Ethereum on Tuesday announced new technical details about its upcoming interoperability layer, a system aimed at making the network’s growing Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem function like a single chain.
A post by Yoav Weiss from Ethereum’s account and chain abstraction team describes the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL), first announced this summer, as a way for users to send tokens, generate NFTs, and trade between different rollups without switching networks or relying on bridges.
The system also aims to eliminate the need to integrate wallets and dapps with each L2 separately, reducing engineering effort and dependence on third-party services, the post explains.
If successful, EIL could address one of Ethereum’s biggest usability problems: fragmentation between rollups. Users and developers can interact with L2 as if it were part of a single chain instead of dealing with multiple networks, bridges, and gas tokens.
According to DefiLlama, Ethereum is currently the world’s largest smart contract blockchain in decentralized finance (DeFi) with total value locked (TVL) of over $72.5 billion. According to The Defiant’s price page, Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH), is currently trading at $3,000 and has a market capitalization of approximately $364 billion, making it the second-largest cryptocurrency.
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Marissa Posner from the Ethereum Foundation’s product team explained to The Defiant that EIL is automatically compatible with all EVM L2. “All we need is for L2 to be an EVM-compatible rollup, so anyone can deploy EIL and no explicit integration with L2 is required,” she said. “For v1, there are a few requirements: be Ethereum L1 compliant, expose a canonical bridge, and be compatible with EVM.”
To send multi-chain transactions, wallets must use the EIL SDK or the future ERC-5792 standard. ERC-4337 wallets will need to add a multi-chain validation module, while EOA wallets can use EIP-7702 to delegate to a compatible implementation provided by the Ethereum Foundation.
“As of today, November 18th, EIL is ready for public testing and experimentation on testnet,” Posner said. “After receiving feedback on the protocol and undergoing testing and auditing, mainnet deployment for further public use will occur.” The team will begin the feedback process and sponsor a $6,000 bounty at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires from November 21-23.
Currently, Ambire is implementing EIL in its public codebase and plans to support mainnet in the future. Ethereum also has a demo app called Stitch, a cross-chain DAPP aggregator, which is currently live.
“We are already in talks with several wallet and dapp teams,” Posner added. “Wallets and dapps interested in learning more about EIL are encouraged to contact us.”
