Gnosis Chain is transitioning from a standalone Layer 1 to an Ethereum-settled rollup and retiring its independent validator set, according to an announcement from Gnosis Chain and a proposal published on GnosisDAO's governance forum.
For GNO stakers, the approved direction would unlock roughly 350,000 GNO when the validator set is sunset and end the treasury-funded staking subsidy. For users and developers, xDAI would remain the gas token, while addresses, balances and contract state would continue without migration to a new chain.
The proposal's main technical promise is atomic access from Gnosis to Ethereum contracts and liquidity. But that synchronous composability will be one-directional at launch, with calls from Ethereum into Gnosis and broader cross-instance composability deferred to later development.
The change would make Gnosis Chain a Gnosis-operated instance of the Ethereum Economic Zone framework. The proposal says the network would produce blocks every two seconds, prove its state every Ethereum block and settle to Ethereum Layer 1.
The vote approved a strategic direction rather than a final technical design and requested no funding. Gnosis Ltd will initially operate a centralized composer that orders transactions, builds blocks and submits them for proving and settlement.
