Gnosis announced today that the Gnosis Chain will cease operating as a standalone first-layer network in Spring 2027. The network will connect to Ethereum as the first general-purpose zone of the Ethereum Economic Zone.
The transition will be implemented via a hard fork. Existing contracts, user balances, addresses, and network IDs will be preserved. xDAI, used for transaction fees, will also remain.
Gnosis therefore states that developers will not need to reinstall their applications.
The decision is driven by costs and fragmented liquidity issues. According to the statement, operating Gnosis Chain as an independent network costs Gnosis DAO approximately $7–10 million per year.
The goal of the new system is to allow a transaction on Gnosis to utilize liquidity on the Ethereum mainnet within the same transaction. A swap that accesses mainnet liquidity using CoW Swap was also demonstrated on the Rollup X testnet, which launched today at Devcon.
A significant consequence of the change concerns the existing validator structure. Gnosis has announced that the current system, consisting of approximately 200,000 independent validators, will not be maintained after the transition.
