The term Ethereum economic zone obviously does a lot of the heavy lifting here, but what makes it easy in your head? What's it take?
I think for me, the core is an effort to rethink what layer 2s are. You get more integration and more power at lower cost. So it's a win-win. The fact that we can allow all these chains to use Ethereum as the ultimate economic operating system for the internet is the most exciting part. This is a very bounded project, not far off in principle.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show about technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization. I'm Sebastian Kuchio, with co-host Fel Ernst. Today we're diving into EEZ, the Ethereum Economic Zone, a new vision to scale Ethereum and bring an app chain vision tightly coupled with Ethereum as an interoperability and proving layer. We'll get into details, but first a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Lido. As Ethereum staking evolves, Lido V3 changes the game with staking vaults offering modular staking infrastructure for builders and institutions. Also, Lido Earn offers curated DeFi strategies. Learn more at lido.fi/stvaults.
I'm good, almost recovered from Berlin Blockchain Week last week.
Berlin Blockchain Week is great, always a pleasure to see the more cypherpunk side of the space. This episode has two parts. First we'll play a fireside chat you did at Dapcon with Vitalik about his EEZ vision. Then we'll discuss it. By the magic of editing, let's go to your fireside with Vitalik.
Fantastic, Vitalik, thank you for being here. This is the last talk in an easy themed block, so I'll ask for your take.
So the next talk will be in a hard block.
Yeah, medium first then hard. I see, okay.
We're still cutting it on the easy side.
I see. So we'll do a tutorial on circle starks after this.
Absolutely. We already heard Martin's, Jordi's, and Philip's take on easy.
Mhm. The term Ethereum economic zone does a lot of heavy lifting. What makes it easy in your head? Is it an economic thing, a single market, or an economic operating system?
For me, the core is rethinking layer 2s to get more benefits and fewer drawbacks. It's about deeper integration with Ethereum, not just a separate EVM chain. Benefits include tight integration with the Ethereum market and user base, less infrastructure responsibility, like with based rollups you don't need your own nodes. You don't need to convince users to create new accounts. Synchronous composability between L2s and better bridging with ZK proofs. So more integration, more power, lower cost. It's a win-win.
That fits super nicely with what Martin said—extending the present, so all zones live in the same now. Jordi said different natured zones extend Ethereum rather than just adding block space. If you think five or ten years in the future, sorting everything that anchors to Ethereum into a few buckets, what are they?
One is privacy, like Aztec and Railgun. I also consider tornado cash and privacy pools as L2s of privacy, not just scalability. Underrated. Second is high TPS for specialized use cases like prediction markets or DeFi. Then having integrated oracles is interesting—oracles are a skeleton in the closet. We need to improve their security. Then ultra-specializing for enterprise use cases, like using proofs to give users guarantees. So there are many directions.
Do you think about chains run by nation states? They're hesitant to put infrastructure on Ethereum. Do you see Ethereum becoming an ultimate settlement layer between nations?
It can happen. We've seen government blockchain projects try consortium chains that don't get interesting properties. Four years later they dump NFTs on mainnet, which is more useful. It's use case dependent. Don't attach too many philosophical connotations to being on L1 or L2. It's a technical matter of what you want to be close to, interoperability needs, scalability, privacy. Sometimes EEZ is good, sometimes just dumping NFTs or ERC20s on mainnet and bridging is the solution.
Yeah, absolutely. Looking at Ethereum's development, it chose censorship resistance over speed, cost, recourse. That creates losers because most users just want payments to clear and get money back if scammed. Should the base layer serve users at all, or be neutral ground for other networks to build user experiences?
It's a difficult trade-off. Attractive to do minimum on the base layer for trust and security, but if it provides too little, you get capture at higher levels. Interoperability gets captured by centralized providers, leading to walled gardens that don't bring freedom. EEZ is helpful because it creates standards for interoperability between L2s by default.
Cool. Let me ask one last question. If I had a crystal ball that could tell me if a specific network exists in the EEZ in 2035, what network would you ask about to gauge success?
Huh? I guess one natural use case is having at least two high-performance DeFi things, like a prediction market or privacy-focused, with easy deposit, easy withdraw, and cross composability between them. Also interesting to see non-financial L2s that integrate governance and asset management.
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Um, so what did you think of that conversation with him? Did you feel he articulated how EEZ benefits Ethereum and the vision well?
Yeah, absolutely. Vitalik is very supportive of the Ethereum economic zone. He hit all the marks.
Yeah, and just to jump off on one point he made—this isn't being actively built by the EF but is supported. Can you talk about who's leading the project and what support you're getting from the EF?
Yes, it's built by us, Nosis and Zisk. Zisk is the proving team around Jordi Bina, who is of ZK Hermes and Polygon fame. The Ethereum Foundation is supporting this financially and endorsing it, which is fantastic. We wanted it to exist for the wider ecosystem, so we built it.
Yeah, it's great they're endorsing it. The EF is focused on many things, so it's cool they're letting Nosis lead with autonomy. You bring experience from building Nosis chain. So let's get straight into it. From your perspective, what is EEZ and the vision?
Absolutely. Back in 2015-2017, the magic of Ethereum was building on what was there before, creating an infinitely expandable programmable financial system. Then fees skyrocketed. We scaled with L2s, fees came down, but composibility disappeared across networks. EEZ leverages real-time proving for synchronous composability, so two networks can talk to each other like the same network, within the same block. This wasn't technically feasible until now.
What makes it technically feasible now?
You can prove your state within the same block. Ethereum's block time is 12 seconds, so if you can prove another chain's state within that, both chains can make a transaction touching both states simultaneously.
So it creates a network of applications independent but composable if they can prove state within a block, like money Legos across chains?
