Ethereum ecosystem, from ‘union of islands’ to ‘integrated economic sphere’

At the EthCC conference held in Cannes, France, major projects in the Ethereum ecosystem announced the development of a new framework called the 'Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ)'. This project is designed to make Ethereum's layer 2 (L2) networks operate as if they were one integrated system.

This framework is jointly developed by Gnosis, an Ethereum infrastructure developer, Zisk, a zero-knowledge proof technology company, and the Ethereum Foundation.

Why is this important?

Ethereum has relied on the L2 network to solve scalability issues for years. With the advent of various L2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, transaction processing capabilities have greatly improved, but new problems have emerged. The entire ecosystem is fragmented, with each L2 operating like an isolated island.

Currently, users must use bridges to move assets between different L2s. This process is slow and expensive, and there is also a risk of hacking. Developers also suffer from the inefficiency of having to build the same tools separately for each network.

EEZ seeks to fundamentally solve these problems. The goal is to allow apps and transactions on different Ethereum networks to interact instantly without a bridge, while maintaining the security of the Ethereum mainnet.

“Ethereum doesn’t have a scalability problem. It has a fragmentation problem,” said Friederike Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis. “Each time a new L2 is created, it creates a silo that makes it more difficult to transfer value back to the Ethereum mainnet. EEZs are designed to do the opposite.”

Expected effects and technical features

Once the EEZ is implemented, the following changes are expected:

• Liquidity Sharing: Funds can move freely between networks
• Simplified development infrastructure: Reduces the need for developers to redundantly deploy across multiple networks
• Improved user experience: Provides an integrated environment without complex bridge processes
• ETH-centered fee system: Continue to use ETH as gas fee without introducing new tokens

In particular, this project is being developed openly, reflecting the opinions of the Ethereum community, so participation and verification across the ecosystem is expected to occur.

In line with Vitalik Buterin’s concerns

This announcement coincides with the time when Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently raised the need to reexamine the L2-centric roadmap. Buterin noted that as fragmentation and user experience issues persist, some of the L2-reliance strategies may need to be rethought.

EEZ is seen as an attempt to directly respond to these concerns by consolidating the liquidity, infrastructure, and user flows of existing networks, rather than adding more isolated chains.