GNO holders have approved the transition of Gnosis Chain from an independent Layer 1 blockchain to a ZK rollup with settlements directly on Ethereum. The project team announced the results of the vote, 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 for, 115 against, 151 abstaining, from 54 voters. Turnout was 123,425 against a quorum of 75,000. https://t.co/Pi18HOuE9G
— Gnosis (@gnosis_) August 19, 2026
What Will Change
According to the proposal, Gnosis Chain will become the first operational instance of the EEZ—a framework for Ethereum-linked rollups introduced in March this year.
The network will no longer rely on its own set of validators for consensus. Settlements will move to the blockchain of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and security will depend on its validators.
Users will not need to transfer assets or applications to the new network. Addresses, balances, and the state of smart contracts will remain intact, and xDAI will continue to be the token for gas payments.
Changes will affect staking of GNO. With the discontinuation of its own validator set, approximately 350,000 coins—about 27% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply—will be unlocked. Subsidies for token locking in the network from the DAO treasury will cease.
Developers plan to link GNO’s economy to network fees in the future. Options under consideration include revenue sharing or token buybacks. A specific model will be put to a separate vote.
The initial launch is scheduled for December 2026 to January 2027. The full version of EEZ, featuring two-way interaction between networks and real-time ZK proofs, is expected in 2027.
Following the news, GNO rose by more than 7% over the past day to $123.
Gnosis Bets on Ethereum
The main advantage of the transition, according to developers, is the ability to interact directly with Ethereum within a single transaction. For example, an application on Gnosis Chain will be able to access a smart contract or liquidity in the main network without the usual bridge scheme.
EEZ is being developed by Gnosis and ZisK with financial support from the non-profit Ethereum Foundation. The project aims to address the fragmentation issue of L2: currently, liquidity and applications are spread across multiple separate 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 for the network. In their view, a separate L1 with less security and liquidity does not give users enough reasons to choose it over Ethereum.
The team believes that transitioning to a regular L2 would not solve this problem amid more than 100 competing solutions.
However, the change involves a compromise on decentralization. The proposal’s authors explicitly stated that the current EEZ architecture with fast block creation does not allow for a large independent set of validators. Some functions will be more centralized at the initial stage.
In April, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst stated that L1 blockchains could also join the EEZ.
