Ethereum doesn't have a scaling problem. It has a fragmentation problem. And today we took a big step forward in fixing it. With the launch of Rollup X - the Ethereum Economic Zone’s devnet - a swap leaves a rollup, fills against mainnet liquidity and comes back, all in a single transaction. From spring 2027, that is how Gnosis Chain will work by default.
This post is for the teams building on Gnosis Chain today, and for the ones we would like to see build on it next. It covers what fragmentation costs, what the EEZ changes, what happens to Gnosis Chain, and where we want to work with you.
What fragmentation costs
Rollups did what they were asked to do: they made Ethereum cheap. Seven in eight transactions now happen on a rollup. But only one in six DeFi dollars sits on one. Ethereum L1 holds $46.4bn in DeFi TVL, Base $6.1bn, Arbitrum One $1.5bn, and the long tail drops off fast from there. L2BEAT lists 94 chains. The users moved to rollups. The money stayed on L1.
Every new chain has to rebuild the same things: bridges, oracles, money markets, on- and off-ramps, block explorers, liquidity in every strategic pair. I know what that costs, because we have been paying it. Operating Gnosis Chain as a standalone L1 costs the Gnosis DAO $7-10 million a year, and a large part of that goes to rebuilding and subsidizing table stakes that already exist on mainnet.
Fragmentation also changes what an asset is. Bridge your ETH to another chain and you no longer hold ETH. You hold an IOU against ETH parked somewhere else. Imagine crossing a bridge and finding that everything you own stayed on the other side, and all you got was a receipt. Now imagine borrowing against the receipt. That is roughly what happens when bridged assets get wrapped, restaked and lent across chains, and everyone hopes the bridge underneath holds. Plenty of holders have looked at this and decided they would rather sit in a natively issued stablecoin than in a derivative of ETH. (Why fragmentation has kept ETH from becoming the native currency of its own ecosystem is a post for another day.)
Alt L1s have the same problem, only worse: instead of joining the largest onchain economy, they compete with it. Gnosis Chain included.
Add it up and you get an industry that has spent fortunes and years of engineering time chasing mercenary capital and duplicating infrastructure, instead of building better products and getting them to people.
What the EEZ is
The Ethereum Economic Zone lets a contract on Ethereum or on a rollup call a contract on another chain and use the answer in the same transaction. No bridge message, no callback, no waiting. If any part fails, all of it reverts.
To join, a network has to do two things: prove its state within an Ethereum slot and follow Ethereum if itEthereum reorgs. That is the whole requirement for any blockchain to join spec. It does not have to run the EVM, be public, be permissionless, use a particular prover or issue a token. And Ethereum itself does not have to change at all.
So why now? Not because Ethereum changed. Proving got fast enough. ZisK proves 99.9% of Ethereum blocks in under 10 seconds, against a 12-second slot, on four consumer RTX 5090 graphics cards, at around $0.003 per proof.
The best analogy I know is January 1, 1983, the day every ARPANET host switched to TCP/IP at once. Satellite, radio and wire networks kept running as they were and could suddenly talk to each other. Nobody ran the whole thing. Nobody had to run the whole thing! And nobody using the internet today was ever onboarded into TCP/IP. The EEZ is that move for Ethereum: rollups become specialized zones that compose with mainnet and with each other, and Ethereum becomes what it was always meant to be, the economic operating system of the world.
To be precise about roles: the EEZ is a Swiss non-profit, co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation, introduced by Gnosis and ZisK in March 2026. All of its software is free and open source, and teams such as Nethermind are already building on it independently. It is not a Gnosis product. Gnosis Chain will simply be one zone in it, the first general-purpose one.
What already works
Rollup X launched today at Devcon in Mumbai as a public test network on Ethereum and three things happened on it that were not possible before:
CoW Swap filled a swap on Rollup X with mainnet liquidity. A user on Rollup X signs one order. CoW Swap's solvers fill it against liquidity on Ethereum mainnet, and the tokens land back on Rollup X in the same transaction. No bridge, no wait, no second signature. A new chain no longer has to launch with thin pools and make its users pay for it in slippage.
Safe changed owners atomically across L1 and L2. An owner change on a mainnet Safe is read and verified by Safes on Rollup X in the same transaction. Safes across chains can also share spending limits as if they were one account. Today a key has to be rotated chain by chain, and the Safe someone forgot is where a compromised key still works. Rotate a key once, and every chain knows.
A post-quantum signature was verified on Rollup X and used on mainnet. A mainnet contract calls Rollup X, checks a Falcon signature and acts on the answer in the same transaction. In the demo, that authorizes a Safe transfer on mainnet. Doing all of this directly on mainnet takes about 5.5 million gas. Through Rollup X, it takes about 495,000 gas on mainnet, around 91% less. The expensive verification still runs, but on the rollup, where gas costs a fraction of mainnet’s. Ethereum will need post-quantum signatures long before it can afford to verify them on L1, and this is how: do the heavy computation in a rollup, settle on mainnet.
CoW Swap and Safe both started life at Gnosis and have long since gone their own way. They are two of the most used pieces of infrastructure on Ethereum, and they chose to be among the first to build on the EEZ.
One important note: For now, Rollup X is a test network: it is not yet meant to hold significant value, and the core protocol is under independent security audit.
What happens to Gnosis Chain
In spring 2027, Gnosis Chain stops being an independent L1 and becomes a zone settling to Ethereum.
If you build on Gnosis Chain today, you do not need to do anything. The chain's state carries over through a hard fork: contracts, balances, addresses, chain ID and xDAI as the gas token, all unchanged. Nothing needs to be redeployed. Based on current DeFi TVL, Gnosis Chain enters as a top 10 Ethereum L2, and the first that can compose synchronously with mainnet.
Here is why we are doing this. Gnosis Chain was built on the thesis that credibly neutral blockspace would be in demand. That did not play out. Blockspace has largely been commoditized, and credible neutrality is Ethereum's home turf. Becoming an ordinary L2 would not have fixed it either: there are a hundred of those, and most have little meaningful usage. Synchronous composability with mainnet is the one thing none of them offers.
The decision also comes at a price. You cannot have fast blocks, synchronous composability with Ethereum and decentralised sequencing at the same time. You have to pick two. We picked the first two, which means Gnosis Chain’s roughly 200,000 independent validator set does not survive the transition. That is the main regret in this decision.
What you can build when mainnet is one call away
The shift is from building on Ethereum to building one Ethereum: build anywhere in the ecosystem, settle to Ethereum.
Teams in the Gnosis ecosystem are already exploring ideas including: cross-chain lending aggregation, trading protocols that access mainnet depth atomically, AI agents that operate mainnet DeFi, and oracle feeds that publish to a rollup where any mainnet contract can read the latest value in the same transaction and only pay L1 gas for the data it consumes.
And there is a lot more that we want to explore with builders:
L1 settlement with compute-heavy operations on L2, as in post quantum demo
Infrastructure deployed once that serves the whole EEZ
Identity, human or agent, registered once on Gnosis and usable across the EEZ
Private zones for institutions that still settle to and compose with mainnet
Privacy for DeFi and AI agents without leaving Ethereum’s liquidity
The common thread is hybrid design: put each part of an application where it runs best, and let the parts compose. Options and perps in particular could look very different once margin and settlement no longer have to live on the same chain.
Getting it to people
Better products are necessary, but not sufficient. Distribution decides.
An application on Gnosis Chain can serve users and liquidity across all of Ethereum without asking anyone to bridge.. The bigger lever is embedded finance: onchain financial services built into products people already use, reaching people who will never know a blockchain is involved.
The infrastructure for that is a longer-term build. But we know both sides of it. We have spent a decade on Ethereum infrastructure, and building Gnosis Pay taught us how the card and fintech world actually works, contracts and compliance included. In the long term open source innovation wins, and we play a role as back end infrastructure that takes these products to market through partners.
Work with us
Since 2015, a fair share of the primitives DeFi runs on were born in this community: constant product market makers, the conditional token framework behind Polymarket, Safe, CoW Swap, the first self-custodial crypto card.
If you run an established application on mainnet, already operate on Gnosis Chain, or plan to launch in the coming months, we are building a Strategic Partner Program. Talk to us: [link].
If you are at Devcon: come to the EEZ booth at the Jio World Centre until 6 November and run the transactions yourself. Finish the challenge and you earn a pin that can’t be bought. Our hands-on workshop on making your first cross-chain call runs on 5 and 6 November at 11am.
Ethereum scaled, then it split. The EEZ puts it back together without changing the base layer. In spring 2027, Gnosis Chain becomes its first general-purpose zone, you keep everything you have deployed, and mainnet becomes one call away.
What will you build with it?
Friederike
