L2s Bid Farewell to Isolation, Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) Officially Announced

Original Compilation: Shenchao TechFlow

Introduction: L2s have solved Ethereum’s scaling problem, but in doing so, they’ve created a new issue: each chain becomes an isolated island, fragmenting liquidity and forcing users to pay a cost every time they cross chains.

The EEZ is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and co-initiated by Gnosis and Zisk. Its core promise is synchronous composability between L1 and L2s—contracts can make atomic calls across chains, no longer relying on bridges for connection.

This is one of the most compelling technical proposals to follow amidst the intensifying discussion around Ethereum’s roadmap.

Full text is as follows:

Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem has solved one problem while creating another.

The scaling problem is largely solved. Rollups work, transaction costs are down, throughput is up. That part is going well.

What isn’t going well is this: each L2 has become its own island. Separate liquidity, separate bridges, separate wallet integrations, separate infrastructure—all of which already exist on Mainnet. Protocols wanting to reach the entire ecosystem’s users need to deploy on five chains, integrating with five sets of tools. Users move between them via bridges, spending time, money, and occasionally, everything, each time.

Furthermore, each L2 isn’t extending Ethereum; it’s extracting value, creating new walled gardens. We are facing a recurrence of the very problems this industry was built to solve.

This is not what Ethereum scaling was supposed to look like.

What We Are Building

The Ethereum Economic Zone is a framework between L1 and L2s, built around one principle: Rollups should extend Ethereum, not fork away from it.

EEZ rollups will achieve synchronous composability with the Ethereum Mainnet. Smart contracts deployed on an EEZ rollup can call a contract on Mainnet, or on another EEZ rollup, receive a response, and use it within a single transaction. The result is atomic cross-chain execution, anchored and secured on Ethereum. Shared liquidity, a unified security model.

What this means in practice:

For Ethereum, EEZ rollups aim to strengthen the base layer’s role. ETH remains the gas token, the settlement layer, and the source of truth. Activity on rollups doesn’t extract value from Ethereum but builds on top of it, drawing from its security.

For protocols, complexity is drastically reduced. Instead of deploying and maintaining multiple versions across multiple chains, a protocol can deploy once and rely on synchronous composability to reach all users across the EEZ. No need to manage bridges, wrapped assets, or per-chain integrations.

For users, the experience is closer to what people intuitively expect: one Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identities are usable across environments without explicit bridging steps. In most cases, gas can be paid in ETH regardless of where execution happens.

We are building this framework according to Ethereum’s core values: open-source, secure, trust-minimized, censorship-resistant, lean, and community-driven.

Why Us

A fair question, and we’ll answer it briefly.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week smart contracts went live, literally the first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum was in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the constant product AMM model (which became the basis for much of DeFi), the conditional tokens framework (now used by Polymarket), the CoW Protocol (which pioneered batch auctions and intents), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, securing over $58 billion). We’ve operated Gnosis Chain for seven years without interruption. We know how to deliver infrastructure that doesn’t break.

We are also deeply aligned with Ethereum itself. The Gnosis DAO holds significant ETH, meaning Ethereum’s success as a system is not an abstract concept for us; it directly relates to what we are building.

On the technical side, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina, the creator of Circom, who has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems for years. His work on zkEVM is among the most battle-tested ZK infrastructure in production, and he is also the founder of Zisk—a high-performance proving stack that will be used in the EEZ.

The Ethereum Foundation is funding this work. The EEZ is designed to be credibly neutral, shared Ethereum infrastructure, not owned by Gnosis or any single entity.

We are building it because it needs to exist, and because we have a track record of delivering.

What It Is Not

The EEZ is not a product of any single team. Gnosis and Zisk are founding contributors, but the goal is to build shared Ethereum infrastructure. The EEZ Association, based in Switzerland, is a newly formed entity dedicated to developing it as fully open-source, public infrastructure. All work will be released as free and open-source software, and contributions are welcome. This is not a closed group but an open effort to build infrastructure the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

It is not an L2 framework, but a framework between L1 and L2s. This distinction is important. Rather than extending isolated execution environments and connecting them asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture—”composability” here truly means composability: smart contracts can call each other atomically across execution environments.

It is also not just an idea. It traces back to early Ethereum research, including execution sharding. What’s new is that recent advances in real-time proving technology have made it feasible. Jordi and our team have been working on it for months behind the scenes. We are announcing now because the technical foundations are solid enough to share. Specifications and benchmarks will follow.

What’s Next

We are building a coalition of infrastructure teams, protocols, block builders, and ecosystem contributors who recognize Ethereum as the world’s most important economic zone and are committed to unifying the ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, xStocks, and we welcome more core contributors from across the ecosystem to join.

This is not intended to be a closed group. If you are a protocol team, an infrastructure builder, or simply believe Ethereum should operate as one system, not a hundred, we want to hear from you.

In the coming weeks, we will release: the technical architecture and protocol specifications, performance benchmarks, developer tools and ecosystem integration details, and a clear path for existing Ethereum protocols to plug into the EEZ.

Ethereum delivers its maximum value when it functions as a unified, composable economy.

Not as a collection of fiefdoms connected by bridges, not as fifty versions of the same DEX with fifty liquidity pools on fifty chains.

One Ethereum. The EEZ.

Friederike Ernst is a co-founder of Gnosis. Jordi Baylina is the founder of Zisk. The Ethereum Economic Zone is being developed with funding from the Ethereum Foundation.

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