A Synchronously composable L1<>L2 framework for Ethereum, built by the leadership of Gnosis and Zisk, with co-funding from the Ethereum Foundation
Cannes, 29 March 2026, the leadership of Gnosis and Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), an L1<>L2 framework that extends Ethereum mainnet, driving value back to the L1.
In turn, EEZ rollups benefit from the liquidity and security of the Ethereum mainnet and are able to compose synchronously with each other and with the mainnet. No bridges, no fragmented state, no rebuilding core infrastructure. With value accruing back to ETH as the default gas token.
The project was announced today at EthCC in Cannes by Jordi Baylina and Friederike Ernst.
The Ethereum Foundation is co-funding the initiative.
The problem
Ethereum's L2 ecosystem is fragmented. Each rollup operates as an isolated environment with its own liquidity, its own wallet integrations, and its own bridging infrastructure. Protocols that deploy across multiple L2s duplicate effort. Users who move between them lose time and value to bridges. The result: an ecosystem that scales blockspace, but fractures everything else.
As Friederike Ernst puts it,
"Ethereum doesn't have a scaling problem. It has a fragmentation problem. Every new L2 is a silo that makes it harder to seamlessly extend and drive value back to the Ethereum mainnet. The EEZ is designed to do the opposite.”
What the EEZ does
The EEZ is a framework for rollups that provides full synchronous composability between L1 and L2 and among all connected EEZ rollups.
Smart contracts on an EEZ rollup can call smart contracts on mainnet and other EEZ rollups within a single transaction and enjoy the same guarantees as deploying on the L1.
Specifically, this enables:
- Instant, global liquidity. Instant access to global liquidity across Ethereum and all EEZ rollups. For any asset and every order flow.
- Shared infrastructure. Freeing everyone up to focus on differentiation (privacy, UX, specialized use cases etc) without having to replicate the same core infrastructure.
- Native Ethereum security. EEZ rollups inherit the full security of Ethereum, with no additional trust assumptions.
- Better User Experience. Less bridging, less waiting, less gas friction, less risk.
- ETH as gas by default. No new token. No added complexity. Just ETH.
This eliminates the "build once, deploy everywhere, integrate everywhere again" problem. Deploy on the EEZ and you get mainnet composability, instant global liquidity, and Ethereum-grade security out of the box.
Who is building it
This initial phase is being developed by the leadership of Gnosis, Zisk, and the Ethereum Foundation in active dialogue with the Ethereum research community. The Ethereum Economic Zone will be developed in the open and an Alliance is already being formed around it.
Gnosis has been shipping Ethereum infrastructure since 2015. Its engineers built the constant product AMM model that enabled modern DeFi. They pioneered intent-based architectures with CoW Protocol. They built the Conditional Token Framework, used by Polymarket. They built Safe, the first production smart contract wallet, years before account abstraction became a priority. Gnosis Chain has run for seven years with zero downtime. And Gnosis DAO holds more ETH than the US government.
Jordi Baylina is the creator of Circom and Polygon zkEVM. His work on zero-knowledge proof systems underpins some of the most widely deployed ZK infrastructure in production today, and he is also the founder of Zisk, a high-performance proving stack that will be used within the EEZ.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a non-profit that supports the Ethereum ecosystem. We are part of a larger community of organizations and individuals that fund protocol development, grow the ecosystem, and advocate for Ethereum.
The Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) is credibly neutral Ethereum infrastructure, with governance minimisation, aiming for non-upgradability, and with all software held by the EEZ Association (a Swiss non-profit) and Free and Open Sourced Software (FOSS).
Dr Friederike Ernst, Co-Founder, Gnosis:
"Ethereum doesn't have a scaling problem. It has a fragmentation problem. Every new L2 that launches with its own liquidity pool and its own bridge is another walled garden. The EEZ is designed to do the opposite. One Ethereum, not a hundred islands."
Jordi Baylina, Founder, Zisk:
“We spent two years building a ZKVM that can prove Ethereum blocks in real time. That's the missing piece. Synchronous composability between rollups isn't theoretical anymore, with real-time ZK proving, we can make multiple rollups execute as if they were one chain. The EEZ is where that becomes a reality.”
What comes next
This also marks the introduction of the EEZ Alliance, an informal collective of EVM infrastructure, protocols, block builders and ecosystem facilitators that recognises Ethereum as the most important economic zone in the world, and is committed to unifying the ecosystem and bettering the long-term prospect of the EVM landscape. Other founding members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, xStocks, and we’re welcoming other leading contributors from across the ecosystem.
Technical specifications, performance benchmarks, and details on ecosystem integrations will follow in the weeks after the announcement.
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