GnosisDAO approves Gnosis Chain EEZ rollup, unlocking 350,000 GNO

GnosisDAO approved GIP-153 with 123,158 GNO in support, retiring Gnosis Chain's validator set and settling transactions on Ethereum as an EEZ rollup.

"The EEZ will have the benefit of reducing the need for bridges (where hacks tend to occur) and increasing the usability of assets in EVM chains," Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said in a May 28 report.

The vote drew 123,425 GNO in turnout across 54 voters, exceeding the 75,000 quorum. The transition unlocks roughly 350,000 GNO currently staked and ends the treasury-funded staking subsidy that dilutes non-stakers by about 2.3 percent annually. Gnosis Chain's validator set has already contracted to roughly 52,000 active validators, down from about 76,000 a month earlier, with approximately 295,000 GNO staked.

The first EEZ block is targeted for December 2026 or January 2027, contingent on the underlying technology being ready. The move positions Gnosis Chain as the first production instance of the EEZ framework, which aims to unify Ethereum's fragmented L2 ecosystem by enabling synchronous execution across rollups without bridges.

What GIP-153 changes

Gnosis Chain will produce blocks every two seconds, prove its state against Ethereum's block cadence, and settle to Ethereum layer-1. The network retains its existing applications, balances, and xDAI gas token. At launch, composability runs one-directional — a contract on Gnosis can call an Ethereum contract and use the result in the same atomic transaction — with bidirectional and cross-instance calls deferred to later development.

The proposal explicitly accepts reduced decentralization as a deliberate trade-off. A misbehaving composer could delay or exclude transactions, though it could not forge state or reverse finalized history. A forced-inclusion route through Ethereum is listed as an option to evaluate later, not a launch feature.

The end of staking leaves GNO's replacement economic role unfinished. The proposal intends to connect GNO to fee revenue from network activity but does not select a mechanism. Fee sharing and buybacks are listed as possibilities for a later GIP after prover economics can be observed in production. GnosisDAO also cut Gnosis Ltd's annual funding to $15 million from a $30 million request in GIP-154.

The EEZ framework and Ethereum's fragmentation problem

The EEZ framework, developed by Gnosis and ZisK with funding from the Ethereum Foundation, targets one of Ethereum's main scaling trade-offs: improved throughput from dozens of L2 networks that separate liquidity, infrastructure, and user activity across separate blockchains. According to L2Beat, 22 Ethereum rollups currently secure $27.82 billion, with $34.88 billion in total value secured when including validiums, optimiums, and other scaling networks.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously raised concerns about centralized sequencers and trusted bridging mechanisms as potential weak points in L2 design. "The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path," Buterin wrote in a Feb. 3 X post.

Gnosis expects the transition to create a new business around operating EEZ instances and providing related infrastructure to financial institutions and fintech companies. Its existing products — Pay, Circles, and VPN — as well as its DeFi and tokenization ecosystem, would gain direct access to Ethereum liquidity.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.