Ethereum Foundation reveals latest work on 'Interop Layer' to make L2 ecosystem 'feel like one chain'

Ethereum Foundation researchers are working on a new way to make Ethereum's diverse Layer 2 ecosystem "feel like one chain."

On Tuesday, coinciding with the Devconnect conference in Argentina, the EF's Account Abstraction team published a blog post outlining new details for the upcoming Ethereum Interop Layer, first floated in August.

"What if all the L2s felt like a single, unified Ethereum? No bridges to think about, no chain names to recognize, no fragmented balances or assets," foundation research Yoav Weiss wrote. "That’s the vision of the Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL): making Ethereum feel like one chain again — while preserving the trust-minimized, decentralized foundations we all care about."

While still under development, the Interop Layer could help solve the fragmentation issues unleashed by Ethereum's Layer 2 scaling roadmap, which created largely siloed ecosystems of users and liquidity and countless UX issues.

The Interop Layer is an onchain protocol that will enable users and applications to "seamlessly interact with the entire ecosystem." Rather than creating a new universal bridge or interchain communication protocol, the Interop Layer takes a "wallet-centric" view into unifying the EVM environment.

With the Interop Layer, Ethereum wallets and dapps will be "multichain-native by default" and new and existing rollups will be “automatically compatible.” In practice, this means users can transfer assets anywhere within the Ethereum environment without knowing what specific chain they’re using, Weiss wrote.

The Interop Layer, which is live for testing, is powered by ERC-4337 account abstraction, the improvement proposal introduced in 2023 that makes it possible for user accounts to behave like smart contracts.