Scroll cuts governance
Scroll said it will trim governance operations after a major protocol migrated to Optimism, a move that drained roughly $160 million in TVL and about $13 million in annualized fees from its ecosystem (coindesk.com). The announcement frames developer and app retention as the immediate pressure point for some zkEVM projects after high-profile migrations (coindesk.com).
Scroll is cutting back its governance operation after Ether.fi moved off the network to Optimism, taking a large share of activity with it. (coindesk.com) CoinDesk reported on April 14 that the migration pulled roughly $160 million in total value locked and about $13 million in annualized fees out of Scroll’s ecosystem. Ether.fi also shifted about 300,000 user accounts and more than 70,000 active cards to Optimism’s OP Mainnet, according to reports cited in coverage of the move. (coindesk.com, bitcoinfoundation.org) The cost cuts center on governance. Scroll said it plans to dissolve its Security Council, move protocol administration to a new Scroll-administered multisignature wallet, and remove several decentralized autonomous organization contributor roles by April 30. (coindesk.com, ambcrypto.com) Scroll is a layer-2 blockchain for Ethereum, built to process transactions more cheaply off the main chain and then settle them back to Ethereum. Its governance system had given delegates and a Security Council a formal role in upgrades and emergency decisions, according to Scroll’s forum and governance documents. (gov.scroll.io, forum.scroll.io, forum.scroll.io) That structure had already been under revision before this week. In a September 18, 2025 forum post, Scroll said the decentralized autonomous organization would report to the Scroll Foundation under a revamped model designed for faster decision-making and tighter resource control. (forum.scroll.io) The latest proposal pushes that centralization further at a moment when network usage has fallen sharply. DefiLlama’s Scroll chain page shows the network’s decentralized finance activity and fee generation have dropped from earlier levels, leaving Scroll with a much smaller base of applications and deposits than it had when Ether.fi was still on the chain. (defillama.com, coindesk.com) The dispute is not just about staffing. Critics in community discussions said dissolving the Security Council and handing control to an internal multisignature wallet would weaken decentralization, while Scroll framed the changes as a response to lower activity and a smaller budget. (ambcrypto.com, coindesk.com) Scroll’s own documentation still describes upgrades as running through multisignature wallets and timelocks on Ethereum and Scroll, which shows how much control over a rollup can hinge on a small set of keys. The immediate question now is whether Scroll can keep developers and applications from following Ether.fi out the door. (docs.scroll.io, coindesk.com)
