Post-Quantum Urgency, Ethereum Economic Zone, Glamsterdam Repricing

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Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction, and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Gnosis and Zisk propose an Ethereum Economic Zone to reconnect L2s, EIP-8037 stays in focus amid DevNet fixes, quantum research raises pressure on Ethereum and Bitcoin, and Base doubles down on payments and builders.

Gnosis and Zisk Launch Ethereum Economic Zone to Reconnect Layer 2s With Mainnet
Glamsterdam Repricing Call Keeps Focus on EIP-8037 as DevNet 3 Bugs Are Addressed
New Quantum Papers Sharpen Post-Quantum Pressure on Ethereum and Bitcoin
Base’s 2026 Roadmap Centers on Payments, Markets, and Builder Growth

Please fasten your belts!

Gnosis and Zisk Launch Ethereum Economic Zone to Reconnect Layer 2s With Mainnet

Gnosis and Zisk have unveiled the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a new framework backed by the Ethereum Foundation that aims to reduce fragmentation across Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem and strengthen Ethereum mainnet’s role as the base economic layer.

The proposal argues that Ethereum’s rollup strategy has solved scaling, but created a new problem: every L2 has become its own silo, with separate liquidity, bridges, wallet integrations, and duplicated infrastructure. EEZ is designed as an L1<>L2 framework, not just another rollup stack, with the goal of making rollups extend Ethereum rather than branch away from it.

Its core feature is synchronous composability across Ethereum mainnet and participating EEZ rollups. In practice, that means a smart contract on one EEZ rollup could call a contract on Ethereum or another EEZ rollup, receive a response, and use it within the same transaction. The model is meant to enable atomic cross-chain execution, shared liquidity, and a more unified security environment.

The framework also keeps ETH as the gas token, settlement asset, and source of truth, rather than allowing participating rollups to pull value away into separate token economies. For protocols, the pitch is simpler deployment and less duplicated integration work. For users, the promise is a more seamless “one Ethereum” experience without constant bridging and chain-specific friction.

Gnosis and Zisk said technical specifications, benchmarks, tooling details, and integration paths will be published in the coming weeks. Founding alliance members include Aave, Titan, Beaver Build, Centrifuge, and xStocks, with the effort positioned as open-source, shared Ethereum infrastructure.

Glamsterdam Repricing Call Keeps Focus on EIP-8037 as DevNet 3 Bugs Are Addressed

Ethereum developers used the fifth Glamsterdam repricings call to focus almost entirely on EIP-8037, the proposal that raises state creation gas costs, while keeping broader repricing work on hold until updated benchmarking data is ready. The main priority was stabilizing Bolt DevNet 3, where client teams are still ironing out interoperability issues before launch.

The discussion centered on a small set of specification mismatches and implementation bugs that are currently blocking smooth DevNet 3 coordination. Spencer said another spec update would be released the same day with only limited adjustments, mainly to align the execution-spec code with the EIP markdown and reduce unnecessary back-and-forth between clients. Developers stressed that these should be treated as narrow fixes for DevNet 3, not a broader redesign of the proposal.

Several technical edge cases were reviewed, including how state gas is consumed in failed CREATE and CREATE2 paths, when static call checks occur, and whether state gas should be returned to a parent frame after failures. The broad direction from the call was to avoid adding the larger “state gas refill on failure” change to DevNet 3, and instead leave that debate for later, most likely DevNet 4.

Maria argued that state gas should represent the long-term cost of actual state growth, meaning it should ideally only be charged when new state is truly created. Still, participants agreed that changing this behavior affects deeper EVM gas semantics and needs more review before being adopted. To move that forward, Maria said she would open a fuller discussion on Ethereum Magicians so teams can compare options in detail before the next devnet cycle.

New Quantum Papers Sharpen Post-Quantum Pressure on Ethereum and Bitcoin

Justin Drake said two newly released papers mark a major shift in the quantum threat discussion, arguing that recent advances in Shor’s algorithm and hardware-specific optimization make the case for post-quantum migration more urgent.

His warning is grounded in two fresh papers: a Google Quantum AI paper on breaking secp256k1-style elliptic curve cryptography more efficiently, and an Oratomic/Caltech paper estimating much lower qubit requirements for a neutral-atom implementation.

The Google paper is the firmer of the two from a fact-checking standpoint. It estimates that attacking the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem could require fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and fewer than 90 million Toffoli gates, and that on superconducting architectures the attack could run in minutes with under 500,000 physical qubits. That broadly matches Drake’s summary, including his point that the work targets the signature systems used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The second paper is more aggressive and should be treated more cautiously, as Drake himself noted. The Oratomic/Caltech paper says Shor’s algorithm could run with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits, and that a 26,000-qubit system could solve ECC discrete logs in a few days on a neutral-atom architecture. That supports the broader claim that resource estimates are falling fast, even if the exact timeline to a cryptographically relevant machine remains uncertain.

For Ethereum, the takeaway is not that Q-Day has arrived, but that the margin for delay is shrinking. The papers do not prove a break is imminent, yet they do strengthen the case for accelerating account abstraction, key migration, and post-quantum planning before the threat becomes operational rather than theoretical.

Base’s 2026 Roadmap Centers on Payments, Markets, and Builder Growth

Base has outlined its 2026 mission, vision, and strategy, framing the next phase of its roadmap around three priorities: building global markets, scaling payments and stablecoins, and becoming the home for builders. The post positions Base as infrastructure for a broader onchain economy, building on what it described as major 2025 growth across trading, stablecoins, apps, and ecosystem funding.

On the markets side, Base says it wants to upgrade the chain with market-specific infrastructure, support new ERCs for smart accounts and tokens, and scale toward sub-second settlement at sub-cent cost. It also says it wants Base to host a wider range of assets and market types, including equities, commodities, tokenized assets, predictions, perpetuals, and spot trading.

For payments, Base is doubling down on stablecoins after reporting more than $17 trillion in stablecoin volume across 26 local currencies and 17 countries in 2025. Its 2026 plan includes privacy primitives, native account abstraction, stablecoin gas payments, and protocol-level support for memos, policies, and rewards, alongside deeper liquidity for stablecoin borrowing, lending, and trading.

Base is also expanding its builder strategy with a strong focus on agents and developer growth. The roadmap highlights agent-native smart accounts, tooling such as CLI and MCP access, support for standards like x402, and growth programs including Base Batches, builder councils, ERC-8021 builder codes, analytics dashboards, and liquidity incentives.

Taken together, the strategy shows Base leaning harder into a thesis that onchain infrastructure is moving beyond crypto-native use cases and toward a unified economy built around tokenized markets, internet-native money, and AI-driven participation.

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