Ethereum Unveils New Technical Details about Interop Layer

Ethereum on Tuesday released new technical details about its upcoming Interop Layer, a system meant to make the network’s growing Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem work like a single chain.

In a post from Yoav Weiss of Ethereum’s Account and Chain Abstraction team, the Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL), originally unveiled this past summer, is described as a way for users to send tokens, mint NFTs, and trade across different rollups without switching networks or relying on bridges.

The system also aims to eliminate the need for wallets and dapps to integrate with each L2 separately, reducing engineering work and reliance on third-party services, the post explains.

If successful, the EIL could address one of Ethereum’s biggest usability issues: fragmentation across rollups. Instead of dealing with multiple networks, bridges, and gas tokens, users and devs could interact with L2s as if they were all part of a single chain.

Ethereum is currently the world’s largest smart contract blockchain with a total value locked (TVL) of over $72.5 billion in decentralized finance (DeFi), according to DefiLlama. Ethereum’s native token Ether (ETH) is currently trading at $3,000 with a market cap of nearly $364 billion, making it the second largest cryptocurrency, according to The Defiant’s price page.

How it Works

Marissa Posner, of the Ethereum Foundation’s Product team, explained to The Defiant that EIL is automatically compatible with all EVM L2s. “Since all we need is that the L2 is an EVM compatible rollup, anyone can deploy EIL, and it doesn’t require explicit integration with the L2,” she said. “For v1, there are a few requirements: Settle to Ethereum L1, expose a canonical bridge, and be EVM-compatible.”

To send multichain transactions, wallets will need to use the EIL SDK or a future ERC-5792 standard. ERC-4337 wallets must add a multichain validation module, while EOA wallets can delegate using EIP-7702 to a compatible implementation provided by the Ethereum Foundation.

“As of today, November 18th, EIL is ready for public testing and experimenting on testnet,” Posner said. “A mainnet rollout for further public use will come after we receive feedback on the protocol and it has gone through testing and auditing.” The team is kicking off the feedback process and sponsoring $6,000 in bounties at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires from November 21–23.

Currently, Ambire implements EIL in its public codebase and plans to support mainnet in the future. Ethereum also has a demo app, Stitch, a cross-chain dapp aggregator that is live now.

“We are already in conversations with several wallet and dapp teams,” Posner added.”Any wallets or dapps that are interested in learning more about EIL are invited to reach out to us.”