Gnosis Votes on Dissolving Its L1 Into an Ethereum ZK Rollup

GnosisDAO voted on Thursday to end Gnosis Chain's run as an independent Layer-1 blockchain. Proposal GIP-153 passed with 123,158 GNO in favor, 115 against and 151 abstaining, across 54 voters, and turnout of 123,425 cleared the 75,000 quorum with room to spare. Those figures come from the announcement Gnosis itself published on Thursday; the tally is the project's own count. The chain will be rebuilt as a ZK rollup, a network that executes transactions itself and posts cryptographic validity proofs to Ethereum, which then guarantees its state. Gnosis calls the design the "Ethereum Economic Zone", or EEZ, and says its chain will be the first production instance. The target is December 2026 or January 2027. The decision closes out six years of Gnosis running its own consensus.

What the vote approves

Gnosis Chain currently pays its own validator set, secured by staked GNO. That arrangement goes away. After the migration, Ethereum's validators secure the network, and Gnosis inherits mainnet security instead of funding its own with staking rewards. The practical prize is synchronous composability with Ethereum itself; co-founder Martin Koeppelmann said "anyone with a mainnet wallet will be able to use a Gnosis dapp in a single transaction." Settlement on Ethereum means a Gnosis block only becomes final once mainnet has verified its proof, so the network's history becomes as hard to rewrite as Ethereum's own. Cointelegraph, writing on Thursday, put the destination in context: 22 Ethereum rollups already secure $27.82 billion in value. Add validiums and optimiums, two related scaling designs, and the figure is $34.88 billion.

A quarter of the supply stops staking

Passage frees roughly 350,000 staked GNO, about 27% of circulating supply, since a rollup secured by Ethereum has no use for its own stakers. The release is a consequence of the security change, not a separate decision. Once Ethereum's validators take over, staked GNO has no job left to do. For holders, the trade cuts both ways. Staking rewards currently dilute non-stakers by about 2.3% a year, and that drag disappears along with the L1. At the same time, tokens that were locked up securing the chain become free to move, and at the time of writing the DAO had not chosen what replaces staking economics: fee-sharing and buybacks were both still on the table.

The market treated it as good news

GNO rose about 10% to roughly $136 on the result, a three-month high, CryptoSlate reported the same day. The move landed on a broad rally day across crypto, though the vote was the catalyst outlets pointed to. Standard Chartered's Geoffrey Kendrick argued, in comments Cointelegraph carried, that the EEZ structure reduces "the need for bridges (where hacks tend to occur)", a nod to the exploit record of cross-chain bridges. The near-unanimous tally also read differently from the day's other governance story, a contested Optimism vote that moved user airdrop funds.

Six months of rollup debate, answered by ballot

In February, Vitalik Buterin wrote that "The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense." GIP-153 is the first production answer to that line: a live chain with its own validator set choosing absorption over sovereignty. If the schedule holds, the conversion lands in December 2026 or January 2027, and the work between now and then is concrete. Gnosis has to ship the ZK proving stack, wind down its validator set, and settle the open revenue question before the switch. Whether other small L1s follow depends on how the first crossing goes. Gnosis volunteered to find out.