Gnosis Chain to Transition to Ethereum L2 in Spring 2027, Ending Its Standalone L1 Era

November 4: In an official blog post, Gnosis announced that Gnosis Chain will stop operating as a standalone L1 through a hard fork in spring 2027, transitioning into an Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) region that settles to Ethereum and becoming its first general-purpose region. Contracts, balances, addresses, chain ID and xDAI as the gas token will all remain unchanged, so developers will not need to redeploy. Gnosis said that based on current DeFi TVL, Gnosis Chain after the transition will rank among the top 10 Ethereum L2s and become the first L2 that can compose synchronously with mainnet; however, its validator set of about 200,000 independent validators will not be retained after the transition. Gnosis said operating Gnosis Chain as a standalone L1 costs Gnosis DAO roughly $7 million to $10 million per year.

On the same day, the EEZ devnet Rollup X went live at Devcon in Mumbai, having demonstrated CoW Swap using mainnet liquidity on Rollup X to complete swaps, and Safe atomically changing owners across L1 and L2. EEZ is a Swiss nonprofit jointly funded by the Ethereum Foundation, proposed by Gnosis and ZisK in March this year.