L2 bids farewell to the孤岛, Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) officially launched

Original author: The Ethereum Economic Zone

Original compilation: ShenChao TechFlow

Introduction: L2 solves Ethereum’s scalability problem, while creating a new one: every chain becomes an island, liquidity gets fragmented, and users pay a cost every time they move cross-chain.

The EEZ is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and jointly launched by Gnosis and Zisk. Its core promise is synchronous composability between L1 and L2—contracts can make atomic cross-chain calls, no longer relying on bridges to connect.

Against the backdrop of rising interest in Ethereum roadmap discussions, this is one of the most promising technical proposals to track.

Full text as follows:

Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem solves one problem, while creating another.

The scalability issue is basically resolved. Rollups work effectively, transaction costs drop, and throughput increases. That part is progressing smoothly.

What is not progressing smoothly is this: each L2 becomes its own isolated island. Independent liquidity, independent cross-chain bridges, independent wallet integrations, independent infrastructure—while all of this already exists on the mainnet. For a protocol to cover the entire ecosystem’s users, it needs to be deployed across five chains and integrated with five sets of tools. Users move between them via cross-chain bridges, spending time and money each time—and sometimes paying everything away.

Moreover, each L2 is not extending Ethereum—it’s extracting value and forming a new walled garden. We’re facing a replay of the very problems this industry was built to solve.

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

What we’re building

The Ethereum Economic Zone is a framework between an L1 and an L2, built around one principle: Rollups should extend Ethereum, not fork away from it.

The EEZ rollup will achieve synchronous composability with the Ethereum mainnet. Smart contracts deployed on the EEZ rollup can call smart contracts on the mainnet, or contracts on another EEZ rollup, receiving responses within a single transaction and using them. The result is cross-chain atomic execution, with guarantees anchored on Ethereum. Shared liquidity, a unified security model.

What does it mean in practice:

For Ethereum, the EEZ rollup aims to strengthen the role of the base layer. ETH remains the gas token, the settlement layer, and the source of truth. Activity on the rollup will not extract value from Ethereum; it will be built on top of it and draw from its security.

For protocols, complexity drops dramatically. There is no need to deploy and maintain multiple versions across multiple chains. A protocol can be deployed only once, relying on synchronous composability to cover users across the entire EEZ. There’s no need to manage cross-chain bridges, wrap assets, or integrate with each chain.

For users, the experience is closer to what people intuitively expect: one Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identity can be used across environments without explicit cross-chain steps. In most cases, regardless of where execution happens, gas can be paid with ETH.

We build this framework on Ethereum’s core values: open source, secure, no centralized trust, censorship-resistant, lean, and community-driven.

Why us

A reasonable question—short answer.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week after smart contract launch—literally the first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum happened in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the constant product AMM model (which became the foundation for most DeFi), the conditional token framework (now used by Polymarket), the CoW protocol (pioneering batch auctions and intent-based trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, custodying over $58 billion). We have operated Gnosis Chain for seven years without interruption. We know how to deliver infrastructure that won’t break.

We’re also highly aligned with Ethereum itself. The Gnosis DAO holds a large amount of ETH, which means that Ethereum’s success as a system is not an abstract concept for us—it directly relates to what we’re building.

On the technical side, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina, the creator of Circom, who has spent years at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems. His work on zkEVM is one of the most thoroughly validated ZK infrastructure projects in production, and he is also the founder of Zisk—Zisk is 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 a trusted, neutral shared Ethereum infrastructure, not owned by Gnosis or any single entity.

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

This 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, headquartered in Switzerland, is a newly formed entity dedicated to developing it as fully open-source public infrastructure. All work will be released as free open-source software, and contributions are welcome. This is not a closed group; it’s an open effort to build infrastructure that the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

It is not an L2 framework, but a framework between L1 and L2. This distinction matters. Rather than connecting isolated execution environments asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture—“composability” here truly means composability: smart contracts can make atomic calls to each other across execution environments.

It’s also not just an idea. It can be traced back to early Ethereum research, including execution sharding. What’s new is that recent advances in real-time proving technology make it feasible. Jordi and our team have been working behind the scenes for months. We’re announcing it now because the technical foundation is solid enough to share. Specifications and benchmark tests will follow.

Next

We’re building an alliance made up of infrastructure teams, protocols, block builders, and ecosystem contributors. These members recognize Ethereum as the most important global economic zone and are committed to unifying the ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, xStocks. We welcome more core contributors from across the ecosystem to join.

This is not intended to be a closed group. If you’re a protocol team, an infrastructure builder, or you simply believe Ethereum should operate as a system rather than a hundred separate systems, we’d like to hear from you.

In the coming weeks, we will release: the technical architecture and protocol specifications, performance benchmark tests, developer tools and ecosystem integration details, as well as a clear path for existing Ethereum protocols to integrate with the EEZ.

When Ethereum functions as a unified, composable economy, it can deliver maximum value.

Not a collection of territories connected via cross-chain bridges, not one DEX version on fifty chains and fifty liquidity pools.

One Ethereum. EEZ.

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