The Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) Is Officially Launched: Someone Has Finally Tackled the L2 Island Problem
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The Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) Is Officially Launched: Someone Has Finally Tackled the L2 Island Problem
This is one of the most值得关注 technical proposals amid heightened discussions around the Ethereum roadmap.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: The Ethereum Economic Zone
Translated and edited by TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: L2s solved Ethereum’s scalability problem—but created a new one: every chain is an island, liquidity is fragmented, and users pay a cost each time they cross chains.
Funded by the Ethereum Foundation and jointly initiated by Gnosis and Zisk, the EEZ makes a core commitment to synchronous composability between L1 and L2—smart contracts can invoke each other atomically across chains, eliminating reliance on bridges.
This is one of the most promising technical proposals to track amid rising discussion around Ethereum’s roadmap.
Full text below:
Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem solved one problem—and created another.
The scalability problem is largely solved. Rollups work; transaction costs have dropped; throughput has increased. That part is going well.
What’s not going well: each L2 has become its own island—its own isolated liquidity, its own bridging infrastructure, its own wallet integrations, its own tooling—all of which already exist on the mainnet. Protocols aiming to serve the entire ecosystem must deploy across five chains and integrate with five separate toolsets. Users move between them via bridges—spending time, money, and sometimes everything.
Moreover, each L2 doesn’t extend Ethereum—it extracts value from it, forming new walled gardens. We’re re-creating precisely the problems this industry was built to solve.
This is not what Ethereum scaling was supposed to look like.
What we’re building
The Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) is a framework bridging L1 and L2, built around one principle: rollups should extend Ethereum—not fork from it.
EEZ rollups achieve synchronous composability with Ethereum’s mainnet. Smart contracts deployed on an EEZ rollup can call contracts on the mainnet—or on another EEZ rollup—and receive and use the response within a single transaction. The result is atomic cross-chain execution, anchored securely to Ethereum—with shared liquidity and a unified security model.
What does that mean in practice?
For Ethereum: EEZ rollups reinforce the base layer’s role. ETH remains the gas token, settlement layer, and source of truth. Activity on EEZ rollups does not extract value from Ethereum—it builds upon it and draws security from it.
For protocols: complexity drops dramatically. Instead of deploying and maintaining multiple versions across chains, protocols deploy once and rely on synchronous composability to reach the entire EEZ user base—no need to manage bridges, wrapped assets, or per-chain integrations.
For users: the experience aligns more closely with intuitive expectations of “one Ethereum.” Assets, positions, and identities are portable across environments without explicit cross-chain steps. In most cases, gas can be paid in ETH regardless of where execution occurs.
We’re building this framework according to Ethereum’s core values: open source, secure, trustless, censorship-resistant, minimal, and community-driven.
Why us
A fair question—we answer briefly.
Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week smart contracts went live—literally the first week. Our first on-chain transaction occurred in August 2015. Since then, our engineers built the constant-product AMM model (now foundational to most DeFi), the Conditional Tokens Framework (used today by Polymarket), the CoW Protocol (pioneering batch auctions and intent-based trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, now safeguarding over $58 billion). We’ve operated Gnosis Chain uninterrupted for seven years. We know how to deliver infrastructure that doesn’t break.
We’re also deeply aligned with Ethereum itself. The Gnosis DAO holds substantial ETH—meaning Ethereum’s success as a system isn’t abstract to us; it directly impacts what we’re building.
Technically, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina—the creator of Circom and a long-time pioneer in zero-knowledge proof systems. His work on zkEVM represents one of the most battle-tested ZK infrastructures in production—and he is also the founder of Zisk, a high-performance proving stack that will power the EEZ.
The Ethereum Foundation is funding this work. The EEZ is designed as a trust-minimized, 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.
What it 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 the EEZ as fully open-source public infrastructure. All work will be released as free and open-source software, and contributions are welcome. This is not a closed group—it’s an open effort to build infrastructure the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.
It is not an L2 framework—but a framework *between* L1 and L2. That distinction matters. Rather than scaling isolated execution environments and connecting them asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture—where “composability” truly means composability: smart contracts can invoke each other atomically across execution environments.
It is also not just an idea. Its roots trace back to early Ethereum research—including execution sharding. What’s new is that recent advances in real-time proof technology have made it feasible. Jordi and our team have been working behind the scenes for months. We’re announcing now because the technical foundation is robust enough to share. Specifications and benchmarking results will follow.
Next steps
We’re assembling a coalition of infrastructure teams, protocols, block builders, and ecosystem contributors who recognize Ethereum as the world’s most important economic zone—and who are committed to unifying the ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, and xStocks—and we welcome more core contributors from across the ecosystem.
This is not intended to be a closed group. If you’re a protocol team, an infrastructure builder, or simply believe Ethereum should operate as one system—not one hundred—we want to hear from you.
In the coming weeks, we’ll release: the technical architecture and protocol specification, performance benchmarks, developer tooling and ecosystem integration details, and a clear onboarding path for existing Ethereum protocols to adopt the EEZ.
Ethereum delivers maximum value when it operates as a unified, composable economy.
Not as a collection of fiefdoms linked by bridges—not as fifty identical DEXs, each deployed on fifty chains with fifty separate liquidity pools.
One Ethereum. The EEZ.
Friederike Ernst is co-founder of Gnosis. Jordi Baylina is founder of Zisk. The Ethereum Economic Zone is developed with funding from the Ethereum Foundation.
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