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

Original Author: The Ethereum Economic Zone

Original Compiler: Deep Tide TechFlow

Introduction: L2 has solved the scalability problem of Ethereum, while creating a new issue: each chain is an island, liquidity is fragmented, and users have to pay a price every time they cross chains.

EEZ is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and co-initiated by Gnosis and Zisk. Its core commitment is the synchronous composability between L1 and L2—contracts can be called atomically across chains, no longer relying on bridges.

This is one of the most notable technical proposals to track against the backdrop of a heated discussion on Ethereum’s roadmap.

Full text as follows:

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

The scalability issue has been largely addressed. Rollups are effective, transaction costs have decreased, and throughput has increased. That part has progressed smoothly.

What hasn’t progressed smoothly is that each L2 has become its own island. Independent liquidity, independent cross-chain bridges, independent wallet integrations, independent infrastructure—these all already exist on the mainnet. A protocol that aims to cover all ecosystem users needs to deploy on five chains and connect five sets of tools. Users move between them through cross-chain bridges, spending time and money each time, and occasionally losing everything.

Moreover, each L2 is not extending Ethereum but drawing value away, creating new walled gardens. We are facing a replay of the issues that this industry aimed to solve in the first place.

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

What We Are Building

The Ethereum Economic Zone is a framework between L1 and L2 built around one principle: Rollups should extend Ethereum rather than fork away from it.

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

What does this mean in practice:

For Ethereum, EEZ rollups aim to reinforce the role of the base layer. ETH remains the Gas token, settlement layer, and source of truth. Activities on rollups won’t draw value away from Ethereum but will build upon it, drawing from its security.

For protocols, the complexity is significantly reduced. There is no need to deploy and maintain multiple versions across different chains; protocols can deploy once and cover all users in the EEZ through synchronous composability. There’s no need to manage cross-chain bridges, wrap assets, or integrate across chains.

For users, the experience is closer to what people intuitively expect: a single Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identities are available across environments without explicit cross-chain steps. In most cases, Gas can be paid in ETH regardless of where it’s executed.

We build this framework according to Ethereum’s core values: open source, security, trustless, censorship-resistant, streamlined, and community-driven.

Why Us

A reasonable question, answered briefly.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week smart contracts went live, literally the first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum took place in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the constant product AMM model (which became the basis for most DeFi), the conditional token framework (now used by Polymarket), the CoW Protocol (which pioneered batch auctions and intent-based trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, holding over $58 billion). We have operated Gnosis Chain uninterrupted for seven years. We know how to deliver infrastructure that doesn’t break.

We are also highly aligned with Ethereum itself. Gnosis DAO holds a significant amount of ETH, meaning the success of Ethereum as a system is not an abstract concept to 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 one of the most rigorously validated ZK infrastructures in production, and he is also the founder of Zisk—a high-performance proof stack that will be used in EEZ.

The Ethereum Foundation is funding this work. EEZ is designed as a trusted 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 it.

What This Is Not

EEZ is not the 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 established entity dedicated to developing it as a 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 but an open effort to build infrastructure that the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

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

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

Next Steps

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, and xStocks. 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 a system rather than a hundred systems, we want to hear from you.

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

Ethereum can only reach its maximum value as a unified, composable economy.

Not a collection of enclosed plots connected by cross-chain bridges, not fifty versions of the same DEX on fifty chains with 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 funded by the Ethereum Foundation.