First of all, very short intro: I’m Friederike Ernst, the cofounder of Gnosis and here today to talk about an initiative we announced at ethCC, the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ – pronounced “easy”).
The core idea is to better align L2s with Ethereum by restoring what made Ethereum powerful in the first place: one shared, composable economic system. Today, framgentation across L2s leads to duplicated liquidity, broken composability, and weaker alignment with the L1.
EEZ addresses this by enabling fully synchronous crosschain execution, allowing contracts across L2s and L1 to interact as if they were on the same network. This creates:
shared liquidity by default instead of fragmented markets
stronger economic alignment with Ethereum, with ETH as the default gas token and settlement layer
a model where L2 activity more directly reinforces Ethereum validator economics (addressing today’s weak coupling between L2 usage and L1 value accrual)
less pressure for L2s to bootstrap isolated economies
For Lido, the implications are quite direct:
stETH becomes natively usable across L2s, without relying on bridges or canonical wrappers
liquidity and markets for stETH unify across the EEZ
instant composability with DeFi across the broader Ethereum ecosystem
stronger linkage between L2 activity and staking returns, with Ethereum validators more directly benefiting from ecosystem-wide usage
Gnosis partnered with the team around Jordi Baylina for the EEZ, but the work is supported by the EF and many ecosystem partners already. All major block builders will support the execution format from day 1 (titan, beaver, flashbots), dapps will leverage from mainnet launch (aave, spark, cow, safe, monerium, xstocks, centrifuge and others) etc.
Would love to get your thoughts and explore whether it makes sense for Lido to engage early here!
I’m a little confused here, how does this relate to Surge, the framework Nethermind has been developing based on Taiko’s code? Are EEZ and Surge complementary, or are they aiming at the same thing from different angles?
What are you and your team’s thoughts on what types of L2s are able to take advantage of the EEZ? More specifically, it seems like even an L2 that doesn’t use Ethereum DA or any public DA and instead keeps the data privately among participants — something like a prividium, zk-validium, Cocoon etc. could still do synchronous calls so long as it generates proofs of its own state transitions and builds execution tables. This could open some interesting use cases, e.g. CEXes or institutions. (I noticed that the opening post from Jordi was using the term “based rollups”, but now the terminology has shifted )
Do you think there are things that could be implemented into the base layer that would make this construction safer and/or more efficient? In particular block-scoped storage (EIP-8212) or native rollups? Of course as you highlighted it’s not strictly required.
Nethermind is part of the EEZ alliance! The surge stack natively doesn’t allow true synchronous composability with response calls within the same block, but can be adapted accordingly. The EEZ is much less about a specific stack and much more about setting a standard for cross chain synchronous message passign.
You don’t have to use blobs for DA, and yes, prividiums/ validiums can compose if they can prove their state and if they’re willing to potentially reorg if Ethereum reorgs. The last one is the big IF here – it means you can’t have full finality before Ethereum. This is also where changes to L1 could help L2s to make this less onerous: Having single slot finality and shorter block times helps for sure.
You can make the dependency on Eth finality smaller by restricting the kind of calls you can make into/ out of the rollup btw, so this very much is a spectrum.
I imagine that 8212 could help, too, in terms of gas costs and also making things neater in terms of block level coordination without hacks. It’s not necessary though. No L1 changes are necessary at all to make this work (and it already works, as our demo showed!), which to me makes it so much more compelling.
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