Overview

Welcome to Ethereum Economic Zone's monthly update — a running note on what's shipped, what's been said publicly, and where the project actually stands, for anyone following along.

September brought a lot of movement. After months with our heads down in the contracts, the work started meeting the outside world: auditors reading it, another team building a client for it, and the first real applications running on top of it. Here is the month in two halves. First the protocol and the network we run it on, then everything around them: the audit funding, client diversity, and the chains getting ready to test.

Where Things Stand

On the protocol, Jordi Baylina called the contracts ready for audit, and we circulated the rollup and sequencing specification behind it. We are now talking to several audit firms and comparing their scopes, timelines and costs.

On the network side, blob encoding went live, which changed the running cost of an idle network: 40,000 blocks settled using under 1% of a blob. The experimental network held under pressure, including attempts to force reorgs, submit parallel blocks, and get the prover to sign an incorrect block. It now settles cross-chain calls at around 88% inclusion, carrying roughly 60 cross-chain transactions per batch.

Then we started running real applications on top. A CoW Swap deployment settled a cross-chain order end to end, and a Uniswap v4 deployment pushed the contracts harder than our own test suite could. This month's static-call improvements came straight out of that work. You can take a look at the details below.

Next is an experimental deployment on Ethereum mainnet. That puts EEZ alongside real liquidity and real applications, which is the environment we want to be testing in and the one we want to demonstrate at Devcon in Mumbai (3–6 November).

Off the protocol, TheDAO Security Fund approved our audit grant and pledging is now open. The grant covers an independent audit of the core contracts, a public testnet other chains can integrate against, and a final payment tied to real mainnet adoption. If you want cross-chain execution to rest on independently reviewed code, you can pledge to the initiative and help get it there.

Client diversity is moving too, and in the open. Nethermind opened a draft pull request adding an EEZ plugin to its client, covering L2 block execution along with the attester, follower and sequencer roles. It is early, but it is the first EEZ implementation from a team outside ours, in a different language from the one we build in.

- Nethermind's EEZ client PR: https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/pull/13867

Technical Progress

The contracts and specifications are public in eez-core-protocol.

What we closed this month:

• Asynchronous cross-chain calls stay out of the core protocol. The proxies remain synchronous-only rather than carrying two sets of semantics, and an async path gets built on top. Martin's rolling-hash bridge prototype shows what that buys: an asynchronous ETH transfer costing about 40k gas on L1, with no composer involved.

• The fee model is settled, the last open gap in the specification. Base fees go to a configurable address rather than being burned, following the pattern Gnosis Chain already uses. Composers keep the priority tips, the same split Ethereum uses.

• Blob encoding. Batch data now goes into Ethereum's blob-carrying transactions under the new block format

  blob format spec. Before this, an idle network posted a batch every few minutes whether or not anything had happened.

• Partial consumption is implemented, and our protocol scenarios pass on the experimental network: reverts, nested calls, static calls.

• Static calls tightened twice. They now expire like execution calls, executable only in the block their batch was posted in. They also carry an execution entry index, after the Uniswap work showed us that an L2 has no state root to tell repeated reads apart static entry spec.

• Explicit gas checks on L2 to L1 calls. The EVM forwards whatever gas is available instead of reverting when a call asks for more than remains, so we check explicitly rather than trust the forward core protocol spec. Safe set the same precedent for signed transactions

• Contracts remain upgradeable for the duration of the audit. Immutability is planned ahead of mainnet deployment, on a timeline we will set out in advance.

On proving, we settled on one shared and deliberately conservative prover across networks, keeping experimentation in the composer and the layers above it, where a mistake gets caught rather than written into the chain multi-prover spec. Jordi is also investing in formal verification in Lean, on the view that a proving system needs stronger guarantees than a standard audit gives.

If you want to run any of this yourself, eez-rollup0 spins up a local EEZ network contracts, L2 genesis, node, proof signer, private L1 and builder stack with scripts for inbound, outbound and mixed cross-chain workloads.

A real order, settled across chains

Martin ran a full CoW Swap deployment on the experimental network. A trader sends GNO to the settlement contract on L2, a helper contract makes the cross-chain call, the swap executes against liquidity on L1, and the proceeds come back to the user on L2. That is the first time the protocol has carried a real user-facing flow rather than a protocol test. Martin is scripting these scenarios so we can replay them after every restart, and has moved on to Uniswap v4.

Making EEZ's contracts safe for chains to adopt

TheDAO Security Fund approved our grant, and pledging is open: EEZ Extends Ethereum: Making Its Contracts Safe for Chains to Adopt

The goal is $120,000 across three milestones: an independent audit of the core contracts at a pinned commit with our fixes and the auditor's re-review; a public testnet carrying those contracts, with integration docs, a conformance suite and a reference integration; and a final payment that only lands once outside chains and protocols run EEZ on mainnet. Gnosis commits $30,000 and hosts the testnet nodes.

We wrote that last milestone to pay on adoption rather than delivery: at least two outside chains and four dapps on mainnet within six months of the report. We also committed to picking the auditor in public, with a shortlist of at least two firms and our reasoning behind it.

Our mission is to deliver an open-source model that is secure enough for everyone to use. Its adoption rests on shared risk, which requires shared security, shared funding, and shared collaboration. Every rollup that adopts EEZ inherits the same contract set on Ethereum, so one review serves all of them and one fix reaches all of them.

Gnosis Chain's EEZ Transition

GIP-153 is approved: Gnosis Chain moves from a standalone L1 to an EEZ rollup settling on Ethereum. Two steps come first, a new Gnosis testnet with its genesis inside EEZ and the mainnet deployment above, with the fork transition behind the audits.

See you on-chain!