The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is announcing a new effort aimed at making the Ethereum ecosystem feel more like a single chain, without compromising its core cypherpunk principles.
In a blog post published on Friday, Aug. 29, the foundation outlined a new initiative called the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL), which will be focused on “making Ethereum feel like one chain again,” without compromising on the network’s core values, such as censorship resistance, open source development, privacy and security.
“EIL is a trustless cross-L2 interop layer, enabling seamless multichain transactions while keeping the user in control, preserving privacy and Ethereum-level censorship resistance,” the Ethereum Foundation said in the post.
A design document for the new layer, which would allow seamless cross-Layer 2 (L2) transactions, is set to be published publicly in October, the blog post notes.
For context, currently, when a user withdraws from Base, Optimism or any other L2 chain, the funds aren’t available on Ethereum mainnet right away. There’s a built-in 3.5-day challenge period to ensure everything is secure, per data from L2BEAT.
Reducing Wait Time
The EF’s blog post also outlined ongoing research on reducing Ethereum’s finality time “from today’s 13-19 minutes to the order of seconds,” and efforts to expand data availability through technologies such as danksharding — a method to make it cheaper and more efficient for rollups to post data on Ethereum — though the timeframe for those remains unclear.
In early August, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued on X that achieving near-instant withdrawals would require replacing optimistic proof systems, which take multiple days to finalize, with zero-knowledge proof systems.
Buterin particularly proposed a “2-of-3” approach combining ZK proofs, optimistic proofs, and trusted execution environments to boost both the speed and security of L2s in a bid to make them efficient enough so that users wouldn’t need to use cross-chain bridges just to avoid long waits when moving funds.
