2026-11-04 –, Lotus Stage 1
The Ethereum Economic Zone puts users and liquidity back in the same block: contracts on different chains call each other and settle atomically, with no bridges and no wrapped assets. Any network that can prove its state within a block can join, EVM or not, public or private, without changing Ethereum. We will show it working, live. Finally, a back-of-the-envelope look at Ethereum’s physical limits: one chain can carry the world’s payments, but only many chains acting as one can carry its economy.
- What actually limits scaling. State, compute, bandwidth. Max out L1 entirely, with bandwidth as the binding constraint, and see where that lands us.
- What would we use it for? Compare the ceiling of a fully scaled Ethereum against the world's financial transactions per second, then against the far larger set of interactions that carry value. Even best-case L1 falls orders of magnitude short.
- Even if it could scale, not everyone belongs there. Ethereum's choices on privacy and censorship resistance mean no recourse when things go wrong. Should vanilla users transact on L1 at all? Institutions have their own reasons not to make a public chain their primary home.
- The EEZ as the answer. It lets networks that are nothing alike (EVM or non-EVM, privacy-first, permissioned, validiums) compose synchronously while settling on Ethereum: one settlement layer, many economies.
Not a workaround for Ethereum's limits, but the architecture you arrive at once you take them seriously.
Friederike Ernst co-founded Gnosis, which has spent a good decade building Ethereum infrastructure and occasionally releasing it into the wild (Safe, CoW Protocol). A physicist by training, she is a co-initiator of the Ethereum Economic Zone, an attempt to make very different chains compose as one economy. She remains on speaking terms with the laws of physics.