Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) Officially Launched: The L2 Island Problem Is Finally Being Addressed

Author: The Ethereum Economic Zone

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Primer: L2 solved Ethereum’s scaling problem, while also creating a new one: each chain becomes an island, liquidity fragments, and users have to pay a cost every time they move across chains. The EEZ is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and jointly initiated by Gnosis and Zisk. Its core promise is synchronous composability between L1 and L2—smart contracts can make atomic calls across chains, no longer relying on connections via bridges. This is one of the most worth-tracking technical proposals amid rising discussion around the Ethereum roadmap.

Full text is as follows:

Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem solves one problem while creating another.

The scaling problem is basically solved. Rollups work, transaction costs go down, and throughput increases. That part has gone smoothly.

What hasn’t gone smoothly is: each L2 has turned into its own island. Independent liquidity, independent cross-chain bridges, independent wallet integrations, independent infrastructure—while all of these already exist on the mainnet. Protocols that aim to cover the entire ecosystem’s users need to deploy across five chains and integrate five sets of tools. Users move between them via cross-chain bridges, and every time they do, they spend time and money—occasionally even everything.

And each L2 isn’t extending Ethereum; it’s extracting value from it, forming a new walled garden. We’re facing a replay of the very problems this industry set out to solve in the first place.

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

What we’re building

The Ethereum Economic Zone is a framework between an L1 and an L2, built around one principle: Rollups should extend Ethereum, not 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 contracts on another EEZ rollup, receiving a response within a single transaction and using it. The result is cross-chain atomic execution, with security guaranteed atop Ethereum. Shared liquidity, a unified security model.

What it means in practice:

For Ethereum: the goal of the EEZ rollups is to strengthen the role of the base layer. ETH is still the gas token, the settlement layer, and the source of truth. Activity on rollups won’t siphon value away from Ethereum; it will be built on top of it, drawing from its security.

For protocols: complexity drops dramatically. No need to deploy and maintain multiple versions across multiple chains. A protocol can be deployed only once and, thanks to synchronous composability, cover all EEZ users. No need to manage cross-chain bridges, wrapped assets, or chain integrations.

For users: the experience is closer to what people intuitively expect—one Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identities are usable across environments without explicit cross-chain steps. Most of the time, regardless of where execution happens, Gas can be paid with ETH.

We build this framework by sticking to Ethereum’s core values: open-source, secure, trustless without a central authority, resistant to censorship, lean, and community-driven.

Why it’s us

A reasonable question—we’ll answer briefly.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the very first week after smart contracts went live—literally the first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum happened in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the constant product AMM model (which became the foundation for most DeFi), the conditional tokens framework (currently used by Polymarket), the CoW Protocol (pioneering batch auctions and intent-based trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, with over $58 billion in custody). We’ve operated Gnosis Chain for seven years without interruption. We know how to deliver infrastructure that won’t collapse.

We’re also highly aligned with Ethereum itself. The Gnosis DAO holds a large amount of ETH, which means that Ethereum’s success as a system isn’t an abstract concept for us—it directly relates to what we’re building.

On the technical level, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina, the creator of Circom, who for years has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems. His work on zkEVM is among the most thoroughly verified ZK infrastructure in production, and he is also the founder of Zisk—Zisk is a high-performance proving stack that will be used in the EEZ.

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

This 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 established entity focused specifically on developing it as fully open-source public infrastructure. All work will be released as free, open-source software. 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; it’s a framework between L1 and L2. This distinction matters. Rather than extending isolated execution environments and 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 also not just an idea. It can be traced back to early Ethereum research, including execution sharding. What’s new is that recent progress in real-time proving technology has 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 benchmark tests will follow.

Next

We’re building an alliance made up of infrastructure teams, protocol teams, block builders, and ecosystem contributors—members who agree that Ethereum is 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 isn’t meant to be a closed group. If you’re a protocol team, an infrastructure builder, or you simply believe Ethereum should operate as a system rather than as a hundred separate systems, we want to hear from you.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll publish: the technical architecture and protocol specifications, performance benchmarks, developer tools and ecosystem integration details, as well as a clear path for connecting existing Ethereum protocols to the EEZ.

Only when Ethereum functions as a unified, composable economy can it deliver maximum value.

Not a collection of fiefdoms connected by cross-chain bridges, not fifty chains with fifty versions of the same DEX paired 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 for development by the Ethereum Foundation.