Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and zkSync founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone at the ETHCC conference in Cannes, France. The EEZ initiative, co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation, aims to build a framework where rollups are synchronously connected within a single transaction to the Ethereum mainnet and to each other. EEZ-connected rollup smart contracts can call mainnet or other EEZ rollup contracts as if deployed directly on the Ethereum mainnet. The base gas token is ether (ETH), and it does not require separate bridge infrastructure.
Ernst said, “Ethereum does not have a scalability problem. It only has a fragmentation problem.” She said that each time Layer 2s with their own liquidity pools and bridges are launched, another closed ecosystem emerges. An informal group to activate EEZ, the EEZ Alliance, will also be launched. Founding members are decentralised finance lending protocol Aave, block builders Titan and Beaver Build, real-world asset platform Centrifuge, and tokenised stock project xStock.
But the interoperability market that EEZ targets is already highly competitive. The Ethereum Foundation account abstraction team announced an interop layer in November 2025 that makes the Layer 2 ecosystem appear like a single chain. Optimism Superchain and Polygon Agglayer are also pursuing their own cross-chain strategies.
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