Sudden big reshuffle! Gnosis Chain self-destructs after an L1 failure, and everyone flees to Ethereum to become “vassals”? $GNO stakers are panicking!

Last night, Gnosis Chain’s co-founder threw out a proposal titled GIP-153.

Between the lines, it’s just one sentence: “As an independent L1, we’re done for.”

The proposal directly admits that Gnosis Chain’s core selling point is “credible neutrality,” but it completely collides with Ethereum. The scale and liquidity are off by several orders of magnitude, yet it still has to shoulder a full set of security infrastructure on its own.

Let me do the math for you: the fee revenue can’t even cover network security spending. Each year, it relies on DAO treasury subsidies, causing about 2.3% dilution to non-stakers.

By contrast, Ethereum’s annual issuance rate is under 1%, and part of it is burned to offset that, resulting in even smaller net dilution.

Now look at the fundamentals: current TVL is only $91 million. The $GNO token has a market cap of $280 million, putting it at the margins among L1s.

Besides security fees, the DAO also has to pay for block explorers, RPC nodes, and incentives for third-party protocols. Liquidity has to be pulled again and again, and network effects never catch up to the mainnet.

The proposal also says that simply turning into a normal L2 is pointless.

More than 100 L2s exist; most have no real usage, and even the ones with traffic aren’t driven by technical differences, but by distribution channels.

The differentiation problem has just moved from L1 to L2.

The conclusion is clear: the transition is only worth it if Gnosis can deliver technical capabilities that existing L2s don’t have.

And that capability is “synchronous composability.”

Gnosis wants to be the first. Because none of the 100+ L2s can do it.

The EEZ (Ethereum Economic Zone) framework was co-published by Gnosis and Zisk’s founder, jointly funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

After the transition, Gnosis Chain produces a block every 2 seconds. For each Ethereum block, it generates a state proof and settles it to L1.

Key point: smart contracts on Gnosis EEZ can directly call contracts on the Ethereum mainnet within a single transaction, get the return values, and execute atomically within the same transaction—either everything succeeds, or everything reverts.

That means all the liquidity, oracles, and in/out-bridge channels on the mainnet—plus even CEX channels—can be called as if they were deployed locally, without needing bridging.

Note: in the initial phase, it only supports one-way calls from L2 to L1. Full two-way composability has to wait until 2027.

During the transition period, a intent-based bridge will provide two-way atomic bridging. The proposal estimates that the first version can deliver 80% of the value, with engineering effort only 40%-50% of the full solution.

Existing cross-Rollup approaches are all asynchronous; message passing delays range from minutes to hours.

Optimism Superchain, Polygon AggLayer, =nil; zkSharding are all working on fragmentation, but none of them has achieved true synchronous atomic execution.

The EEZ framework is already running on devnet, including end-to-end cross-chain execution.

The key technical figure is Jordi Baylina, creator of the Circom language. He previously co-founded Polygon zkEVM, and in June 2025 he independently established Zisk to build a ZKVM for real-time proving.

But the first version of Gnosis EEZ doesn’t use ZK proofs; it uses temporary verification approaches such as TEE, while the exact mechanism hasn’t been decided. Real-time ZK proving will wait until the complete EEZ specification is finished.

The proposal emphasizes that the trust assumptions will only decrease, never increase.

When Friederike Ernst unveiled EEZ, she said: “Ethereum doesn’t have a scaling problem; it has a fragmentation problem. Each new L2 comes with its own liquidity pools and bridges—another walled garden.”

EEZ alliance founding members include Aave, block builder Titan and Beaver Build, the RWA platform Centrifuge, and the tokenized stock project xStocks.

The framework itself is a public good. It is run by a Swiss non-profit organization, jointly led by Gnosis and Zisk, co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Everything is open source, with no native token of its own.

Now for the most painful part: $GNO stakers.

Currently, about 350k $GNO tokens are staked, representing 27% of circulating supply.

Once the transition is implemented, all of these stakes will be unlocked, and Gnosis Chain’s large independent validator set will exit.

The proposal admits this is the biggest regret. It plans to find new roles for validators, potentially including participating in Gnosis VPN operations.

The original bridging validators would become Prover nodes. In an M-of-N prover architecture, they’ll serve as initial operators.

The right to propose blocks transfers to Gnosis Ltd’s centralized operator.

The proposal’s stance is very direct: becoming less decentralized is a deliberate choice.

Reason: the risks of centralized sorters are bounded. Each block is proved and settled on Ethereum, so the sorter can’t forge states or steal funds. The worst it can do is delay or censor transactions.

Going further, anti-censorship is Ethereum’s exclusive territory and is incompatible with most financial applications. Financial applications need fraud response, compliance, and rights of recourse.

A chain controlled by an operator can intercept suspicious transactions and proactively protect users. The proposal calls this a feature, not a bug.

Once staking rewards are removed, value capture shifts to fees generated by network activity, priced dynamically along the path. The specific mechanism (fee splits or buybacks), etc., will be clarified after observing the Prover economic model, through subsequent proposals.

Until the new model is released, the market’s focus will be on selling pressure after staking unlocks.

Don’t view this proposal in isolation. Put it in the context of GnosisDAO’s recent aggressive moves.

On June 27, 2026, GnosisDAO passed GIP-150, allowing $GNO holders to redeem DAO treasury assets pro rata.

Treasury liquid assets are valued at about $223 million. This move turns $GNO from a pure governance token into a direct right to pull from the DAO’s asset-liability balance sheet.

The total treasury is about $300 million. Of that, 51% is $GNO itself. The rest includes mainstream assets such as ETH, about $93 million, plus stablecoins of about $23 million.

With GIP-150 plus GIP-153 combined, GnosisDAO is doing two things at the same time: letting token holders exit at net value, while thoroughly rewriting the underlying chain’s technical architecture.

From a business positioning standpoint, Gnosis Ltd plays both roles: a co-architect of the EEZ framework and the operator of the first production instance. It plans to commercialize early experience in migrating active chains, operating the technology stack, and building composable blocks as a service to banks and fintech companies—selling EEZ instance-as-a-service.

The EEZ framework is a public good, but the professional capability to deploy and operate it isn’t.

Gnosis’s own Pay, Circles, and VPN products will anchor consumer-layer applications, and through synchronous composability they will directly access L1 stablecoin liquidity.

Roadmap: community voting is expected in August-September 2026, with the genesis block targeted for late 2026 to early 2027.

By then, Gnosis Chain validators will officially exit, and the first EEZ block will be produced.

The complete EEZ specification (two-way composability, nested calls, real-time ZK proving) is expected to roll out throughout all of 2027.

After the transition, governance will be divided into three layers: changes to the EEZ protocol layer will be driven by Ethereum’s governance process; GnosisDAO will continue to govern Gas token policy, fee distribution, and the ecosystem treasury; and the long-term governance mechanism for Prover operations will be set separately later.

Core variables to watch in the future: whether the GIP-153 vote passes, market selling pressure after 350k $GNO tokens unlock, whether the new tokenomics model can make up for the lost staking rewards, the security of the TEE temporary proving approach, and the censorship risk of centralized sorters in real-world operation.

The vision of synchronous composability is tempting, but from the first single-direction L2-to-L1 design with TEE, to final two-way ZK proving, there’s still a long road ahead.

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