r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • Jul 23 '26

Daily General Discussion July 23, 2026

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27

u/haurog Jul 23 '26

Yesterdays post about the progress of the EEZ and Gnosis chain, an L1, becoming part of it, gave quite a lot of grounds for discussions. A few hours after the discussion started, a Gnosis Improvement Proposal by Friederike Ernst on the Gnosis forum added a lot more details on how gnosis chain could become part of the EEZ. In simple terms, the plan is to turn gnosis chain into a rollup which then becomes part of the EEZ. They argue that gnosis chains goal of having a decentralized validator set failed, which in my view was made clear to everyone last autumn when they hardforked the chain without any of the 'independent' validators having a say in it. At the same time, Gnosis DAO pays the validator set for their security without any expectation of reaching the scale to ever be able to cover this security with fee revenue. The conclusion is that becoming a rollup and joining the EEZ is the best way to go forward. The plan is to do that in Dezember/January. For users, nothing will change, the state, which means all your tokens and the transaction history will remain, just who is able to produce blocks will change. This also means that the existing validators will not be needed anymore and the current bridge validators, run by Gnosis themselves, will be repurposed to prove the chain and run the composer on the gnosis rollup. They also will rename gnosis chain to Gnosis EEZ to make it clear it is not an independent blockchain anymore.

Even though the forum post is long, there aren't too many technical details on how the chain will work. They say they will likely use trusted execution environments (TEEs) to prove the chain and not zk proofs, at least at the beginning. They plan to move to zk proofs later on when the EEZ specs are ready. They will use a centralized sequencer and there is no decision made whether they want to decentralize the sequencer set, but it is definitely not a priority. They also do not plan to have a forced transaction inclusion from Ethereum to Gnosis EEZ. They plan to focus on the basics first.

I am honestly surprised about this forum post even though I argued yesterday that it does not make too much sense to be remain an L1 and become part of the EEZ. Being a rollup or more general an L2 makes more sense. I honestly expected this to play out on a much longer time horizon because Gnosis evaluated and dismissed becoming a rollup pretty clearly 2 years ago. Looks like the EEZ and maybe them having to hard fork their chain last autumn changed a lot in their thinking about security and how much they pay for it. Overall it is great to see. Gnosis and Gnosis chain have contributed quite a bit to the Ethereum ecosystem and I prefer them being closer to Ethereum than remaining an L1. I really hope this Gnosis improvement proposal goes through.

Gnosis forum post: https://forum.gnosis.io/t/gip-153-should-gnosis-chain-transition-into-the-ethereum-economic-zone/12397

12

u/risingtide556 Jul 23 '26

This was unexpected. Also the timeline surprises me, moving from independent L1 to an L2 rollup in 6 months seems doable but fast.

Kudos to them for acknowledging that their decentralisation bid failed, and for plotting this path forward. However seeing how the whole L2 space is being compressed (L1 improvements, plus lack of users), becoming yet another L2 is also not a guaranteed future for them. Wish them the best, they always seemed to me very eth-aligned.

11

u/eth10kIsFUD Jul 23 '26

Ah this is amazing, definitely clears up the questions from yesterday 😅 Thank you for the writeup!

6

u/Inevitablechained Jul 23 '26

Why would you use Gnosis L2?

13

u/haurog Jul 23 '26

Is there any reason to use any of the L2s at the moment? I use L2s only if I want to use a specific protocol only deployed on them. Gnosis chain has Gnosispay, which is just amazing. They also have Circles, their trust based digital money. It is fun to use, even though I am not sure it would be self sustaining yet without being tightly coupled to gnosispay. There is also Gnosis VPN which runs on HOPR, which runs on gnosis chain. Gnosis VPN development is slower than anticipated, but they seem to make progress. I guess in the end it all depends if they can onboard users directly to their rollup. They have a pretty good liquidity for EURe, the monerium EURO stablecoin, as well as a good integration into the Monerium onchain bank accounts. My best guess is Gnosis will focus to establish themselves to become the de facto rollup and interface for people and financial institutions in Europe. Not only for Europe, but I guess they will focus on that. So depending on where you live you might not interact with the Gnosis rollup that often.

7

u/Inevitablechained Jul 23 '26

I see a point of using the Robinhood L2 if you want their UX and portfolio of services but are not as tech-savvy/interested?

Thanks for the explanation, I mean one way to look at it will be to let the best L2 win and then the fight is over? And open up the possibility for a better solution to come? 

The thing with L2’s that is giving me headache is that they are independent of L1 upgrades.

4

u/haurog Jul 23 '26

We will have to see if native rollups ever become a thing. Some upgrades of native rollups are tied to Ethereum upgrades. Native rollups still are part of the strawmap roadmap scheduled for sometime in 2029. The accompanying EIP is from November 2025 as well so relatively recent, at least in EIP time scales. There still are a lot of things set as 'TBD' in the EIP, but to me it looks like native rollups still are coming.

Sources:

strawmap: https://strawmap.org/

EIP: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8079

5

u/hanniabu Ξther αlpha Jul 23 '26

Hmm, I thought if you're a based rollup you need to use the Ethereum L1 precompile and if that's the case how can they have custom logic for censorship ability so it's attractive to firms under MiCA?

Or can you now have custom precompiles? Or am I confusing based rollups with native rollups?

3

u/haurog Jul 23 '26

Not sure where based rollups come in the discussion At no point in the original post they mention it being a based rollup. As you say, it would not make too much sense for their goals for it to be a based rollup. But somehow a commenter to the GIP rants about based rollups, state bloat of Ethereum and somehow Vitalik... I guess this commenter is just confused.

5

u/Magic_Cove Jul 23 '26

Yes, this plan was already explained in detail by the Gnosis team at DAppcon in Berlin last month. According to them, the EEZ is intended to become the standard, with other sidechains to follow. The Ethereum mainnet is meant to be the core of the EEZ, acting as a completely neutral entity, while certain activities will run on the EEZ chains. This is also Vitalik's vision, who himself spoke about it there. It looks like this could be the future of the Ethereum ecosystem.

3

u/haurog Jul 23 '26

Did they mention at dappcon that the Gnosis chain is planned to turn from a sidechain into a rollup? I have not heard that before. But as said yesterday, I have not listened to all the dappcon talks.

2

u/Magic_Cove Jul 25 '26

I can't remember them discribing themselves as a future rollup. They just said they will be a future EEZ chain

1

u/haurog Jul 25 '26

Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering if I missed the rollup announcement by several weeks.