing that comes to mind is "Ethereum".
2、Karen Scarbro's Insights: The Microsoft Perspective
As a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft and the Executive Director of the EEA, Scarbro has a unique perspective, deeply embedded in both a global tech giant like Microsoft and the global Ethereum ecosystem. She highlighted 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 tend to choose ecosystems with clear roadmaps, sustainable support, and long-term maintenance. Ethereum's deep trust foundation, development tools, and broad community support ensure that innovative projects can run stably in the long term.
- L2 and modular architecture: Scarbro emphasizes that enterprises are not just focused on the Ethereum mainnet, but actively engaging with L2 solutions built on Ethereum's trust mechanism. This modular design - comprising multiple execution frameworks, DA providers, and aggregation architectures - allows enterprises to customize their technology stack, degree of decentralization, and data availability sources based on their needs.
This flexibility ensures that as new technologies emerge, enterprises can upgrade, adjust, and adapt their Ethereum-based technology stack to meet market demands and technological developments. These insights from Microsoft, a cloud services giant known for its enterprise cloud offerings, indicate that Microsoft and its peers are preparing to deploy products and infrastructure on top of the Ethereum-based layers, leveraging their cloud integration capabilities and convenient deployment models.
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 to serve as a neutral platform for transaction settlement and data verification across complex supply chains, financial products, and digital asset markets.
This adaptability is highly attractive to enterprises that need to navigate change. Unlike traditional monolithic infrastructure, Ethereum's modular design allows enterprises to flexibly address various trade-offs - as new solutions and optimization technologies emerge, enterprises can quickly adjust and adapt. This ensures that enterprise deployments always have future-proof capabilities, with flexibility to integrate new standards and advanced cryptographic technologies without sacrificing security and trust guarantees.
Furthermore, financial applications - often the most risk-sensitive and heavily regulated - tend to prefer using Ethereum's L1 and L2s with nativeDA. A hierarchy of trust naturally forms, with Ethereum's L1 at the top, followed by L2s that leverage Ethereum's own DA solutions, and then L2s relying on other DA providers. While some may be concerned about this leading to liquidity and composability fragmentation, this fragmentation is actually driven by the immense demand, fueling the Ethereum ecosystem to expand in an unprecedented way. Over time, the aggregate transaction volume across these layers will exceed any single monolithic network, meaning that what may appear as short-term trade-offs are actually manifestations of healthy, sustained growth.
Scarbro mentioned in her talk that top consulting firms and financial institutions (such as Ernst & Young and JPMorgan Chase) are actively developing on Ethereum, launching privacy solutions and interoperable frameworks tailored to enterprise needs. Ethereum's cultural fit - open-source ethos, global community, and a proven track record of success - further solidifies its position as a platform for corporate innovation, while ensuring that enterprises can remain agile and optimize their architecture as the environment evolves.
4. Pressure on Ethereum's Data Availability Layer
As more and more enterprises move from the proof-of-concept stage to production-level applications, the demand for Ethereum's data availability will increase dramatically. Data availability is the core of Rollup-based scaling: it ensures that transaction data can be easily accessed even after compression, supporting trustless verification of off-chain state transitions.
While Ethereum is introducing EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) and plans to improve data availability throughput through full danksharding, the growth in enterprise-level transaction volumes - from supply chain verification to complex financial settlements - may exceed the capacity of these improvements. As critical application systems depend on the security of Ethereum, enterprises' demand for "premium data availability" resources will increase significantly.
5. Alternative Data Availability Layers: The Market's Natural Response
In a future where global finance and tech companies rely on Ethereum settlement, capacity bottlenecks are inevitable. The market's response will be the emergence of alternative data availability layers and chains optimized specifically for data availability. Applications that do not require paying Ethereum's high data availability fees - such as mass consumer applications or non-critical enterprise data - will turn to these more cost-effective alternatives.
Here, Ethereum's modular design shines again: enterprises can flexibly choose 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 rebuilding the entire system - a key reason why Ethereum is becoming a long-term strategic choice.
This flexibility may lead to fragmentation in liquidity and composability between different data availability layers and Rollups. However, given the sheer strength and growth of demand, 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 scaling driven by market forces.
6. Ethereum's Peak: The Global Enterprise Settlement Platform
Karen Scarbro's speech, and her dual role at Microsoft and the EEA, foreshadows future trends. The world's largest enterprises are not just tentatively using Ethereum, they are preparing to deepen their collaboration. 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 a long-term strategic investment.
As the demand for Ethereum settlement increases, data availability will become scarcer and a high-risk market. In this environment, Ethereum will remain the most critical settlement platform, becoming the gold standard of trust, even if it offloads some of the data availability load to other emerging solutions. Ethereum's flexible modular foundation allows enterprises to keep pace with technological innovation, constantly adjusting their frameworks and data availability sources as the ecosystem evolves.
7. Conclusion
We are on the threshold of a new era, as Ethereum's settlement layer rises to become the de facto standard for enterprise-scale solutions globally. Karen Scarbro's insights from the core of Microsoft and the EEA prove that global finance and tech giants are positioning themselves around Ethereum. Ethereum's modular execution framework, its ability to adapt to data availability solutions, and its trust hierarchy from L1 to L2 ensure that enterprises can freely adjust their architectures as the market and technology change when building and scaling.
The end result? Demand at all levels - from L1 to L2 - will skyrocket, driving Ethereum's data availability capacity to and even beyond its limits. While there may be some fragmentation in liquidity and composability, this is precisely the manifestation of Ethereum's rapid growth as the global audit and settlement engine. Over time, the transaction volume of the entire Ethereum ecosystem will far exceed any single monolithic network, ensuring Ethereum's continued core position in the multilayered, flexible future of global blockchain applications.
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