Gnosis Chain Plans Spring 2027 Move to Ethereum Economic Zone
Gnosis Chain targets spring 2027 for a move to Ethereum settlement, retiring its validator set while preserving contracts, balances and the xDAI gas token.
Key Notes
- Gnosis Chain targets spring 2027 for a transition from an independent L1 to Ethereum settlement.
- Contracts and balances carry over through a hard fork while xDAI remains the gas token.
- The current validator set will retire and staked GNO will unlock at activation.
Gnosis Chain plans to stop operating as an independent layer-one blockchain in spring 2027 and join the Ethereum Economic Zone, replacing its own consensus system with settlement on Ethereum.
In a November 4 announcement, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst said the network would become the EEZ’s first general-purpose zone. A hard fork will preserve existing contracts, balances, addresses, the chain ID and xDAI as the gas token, without requiring applications to redeploy.
The Trade-Off Behind Retiring the Validator Set
The change will retire a set of roughly 200,000 validators. Ernst described that loss as the decision’s main regret, arguing that fast blocks, synchronous interaction with Ethereum and decentralized sequencing cannot all be delivered together. Gnosis has chosen the first two.
Economics also influenced the move. Ernst said running an independent L1 costs GnosisDAO $7 million to $10 million annually, including spending on infrastructure and liquidity that already exist on Ethereum.
The validator guidance says operators should continue running their nodes until activation. At the fork, staked GNO will unlock and GNO will remain the governance token. RPC and archive node operators will retain their execution clients while dropping the consensus-layer software.
Ethereum Liquidity in the Same Transaction
The aim is to let a Gnosis application call an Ethereum mainnet contract and receive the result within one transaction. That could allow trading or lending applications to use mainnet markets without a separate bridge transfer for each interaction.
Gnosis’s technical documentation describes a Gnosis-operated composer taking over block production, with data published to Ethereum blobs. It targets two-second blocks, compared with five seconds today; Ethereum settlement remains a separate stage.
The rollout is staged. The initial design supports calls from Gnosis EEZ into Ethereum, while reverse calls, nested execution and interaction between EEZ instances follow later. Proving is also expected to begin with an interim setup, likely based on trusted execution environments, before moving to real-time zero-knowledge proofs.
A New Foundation for the Existing Network
The earlier governance proposal envisaged replacing treasury-funded staking subsidies with revenue from network activity. It left the mechanism connecting that revenue to GNO for a later decision, discussing possible fee sharing or buybacks rather than promising either.
CoinScreamer’s EEZ coverage examined the framework’s attempt to reconnect Ethereum’s fragmented applications and liquidity. The Gnosis plan applies that approach to an existing network, keeping its applications in place while changing the infrastructure beneath them.
Ernst said the Rollup X public test network is already demonstrating cross-chain transactions, but is not intended to hold significant value. The core protocol is undergoing an independent security audit.
The spring target is not an activation block. Gnosis says the precise fork details will be published before the transition; until then, the existing L1 continues operating.
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