At the EthCC conference in Cannes, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a new initiative co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation. The EEZ is designed as a framework for rollups that can compose synchronously with the Ethereum mainnet and with each other within a single transaction, aiming to solve the ecosystem's fragmentation problem.
The core innovation allows smart contracts on connected rollups to call contracts on the mainnet or other EEZ rollups with the same guarantees as if they were deployed on Ethereum itself. The framework uses ETH as its default gas token and requires no additional bridging infrastructure. "Ethereum doesn't have a scaling problem. It has a fragmentation problem," Ernst stated. "Every new L2 that launches with its own liquidity pool and its own bridge is another walled garden."
The project launches alongside the EEZ Alliance, an informal collective with founding members including DeFi lending protocol Aave, block builders Titan and Beaver Build, real-world asset platform Centrifuge, and tokenized equities project xStocks. The announcement follows concerns highlighted by analysts in 2024 that a new Ethereum L2 was appearing roughly every 19 days, creating silos of fragmented liquidity. The Block's 2026 L2 outlook concluded that most new L2 launches became ghost towns after incentive cycles, with activity concentrating around a small set of ecosystems.
Proponents argue the EEZ is distinguished by its real-time ZK proving technology. Baylina, creator of the Circom language and former co-founder of Polygon zkEVM, said, "We spent two years building a ZKVM that can prove Ethereum blocks in real time. Synchronous composability between rollups isn't theoretical anymore."
The initiative appears to be the product of a six-month R&D collaboration debated within GnosisDAO governance in February 2026, exploring converting Gnosis Chain into a natively integrated Ethereum L2. The Ethereum Foundation's co-funding is notable given its recent shift to a leaner spending posture, having paused its open grants program in mid-2025. Co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak have prioritized scaling Ethereum mainnet and improving L2 interoperability, making the EEZ a natural fit.
The EEZ will be structured as a Swiss non-profit with all software released as free and open-source. The project aims for governance minimization and eventual non-upgradability, with technical specifications and performance benchmarks expected in the coming weeks.
