#Gate广场四月发帖挑战

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

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

What’s not progressing smoothly is: each L2 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. Protocols aiming to cover the entire ecosystem of users need to deploy on five chains, connect five sets of tools. Users move between them via cross-chain bridges, each time spending time and money, and sometimes losing everything.

Moreover, each L2 isn’t extending Ethereum; it’s pulling value away, creating new walled gardens. We are facing a replay of the problems we initially set out to solve when building this industry.

This isn’t what Ethereum scaling should look like.

What We Are Building
The Ethereum Economic Zone is a framework between L1 and L2, built around a core principle: Rollups should extend Ethereum, not fork away from it.

EEZ rollup will achieve synchronized composability with the Ethereum mainnet. Smart contracts deployed on EEZ rollup can call smart contracts on the mainnet or on another EEZ rollup, receiving responses and acting within a single transaction. The result is cross-chain atomic execution, anchored on Ethereum. Shared liquidity, unified security model.

What does this mean practically:

For Ethereum, EEZ rollup aims to strengthen the role of the base layer. ETH remains the gas token, settlement layer, and source of truth. Activity on rollups doesn’t drain value from Ethereum but builds upon it, drawing security from it.

For protocols, complexity is significantly reduced. There’s no need to deploy and maintain multiple versions across multiple chains. Protocols can deploy once and rely on synchronized composability to cover the entire EEZ user base. No need to manage cross-chain bridges, wrap assets, or integrate with each chain.

For users, the experience aligns more closely with intuitive expectations: one Ethereum. Assets, positions, and identities are available across environments without explicit cross-chain steps. In most cases, whether executing on one chain or another, gas can be paid with ETH.

We are building this framework based on Ethereum’s core values: open source, secure, trustless, censorship-resistant, lean, community-driven.

Why Us
A reasonable question, and here’s our brief answer.

Gnosis has been building Ethereum infrastructure since the first week of smart contract deployment — literally the first week. Our first transaction on Ethereum was in August 2015. Since then, our engineers have built the constant product AMM model (the foundation for most DeFi), the conditional token framework (used now by Polymarket), the CoW protocol (pioneering batch auctions and intent trading), and Safe (the first production-grade smart contract wallet, holding over $58 billion). We’ve 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 large amount of ETH, meaning Ethereum’s success as a system is not an abstract concept for us — it directly relates to what we are building.

On the technical side, much of the work is led by Jordi Baylina, creator of Circom, who has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof systems for years. His work on zkEVM is among the most thoroughly validated ZK infrastructure 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 trust-neutral shared Ethereum infrastructure, owned by no single entity, including Gnosis or others.

We are building it because it needs to exist, and because we have a track record of delivering it.

What It Is Not
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 Swiss-based EEZ Association is a newly formed entity dedicated to developing this as fully open-source public infrastructure. All work will be released as free open-source software, with contributions welcome. This is not an exclusive group; it’s an open effort to build foundational infrastructure that the entire Ethereum ecosystem can rely on.

It’s not a Layer 2 framework but a framework between Layer 1 and Layer 2. This distinction is crucial. Instead of expanding isolated execution environments connected asynchronously, this is a fundamentally different architecture — “composability” here truly means composability: smart contracts can call each other atomically across execution environments.

It’s also more than just an idea. It traces back to early Ethereum research, including sharding execution. 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 are now announcing it because the technical foundation is solid enough to share. Specifications and benchmarks will follow.

Next Steps
We are building an alliance of infrastructure teams, protocols, block builders, and ecosystem contributors who recognize Ethereum as the world’s most important economic zone and are committed to unifying the ecosystem. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, xStocks, and we welcome more core contributors from across the ecosystem.

This is not intended to be an exclusive group. If you are a protocol team, infrastructure builder, or simply believe Ethereum should operate as a system rather than a hundred systems, we want to hear from you.

In the coming weeks, we will publish: technical architecture and protocol specifications, performance benchmarks, developer tools and ecosystem integrations, and a clear pathway for existing Ethereum protocols to connect to EEZ.

Ethereum, as a unified, composable economy, can realize its maximum potential.

Not a collection of enclaves connected by cross-chain 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 Founder of Zisk. The Ethereum Economic Zone is funded by the Ethereum Foundation.