Scroll Restructures Governance and Cuts Costs Following Major Protocol Exodus

Scroll is implementing drastic cost-cutting measures, including the dissolution of its Security Council and the layoff of several DAO contributors. The network plans to transfer control to an internal management team within the next 10 days, pending support from the current council, as the existing structure was deemed too expensive relative to its usage. This restructuring follows the migration of Ether.fi, Scroll's top decentralized application, to Optimism's OP mainnet. The exodus resulted in the loss of approximately 300,000 user accounts and over $160 million in total value locked (TVL), leaving Scroll with a remaining TVL of roughly $23 million. Financial data from DeFiLlama indicates that the migration stripped approximately $13 million in annualized fees from the Scroll network. This loss of organic revenue has forced the project to reduce the capacity of its operational committees and streamline its governance model. Adding to the turmoil, analysis from L2BEAT revealed a suspicious surge in network fees during early April. For six days, the network increased the cost of publishing data to the Ethereum mainnet by a factor of 1,280. This adjustment forced users to pay over $50,000 in excess fees for transactions that would normally cost around $280, creating a misleading illusion of increased chain momentum. These developments highlight the intense competition and volatility within the Ethereum Layer-2 ecosystem, where the loss of a single anchor protocol can jeopardize the financial viability of a network.