Interoperability, Gnosis and the Ethereum Economic Zone

The Host
Jan Philipp Fritsche — Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. Co-Founder of Bermuda. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/

The Guest

Friederike Ernst — Co-founder of Gnosis, one of Ethereum's oldest companies, and an advocate of the Ethereum Economic Zone. Gnosis has built Safe, CowSwap, and Gnosis Pay, and continues to push the ecosystem's R&D frontier.
https://x.com/tw_tter

To solve scalability, Ethereum broke composability. Can it get both back?

In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Friederike Ernst of Gnosis to unpack the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), introduced at ETHCC this year, and what it means for the fragmented world of L2s. The starting point is a history lesson. In 2015 there was one Ethereum, and everything composed with everything: oracles, stablecoins, prediction markets, and DEXs all plugged seamlessly into one another. Success brought congestion, fees spiked to $50 or $100 a transaction, and the ecosystem scaled via L2s. Fees came down, but the different zones stopped being able to talk to each other in the same block. As Friederike puts it, crossing between them became like international travel: passport, border, delay.

The EEZ's fix is real-time proving. Using zero-knowledge proofs to enforce atomic transactions across chains, two operations become entangled so that either both happen or neither does, no waiting for finality on one side and then the other. It's the difference between traveling between countries and simply picking up a telephone to call into a smart contract on another chain and use the answer in the same block. Friederike walks through why "within the same block" matters, why Ethereum's 12-second heartbeat sets the ceiling, and how Gnosis Chain, the first chain migrating in, will drop to two-second blocks with five Gnosis-only blocks between each Ethereum-composing one.

A large part of the conversation is a genuinely clear explanation of the plumbing: why this is being led by Gnosis and Jordi Baylina's ZisK rather than the Ethereum Foundation (which is funding it), and the pivotal and under-appreciated role of block builders. Jan and Friederike detour into MEV and how modern Ethereum blocks are actually built, because the EEZ depends on it: with more than 80% of block-building capacity already committed, the cross-chain "dance" gets abstracted away from users entirely. Apps like Aave, Safe, CowSwap, Spark, and Monerium can opt into new business logic, such as borrowing against your global collateral across all EEZ chains rather than the assets on a single chain.

The strategic payoff is specialization. Today's L2 landscape is full of "mini-Ethereums" fighting for relevance by offering a cheaper but worse version of the same thing. In the EEZ, a chain can do one thing extremely well, an oracle-only chain that lets you pay Ethereum gas only for the data points you actually use, or a privacy-first identity chain where your documents never leave the chain and only a proof of your age, funds, or reputation is passed along. Going between them stops feeling like cross-chain at all.

The final act turns philosophical, and it's the most provocative stretch. Friederike makes the case that retail may not belong on Ethereum mainnet at all: censorship resistance means no recourse, so a fat-fingered or phished transaction is simply gone. The EEZ lets zones offer safety nets, delayed large transfers, a call before you wire $20,000 abroad, refusing to process obvious hacks like an infinite mint, without compromising the neutral base layer. She frames a future of chains with different characters: the CCTV-everywhere "Singapores," the permissive "Switzerlands," the privacy-adamant "European Unions," with users free to move between them rather than being forced to swim in Ethereum's shark-infested waters. Jan connects it to a familiar theme: code is law at the base layer, with a second layer that keeps users safe and lets law still be law. And on why neutrality matters, Friederike points to SWIFT freezing Russia's reserves as a warning: administer sanctions on rails that are supposed to be neutral, and geopolitical blocs simply build their own.

The episode closes on Gnosis itself, the R&D lab that spins out Safe, CowSwap, and Gnosis Pay rather than scaling them, and where the real adoption story now looks nothing like a crypto product at all: Gnosis Pay powering Opera's MiniPay for millions in emerging markets, blockchain rails invisible behind a phone number.

The takeaway is a reframing. The L2 thesis traded composability for scale. Real-time proving may hand it back, and in doing so turn a landscape of interchangeable mini-Ethereums into a network of specialized zones you never notice you're moving between.