GnosisDAO votes to retire L1, unlock 27% of GNO supply

GnosisDAO has approved a plan to retire Gnosis Chain's standalone Layer 1 blockchain. The move will unlock roughly 350,000 staked GNO tokens, equivalent to about 27% of the token's circulating supply.

Under GIP-153, Gnosis Chain will become a zero-knowledge-proven Ethereum Economic Zone rollup that settles directly to Ethereum every block. The network will eventually retire its independent validator set and inherit security from Ethereum validators instead.

The unlocked GNO tokens are already counted as circulating supply. Ending staking would make them liquid again and remove their current role in securing the chain.

GNO rallied 10% to as high as about $136 around the governance decision, its highest level since May, CryptoSlate data showed. The move came despite the prospect of a sizable increase in liquid GNO and reflected investor attention on Gnosis' deeper integration with Ethereum.

The approval is a direction-level mandate rather than a final launch decision. GnosisDAO did not approve funding or a completed technical design. The first EEZ version is targeted for around December 2026 or January 2027, depending on required infrastructure being ready.

The transition will also force Gnosis to rethink GNO's economics after staking disappears. Gnosis currently pays validator rewards from its treasury because network fees cover only a fraction of its security costs. GIP-153 estimates that model dilutes non-stakers by about 2.3% annually. Once the validator set is retired, the staking subsidy would end and Gnosis intends to link GNO instead to revenue generated by the rollup.

The exact mechanism remains unresolved. Gnosis is considering options including fee sharing or GNO buybacks tied to network revenue. A separate governance proposal is expected after the economics of operating the rollup become clearer.

The broader bet is that Gnosis can give applications direct access to Ethereum's liquidity without requiring users to bridge assets between separate networks. Its planned synchronous composability would allow a Gnosis contract to call an Ethereum contract and use the result within the same atomic transaction.

Martin Koeppelmann, Co-Founder and CEO, told CryptoSlate:

"Ethereum is not scaling into one economy; it's scaling into a hundred islands. This proposal is Gnosis choosing the other path. After the transition, anyone with a mainnet wallet will be able to use a Gnosis dapp in a single transaction, and a Gnosis account will be able to use anything on Ethereum. Same block, no bridges."

Several DeFi projects have committed to building on the environment, including Aave, Spark, Fluid, CoW Swap, Safe, and Centrifuge.

The transition comes with a decentralization trade-off. Gnosis Ltd. is expected to operate the sequencer that initially orders transactions and produces blocks, while proofs and settlement move to Ethereum. GIP-153 explicitly describes the move toward a less decentralized execution layer as deliberate.

For GNO holders, the change replaces one established source of token utility with an unfinished revenue model while simultaneously releasing a large block of staked tokens back into liquid markets.