Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina on Sunday announced a new "easy" initiative: the Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ, at EthCC conference in Cannes. The initiative, which is being co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation, aims to create a framework for rollups that can compose synchronously with Ethereum mainnet and with each other within a single transaction.
The EEZ is designed to let smart contracts on connected rollups call contracts on 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 said in a statement. "Every new L2 that launches with its own liquidity pool and its own bridge is another walled garden."
The project represents the latest and most concrete effort to address Ethereum's well-documented L2 fragmentation problem. The proliferation of Layer 2 chains has been a persistent concern as the ecosystem scaled blockspace while splintering liquidity and user experience.
The project is launching alongside an informal collective called the EEZ Alliance. Founding members include DeFi lending protocol Aave, block builders Titan and Beaver Build, real-world asset platform Centrifuge, and tokenized equities project xStocks.
As The Block reported in 2024, analysts flagged that a new Ethereum L2 was appearing roughly every 19 days, with each one adding a new silo of fragmented liquidity. The Block's own 2026 L2 outlook concluded that most new L2 launches became ghost towns shortly after incentive cycles while meaningful activity concentrated around a small set of ecosystems.
The EEZ also enters a crowded field of interoperability efforts. The Ethereum Foundation's own Account Abstraction team unveiled an "Interop Layer" in November 2025 designed to make the L2 ecosystem feel like a single unified chain. Meanwhile, Optimism's Superchain and Polygon's AggLayer have pursued their own cross-chain coordination strategies, and the =nil; Foundation has been developing a zkSharding-based approach to the same underlying problem.
What distinguishes the EEZ, its proponents argue, is real-time ZK proving. Baylina, who created the Circom programming language and co-founded Polygon zkEVM before spinning off the team into independent venture Zisk last June, said his proving stack is the enabling technology. "We spent two years building a ZKVM that can prove Ethereum blocks in real time," he said. "Synchronous composability between rollups isn't theoretical anymore."
The announcement did not arrive out of nowhere. GnosisDAO governance records from February 2026 show the community had already been debating a six-month R&D collaboration with Baylina to explore converting Gnosis Chain into a natively integrated Ethereum L2 with synchronous composability. The EEZ appears to be the product of that exploration.
The Ethereum Foundation's decision to co-fund the initiative is notable given its recent shift to a leaner spending posture. The Foundation paused its open grants program in mid-2025 as part of an effort to cut its burn rate to roughly 5% per year. Co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak have said their priorities include scaling Ethereum mainnet and improving L2 interoperability, making the EEZ a natural fit for the Foundation's narrower focus.
The EEZ will be structured as a Swiss non-profit with all software released as free and open-source, per the release. The project aims for governance minimization and eventual non-upgradability. Technical specifications and performance benchmarks are expected in the coming weeks.
