Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) officially launched, finally ending the era of L2 liquidity silos.

Author: The Ethereum Economic Zone

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Introduction: While L2 has solved Ethereum's scaling problem, it has created a new one: each chain is an island, liquidity is fragmented, and users have to pay a price every time they cross chains.

Funded by the Ethereum Foundation and jointly launched by Gnosis and Zisk, EEZ's core promise is synchronous composability between L1 and L2—contracts can be atomically called across chains without relying on bridges.

This is one of the most noteworthy technical proposals to follow amid the heating-up discussions surrounding the Ethereum roadmap.

The full text is as follows:

Ethereum's L2 ecosystem solved one problem while creating another.

The scaling issue has been largely resolved. Rollups are effective, transaction costs have decreased, and throughput has increased. That part is progressing smoothly.

The problem is that each L2 blockchain has become its own isolated island. Independent liquidity, independent cross-chain bridges, independent wallet integrations, independent infrastructure—all of which already exist on the mainnet. A protocol that aims to cover the entire ecosystem would need to be deployed across five chains, integrating five different tools. Users move between these chains via cross-chain bridges, incurring time and costing money each time, and occasionally even wasting everything.

Moreover, each L2 isn't extending Ethereum; instead, it's extracting value and creating a new walled garden. We're facing a replay of the very problems that were supposed to be solved when this industry was built.

This is not how Ethereum scaling should be done.

What are we building?

The Ethereum economic zone is a framework between L1 and L2, built around the principle that rollups should extend Ethereum, not fork off 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 another EEZ rollup, receiving and using the response within a single transaction. The result is cross-chain atomic execution, ensuring anchoring to Ethereum. Shared liquidity and a unified security model.

What is the practical significance?

For Ethereum, EEZ rollups aim to strengthen its role as the foundational layer. ETH remains the gas token, settlement layer, and source of truth. Activity on rollups does not siphon value from Ethereum; rather, it builds upon it and draws from its security.

For the protocol, complexity is significantly reduced. There's no need to deploy and maintain multiple versions across multiple chains; the protocol can be deployed only once, relying on synchronous composability to reach users throughout EEZ. There's no need to manage cross-chain bridges, encapsulate assets, or integrate with various chains.

For users, the experience is closer to what they intuitively expect: one Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identities are available across environments without the need for explicit cross-chain steps. In most cases, gas payments can be made with ETH, regardless of where the transaction is executed.

We built this framework according to Ethereum's core values: open source, security, decentralized trust, censorship resistance, simplicity, and community-driven.

Why us?

A reasonable question, we'll answer briefly.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the very first week of its smart contract launch—literally the very first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum occurred in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the Constant Product AMM model (which became the foundation of much of DeFi), the Conditional Token framework (now used by Polymarket), the CoW protocol (which pioneered bulk auctions and intent trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, hosting over $58 billion). We have operated Gnosis Chain for seven years without interruption. We know how to deliver infrastructure that won't crash.

We are also highly aligned with Ethereum itself. Gnosis DAO holds a significant amount of ETH, which means that the success of Ethereum as a system is not an abstract concept for us; it is directly related to what we are building.

On the technical level, much of the work was led by Jordi Baylina, the creator of Circom, who has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems for many years. His work on zkEVM is one of the most thoroughly 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 also because we have a history of delivering it.

This is nothing

EEZ is not the product of any single team. Gnosis and Zisk are founding contributors, but the goal is to build a shared Ethereum infrastructure. The Switzerland-based EEZ Association is a newly formed entity dedicated to developing it as a 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, but an open effort to build infrastructure that the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

It's not an L2 framework, but rather a framework between L1 and L2. This distinction is important. Rather than extending isolated execution environments and then connecting them asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture—"composability" here truly means composability: smart contracts can atomically call each other across execution environments.

It's not just an idea. It dates back to early Ethereum research, including implementing sharding. What's new is that recent advancements in Proof-of-Live technology have made it feasible. Jordi and our team have been working behind the scenes for months. We're announcing it now because the technical foundation is solid enough to share. Specifications and benchmarks will follow.

We are building a consortium of infrastructure teams, protocol members, block builders, and ecosystem contributors who recognize Ethereum as the world's most important economic zone and are committed to a unified ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, and xStocks, and we welcome more core contributors from across the ecosystem to join us.

This is not intended to be a closed community. If you are a protocol team member, an infrastructure builder, or simply believe that Ethereum should function as one system rather than a hundred systems, we would like to hear your voice.

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

Ethereum can realize its greatest value when it is presented as a unified, composable economy.

It is not a collection of fiefdoms connected by cross-chain bridges, nor is it fifty versions of the same DEX on fifty chains with fifty liquidity pools.

One Ethereum. EEZ.

Friederike Ernst is the co-founder of Gnosis. Jordi Baylina is the founder of Zisk. The Ethereum Economic Zone is developed with funding from the Ethereum Foundation.