Gnosis holders have voted in favor of transitioning Gnosis Chain from an independent Layer 1 blockchain to a ZK-rollup that integrates directly with Ethereum. The project's team announced the outcome of the voting which concluded on August 19.
GnosisDAO has approved Gnosis Chain's transition from a standalone Layer 1 into a ZK-proven Ethereum Economic Zone rollup.
GIP-153 results: 123,158 votes in favor, 115 against, 151 abstentions, from 54 voters. The total turnout was 123,425, surpassing the required quorum of 75,000. https://t.co/Pi18HOuE9G
— Gnosis (@gnosis_) August 19, 2026
What Will Change
As outlined in the proposal, Gnosis Chain will become the first operational instance of the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a framework for Ethereum-related rollups first introduced in March this year.
The network will no longer depend on its own set of validators for consensus. Transactions will now be processed on the blockchain of the second-largest cryptocurrency, with security provided by its validators.
Users will not need to transfer assets or applications to a new network; their addresses, balances, and smart contract states will remain intact, and xDAI will continue to serve as the gas payment token.
Staking for GNO will also be affected. With the move away from its own validator set, approximately 350,000 coins—around 27% of the circulating supply—will be unlocked. Incentives for staking tokens from the DAO treasury will cease.
Looking ahead, developers aim to link the GNO economy to network fees, with options such as revenue sharing or token buybacks under consideration. The specific model will be put to a separate vote.
The first launch is expected between December 2026 and January 2027. A full version of the EEZ, featuring bidirectional interactions between networks and real-time ZK proofs, is anticipated during 2027.
Following the announcement, GNO saw a price increase of over 7% in the past 24 hours, reaching $123.
Hourly chart of GNO/USDT on Binance. Source: TradingView.Gnosis Bets on Ethereum
The main advantage of this transition, according to developers, is the ability to interact directly with Ethereum within a single transaction. For instance, an application on Gnosis Chain will be able to access a smart contract or liquidity in the main network without the usual bridge setup.
The EEZ is being developed by Gnosis and ZisK with financial support from the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization. This project aims to address the fragmentation issue in Layer 2 solutions, where liquidity and applications are scattered across multiple individual layers, each requiring its own bridges and infrastructure.
The authors of GIP-153 acknowledged that the initial model of Gnosis Chain failed to provide sufficient competitiveness. They assessed that a separate Layer 1 with lower security and liquidity does not give users adequate reasons to choose it over Ethereum.
According to the team, transitioning to a standard Layer 2 would not resolve this issue amidst over 100 competing solutions.
However, this change entails a compromise regarding decentralization. The proposal's authors explicitly stated that the current architecture of the EEZ, with its rapid block creation, does not support a large independent set of validators. Some functions will be more centralized during the initial phase.
It is worth noting that in April, Gnosis co-founder Frederike Ernst mentioned that Layer 1 blockchains could also join the EEZ.