Ethereum is driving global enterprise adoption through the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), with its modular design and flexible data availability layer supporting the platform's role as the core of global settlement in response to growing demand.

Author: Adriano Feria

Translation: Blockchain in Plain Language

Introduction

The Ethereum ecosystem is experiencing a wave of transformation towards enterprise-level adoption. As some of the world's largest companies, including Microsoft, JPMorgan, Santander, and Ernst & Young, collaborate through the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the network's reputation as a global settlement layer and innovation platform is becoming increasingly robust. Recently, Karen Scarbro, Microsoft's Technical Program Manager and EEA Executive Director, emphasized in a keynote speech how financial and tech giants are interfacing with Ethereum to leverage its secure, trust-minimized foundation to create 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 enterprise on-chain operations scale, 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 accommodate mass 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 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-level solutions. EEA Executive Director Karen Scarbro recently stated, "If your enterprise wants to participate in the Web3 economy, building on Ethereum — settled by the mainnet and utilizing its L2 — is the most pragmatic choice."

By promoting the Ethereum ecosystem, the EEA is not just advocating for a technology but providing a tangible path for enterprise adoption. Scarbro noted that EEA's membership has reached an all-time high, including traditional financial giants like JPMorgan and Santander, as well as tech behemoths like Microsoft and Ernst & Young. 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 Program Manager and EEA Executive Director, Scarbro has a unique perspective, deeply embedded in a global tech giant while fully engaged in the global Ethereum ecosystem. She highlighted 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 strong 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 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 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 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 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 continuously emerge, enterprises can adjust in a timely manner to adapt to changes. This ensures that enterprise deployments are always future-proof, highly flexible, and capable of integrating emerging standards and advanced cryptographic technologies without sacrificing security and trust.

Moreover, financial applications — often the most risky and heavily regulated — tend to prefer Ethereum's L1 and L2 with native DA. A natural hierarchy of trust forms: 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 worry that this may lead to fragmentation of liquidity and composability, in reality, this fragmentation is driven by the immense demand pushing the Ethereum ecosystem to expand in unprecedented ways. Over time, the total transaction volume across these layers will surpass that of any single monolithic network, indicating that what seems like short-term trade-offs are actually manifestations of healthy, sustained long-term growth.

Scarbro mentioned in her speech that top consulting firms and financial institutions (such as Ernst & Young and JPMorgan) are actively developing on Ethereum, launching privacy solutions and interoperable frameworks that meet 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, ensuring that enterprises can still flexibly adjust and optimize their architectures in a changing environment.

4. Pressure on Ethereum's Data Availability Layer

As more enterprises move from proof-of-concept stages 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 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 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 the security of critical application systems relies on Ethereum, the demand for its "premium data availability" resources will significantly increase.

5. Alternative Data Availability Layers: A Natural Market Response

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 specifically optimized for data availability. Applications that do not need to pay Ethereum's high data availability costs — such as consumer applications or non-critical enterprise data — will turn to these more cost-effective alternatives.

Here, Ethereum's modular design plays to its advantage 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 needing to rebuild their entire systems — 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 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 any single monolithic chain, proving that this fragmentation is, in fact, a natural expansion driven by the market.

6. Ethereum's Apex: The Settlement Platform for Global Enterprises

Karen Scarbro's speech, along with her dual role at Microsoft and the EEA, signals 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 worthy of long-term strategic investment.

As the demand for Ethereum settlement increases, data availability will become scarcer, turning into a high-risk market. In such an environment, Ethereum will remain the most important settlement platform, becoming the gold standard of trust, even as it offloads some data availability burdens to other emerging solutions. Ethereum's flexible modular foundation enables enterprises to keep pace with technological innovations, continuously adjusting their frameworks and data availability sources in line with the ecosystem's development.

7. Conclusion

We stand 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 globally. Karen Scarbro's insights from the core of Microsoft and the EEA demonstrate that global financial and tech giants are positioning themselves around Ethereum. Ethereum's modular execution framework, its ability to adapt to data availability solutions, and the trust hierarchy from L1 to L2 ensure that enterprises can freely adjust their architectures in response to market and technological changes as they build and scale.

What is the ultimate outcome? The demand across layers — from L1 to L2 — will skyrocket, driving Ethereum's data availability capacity to reach or even exceed its limits. While some degree of fragmentation in liquidity and composability may occur, 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 multi-layered, flexible future of global blockchain applications.

Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/12/5592.html

Source: https://medium.com/@adriano.feria/ethereums-settlement-apex-fa49e85f125e

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