In August, GnosisDAO approved a plan to turn Gnosis Chain from a standalone Layer 1 blockchain into a zero-knowledge proven rollup that settles to Ethereum every block. It is set to be the first instance of the Ethereum Economic Zone, a framework that lets specialised chains call Ethereum mainnet within a single transaction.
Dr Friederike Ernst is a physicist and co-founder of Gnosis, which she set up in 2015 and which describes itself as a full-stack ecosystem bridging decentralised technology with everyday finance. She is also co-host of the Epicenter podcast. In written answers to The Fintech Times, she explained what the vote settles, what it leaves open, and why she thinks the main beneficiaries are regulated financial firms.
“What is settled is the model,” Ernst said of the vote. “Gnosis Chain stops running its own independent security and settles directly into Ethereum, inside the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) framework. That is the decision the vote confirms, and it is the part that matters to anyone building on us, because it fixes what they are integrating against.”
What remains, she said, is engineering: refining the zero-knowledge proving system for production, completing the integration, and a few pieces of shared Ethereum infrastructure landing on schedule. Gnosis says much of the work was demonstrated live at EthCC, and it is targeting the end of this year into the beginning of next. “For a fintech evaluating us now, the practical point is that nothing about the settlement model is still up for negotiation, so integration work started today does not get thrown away at genesis.”
One integration instead of many
Although the announcement stressed consumers and decentralised finance, Ernst argued that regulated firms stand to gain most. “For banks, payment firms and fintechs, this is where most of the value sits,” she said.
“A fintech that wants to offer its customers savings, lending, tokenised equities or stablecoin payments today buys each of those from a different vendor. Each one comes with its own contract, its own integration, its own risk review, its own outage, and its own margin taken out of the middle.” In the EEZ, she said, a firm connects once and switches those capabilities on for its customers under its own brand. “Adding the next product is a configuration decision rather than a twelve-month vendor cycle.”
The regulated side, she said, is designed in. Some partners need stronger anti-money laundering controls at the protocol level, and others need transaction privacy their competitors cannot read. “Where those capabilities do not exist, we build them as custom modules with the partner, rather than telling them to work around the gap.”
She set out the commercial case in three parts: the margin fintechs currently give away to vendors, revenue from savings, investing or credit products that are uneconomic to build through vendor integrations, and balances that stay in the app. “None of this requires the fintech to become a crypto company,” she said. “The customer sees a savings product or an investment product in the app they already use. What sits underneath is our problem, not theirs.”
Synchronous composability in practice
The technical feature Gnosis is promoting is synchronous composability: a transaction on Gnosis Chain can call Ethereum mainnet and use the result in the same transaction. Ernst described what that changes for a customer who taps to earn on a balance. Today that means bridging to where the liquidity is, waiting, executing, bridging back and reconciling two ledgers. “That is why most fintechs either do not offer it or buy a wrapped version of it from a vendor,” she said.
“With synchronous composability, that whole sequence becomes one transaction. The balance reaches liquidity on Ethereum mainnet and the result comes back, together, in one step. It either completes or it does not happen at all.” Customers see one action rather than a multi-step flow, engineering teams reconcile against a single atomic outcome instead of a partial state on a bridge, and product teams no longer have to recreate liquidity on their own chain.
What the chain gives up
The trade is who secures the network. “Today that is an independent community of validators. Afterwards it is Ethereum’s validators,” Ernst said. “That is a significant shift that we have not treated lightly, but it is the trade that makes everything else possible.”
On timing, she said a few years ago the move would have meant compromising on the technology or the user experience. “Neither is acceptable when the end customer is a retail banking customer who has never heard of a validator. The proving technology and the Ethereum infrastructure have matured to the point where it no longer requires that compromise.”
For existing users, she said, very little changes: no new chain, wallet or address, the same fee token, and no migration project for teams building on it. Validators face a genuine transition. “This is a community that has run infrastructure for Gnosis Chain for years, and that experience stays valuable,” she said, citing Gnosis VPN as one place where operating infrastructure continues to matter. “The aim is not to switch one system off and another on, but to give people a route through and meaningful ways to keep contributing.”
Neutrality and the liquidity claim
The EEZ is co-developed with ZisK and part-funded by the Ethereum Foundation, yet Gnosis runs its first instance. “The framework is not owned by Gnosis,” Ernst said. It sits under a Swiss non-profit structure rather than inside a single company. “Being first to run an instance does not come with the ability to write the rules to suit ourselves, because the rules exist independently of us.” For partners, she said, that means the framework outlives any individual operator, Gnosis included.
Gnosis has argued that the zone does not need to compete for total value locked because its addressable liquidity is Ethereum’s own. Asked for the strongest counter-argument, Ernst was direct. “Access to liquidity is not the same as use of it. You can open the door, but if nobody designs a product around walking through it, the door does not matter.”
That, she said, is a distribution problem rather than a technology one, which is why Gnosis is spending the pre-launch window with fintechs and protocols. “The measure we hold ourselves to is not total value locked, it is how many consumer products are live and how many customers are reached through them.”
On the protocols named in the announcement, including Aave, Spark, Fluid, CoW Swap, Safe and Centrifuge, she was careful. “The honest answer is that these are committed partners exploring the space with us rather than finished integrations, and I will not speak for anyone else’s timeline.” Gnosis intends to take the consumer-facing role across payments, savings, lending and tokenised assets, drawing on assets and protocols already on Ethereum.
Gnosis is targeting genesis for the EEZ instance around the turn of 2026 and 2027, conditional on the shared Ethereum dependencies landing.
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