A group of developers within the Ethereum ecosystem, operating independently of the Ethereum Foundation, have announced Ethereum R1 — a layer-2 (L2) scaling solution for the Ethereum network that does not include a native token.
According to the announcement, the project relies entirely on donations, does not have venture funding, and does not have any pre-mined token allocations or a governance token. The project’s team wrote in a May 1 X post:
“General-purpose L2s should be commodities — simple, replaceable, and free from centralized dependencies or risky governance. Ethereum R1 is our answer to that call — the rollup grounded in credible neutrality, decentralization, and censorship resistance.”
“Most L2s today are acting more like new L1s than an Ethereum scaling solution — private allocations, opaque governance, and centralized control,” the developers continued.
The announcement points to increasing concerns within the Ethereum community regarding the current direction of