Gnosis Chain to End Independent L1 Operations in Spring 2027 and Become EEZ's First General-Purpose Zone

Gnosis Chain plans to end its independent Layer 1 (L1) operations in Spring 2027 and join the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ). According to Foresight News, the move will make Gnosis Chain the first general-purpose Zone settling to Ethereum. A hard fork will migrate the chain’s state while preserving contracts, balances, addresses, chain ID and the xDAI gas token, so developers will not need to redeploy. Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst said the network chose rapid block production and synchronous composability with Ethereum over decentralized sequencing, meaning its current set of about 200,000 independent validators will not be retained after the migration. She also said the Gnosis DAO spends $7 million to $10 million annually to operate Gnosis Chain as an independent L1. The EEZ’s Devnet Rollup X testnet launched today at Devcon in Mumbai, with demonstrations including a CoW Swap exchange using Ethereum mainnet liquidity in a single transaction and Safe’s atomic owner changes between L1 and L2. Rollup X also demonstrated Falcon post-quantum signature verification, callable by the mainnet; the mainnet gas use for the operation fell from about 5.5 million to about 495,000, a reduction of roughly 91%. Rollup X remains a testnet, and its core protocol is undergoing an independent security audit. The EEZ is a Swiss nonprofit co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Foresight News previously reported that Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina collaborated on the EEZ framework, which is intended to address liquidity fragmentation caused by L2s.