Ethereum's L2 landscape solved one problem and created another.

The scaling problem is largely solved. Rollups work. Transaction costs are down. Throughput is up. That part went well.

What didn't go well: every L2 became its own island. Own liquidity. Own bridge. Own wallet integrations. Own version of infrastructure that already exists via mainnet. Protocols that want to reach users across the ecosystem deploy on five chains and integrate with five sets of tooling. Users move between them through bridges that cost time, money, and occasionally everything.

And, instead of extending Ethereum, each L2 drew value away into new walled gardens. We risk a repetition of the same problems we built this space to solve.

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

What we're building?

The Ethereum Economic Zone is an L1<>L2 framework built around one principle: rollups that extend Ethereum, not branch away from it.

EEZ rollups will be synchronously composable with Ethereum mainnet. A smart contract on an EEZ rollup can call a smart contract on mainnet, or on another EEZ rollup, receive a response and use it within a single transaction. The result is atomic execution across chains, with guarantees anchored in Ethereum. Shared liquidity. A unified security model.

What this means in practice:

For Ethereum, EEZ rollups are designed to reinforce the role of the base layer. ETH remains the gas token, the settlement layer, and the source of truth. Activity on rollups does not pull value away from Ethereum but instead builds on top of it and draws from its security.

For protocols, this significantly reduces complexity. Instead of deploying and maintaining multiple versions across chains, protocols can deploy once and rely on synchronous composability to reach users across the EEZ. There is no need to manage bridges, wrapped assets, or per-chain integrations.

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

We are building this framework following the core values of Ethereum: open source, secure, with no central trust, censorship resistant, lean, and community driven.

Why us?

A fair question. We'll answer it briefly.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week smart contracts were live. Literally. Our first transaction on Ethereum was in August 2015. Since then, our engineers built the constant product AMM model (which became the foundation of much of DeFi), the Conditional Token Framework (now used by Polymarket), CoW protocol, which pioneered batch auctions and intent-based trading, and Safe (the first production smart contract wallet, securing over $58 billion). We've run Gnosis Chain with zero downtime for seven years. We know how to ship infrastructure that doesn't break.

We are also deeply aligned with Ethereum itself. Gnosis DAO holds a significant amount of ETH, which means the success of Ethereum as a system is not abstract for us. It is directly tied to what we are building.

On the technical side, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina, who created Circom and has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems for years. His work on zkEVM is some of 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 within the EEZ.

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

We're building it because it needs to exist, and because we have the track record to ship it.

What this isn't

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 established entity dedicated to developing this as fully open-source, public infrastructure. All work will be released as free and open-source software. Contributions are welcome. This is not an exclusive group, but an open effort to build infrastructure the broader Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

It isn't an L2 framework. It’s an L1<> L2 framework. That distinction matters. Instead of scaling isolated execution environments and connecting them asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture, one where “composability” actually means composability: smart contracts that can talk to each other across execution environments, atomically. 

And it isn't just an idea. Versions of it go back to early Ethereum research, including execution sharding. What’s new is that recent advances in real-time proving makes it feasible. Jordi and our team have been working on this behind the scenes for months. We're announcing it now because the technical foundations are solid enough to share. Specs and benchmarks will follow.

What comes next

We’re building an alliance of infrastructure teams, protocols, block builders and ecosystem contributors that recognise Ethereum as the most important economic zone in the world, and are committed to unifying the ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, xStocks, and we’re welcoming other leading contributors from across the ecosystem.

This is not intended to be a closed group. If you're a protocol team, an infrastructure builder, or just someone who thinks Ethereum should work as one system instead of a hundred, we want to hear from you.

Over the coming weeks we'll publish:

• Technical architecture and protocol specifications

• Performance benchmarks

• Details on developer tooling and ecosystem integrations

• Clear paths for existing Ethereum protocols to leverage the EEZ

Ethereum is at its best when it works as a single, composable economy. 

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

One Ethereum. EEZ.

Friederike Ernst is Co-Founder of Gnosis. Jordi Baylina is the creator of Circom and a core contributor to Polygon zkEVM. The Ethereum Economic Zone is being developed with funding from the Ethereum Foundation.