Gnosis and Zisk Announce Ethereum Economic Zone Framework

Developers from Gnosis and Zisk, with support from the Ethereum Foundation, announced the Ethereum Economic Zone framework on Sunday at the EthCC conference in Cannes, France. The proposal seeks to unify Ethereum's fragmented Layer 2 rollup ecosystem by enabling smart contracts on different rollups to execute synchronously with each other and the Ethereum mainnet in a single transaction, eliminating the need for traditional bridges.

The framework addresses a core challenge in Ethereum's scaling strategy. Dozens of Layer 2 networks, including Arbitrum, Base and Optimism, have boosted overall throughput beyond the mainnet's capacity. However, this growth has led to fragmentation, with liquidity, infrastructure and user activity siloed across separate environments. Data from L2BEAT shows more than 20 active Layer 2 networks holding nearly 40 billion dollars in total value locked, distributed unevenly among them. The EEZ aims to create shared infrastructure for applications, allowing coordinated settlement back to Ethereum and reducing duplication in validators, data availability and cross-network transfers.

At the heart of the EEZ is a standardized protocol for atomic cross-rollup...