The End of Ethereum's Island Effect: How Does EIL Reconstruct Fragmented L2s into a "Supercomputer"?

Author: imToken

In the previous article of the Interop series, we introduced the Open Intents Framework (OIF), which acts like a universal language, allowing users to express intentions such as “I want to buy an NFT cross-chain,” and be understood by solvers across the network.

But just being “understood” isn’t enough—it needs to be “done.” After all, once your intention is sent out, how does your funding safely move from Base to Arbitrum? How does the target chain verify your signature is valid? Who pays the gas on the target chain?

This involves the core of the “Acceleration” stage in Ethereum’s interoperability roadmap—the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL). At the recent Devconnect, the EF account abstraction team officially brought EIL to center stage.

Simply put, EIL has a highly ambitious goal: To make the user experience across all L2s “look and feel like being on the same chain,” without a hard fork or changes to Ethereum’s underlying consensus.

1. What exactly is EIL?

To understand EIL, don’t be misled by the word “Layer”: EIL is not a new blockchain, nor is it a traditional cross-chain bridge.

Essentially, it is a set of standards and frameworks that combines “account abstraction (ERC-4337)” with “cross-chain messaging” capabilities to build a virtual unified execution environment.

In Ethereum’s current ecosystem, each L2 is an isolated island. For example, your account (EOA) on Optimism and your account on Arbitrum may have the same address, but their states are completely isolated:

• A signature on chain A cannot be directly verified on chain B.
• Assets on chain A are invisible to chain B.

EIL attempts to break down this isolation with two core components:

• ERC-4337-based smart accounts: Using account abstraction to decouple account logic from keys; leveraging the Paymaster mechanism to solve the problem of lacking gas on the target chain; utilizing the Key Manager for multi-chain state synchronization.
• Trust-minimized messaging layer: Establishing standards so that UserOps (user operation objects) can be bundled and securely transmitted to another chain via the rollup’s official bridge or light client proofs.

To put it simply, traditional cross-chain is like traveling abroad: you have to exchange currency (cross-chain assets), apply for a visa (re-authorize), and follow local traffic rules (buy target chain gas). In the EIL era, cross-chain is more like using a Visa card:

No matter which country you’re in, just swipe your card once (sign once) and the underlying banking network (EIL) automatically handles exchange rates, settlement, and verification. You don’t feel the existence of borders.

The EIL solution proposed by the Ethereum Foundation’s account abstraction team envisions this future: Users can complete cross-chain transactions with a single signature, without relying on centralized relays or new trust assumptions, and can initiate from the wallet for seamless settlement between different L2s.

This is actually closer to the ultimate form of “account abstraction.” Compared to the current high-barrier, fragmented operations, this experience will help users create accounts, manage private keys, and handle complex cross-chain transactions automatically.

Especially with native Account Abstraction (AA), all accounts can become smart accounts, allowing users to ignore gas fees (even be unaware of their existence), and truly focus on on-chain experience and asset management.

2. A Paradigm Shift: From “Cross-Chain” to “Chain Abstraction”

If EIL is truly implemented, it could bridge the “last mile” for Web3 mass adoption. This marks a shift in the Ethereum ecosystem from multi-chain competition to chain abstraction and integration, potentially solving the biggest headaches for users and developers.

First, for users, it enables a truly “single-chain experience.”

In short, under the EIL framework, users no longer need to manually switch networks. For example, all your funds are on Base, but you want to play a game on Arbitrum. You simply click start in the game, your wallet pops up a signature request, you sign, and the game begins.

In the background, EIL automatically bundles your UserOp from Base, transmits it to Arbitrum via the messaging layer, and the Paymaster covers your gas and entry fee. For you, it feels as smooth as playing the game directly on Base.

Second, from a security perspective, it completely eliminates the single-point risk of multi-signature bridges.

Traditional cross-chain bridges often rely on a set of external validators (multi-sig). If hackers compromise this group, billions of dollars in assets are at risk. EIL emphasizes “trust minimization,” preferring to leverage the security of the L2 itself (such as storage proofs) to verify cross-chain messages, rather than relying on external third-party trust. This means as long as Ethereum mainnet is secure, cross-chain interactions are relatively secure.

Lastly, for developers, it’s also a unified account standard. Currently, if a DApp wants to be multi-chain, developers must maintain several sets of logic. With EIL, developers can assume users have a full-chain account, only need to implement interfaces based on the ERC-4337 standard, and can naturally support cross-chain users without worrying about which chain the funds are on.

But to realize this vision, there’s a major engineering challenge: How can the hundreds of millions of existing EOA users also enjoy this experience?

After all, migrating from EOA to AA requires users to transfer assets to a new address, which is too cumbersome. This leads to Vitalik Buterin’s EIP-7702 proposal, which cleverly solves compatibility disputes among three previous proposals (EIP-4337, EIP-3074, EIP-5003) by doing something magical: allowing existing EOA accounts to “temporarily transform” into smart contract accounts during a transaction.

This means you don’t need to register a new wallet or transfer assets from your current imToken or other wallets to a new AA account address. Instead, with EIP-7702, your old account can temporarily gain smart contract features (such as batch authorization, sponsored gas, atomic cross-chain actions), and after the transaction, reverts to being the highly compatible EOA.

3. EIL Deployment and the Future

Compared to OIF’s community-driven “bottom-up” approach, EIL has a more official character, being led by the EF account abstraction team (creators of ERC-4337).

Currently, progress is mainly focused on three key areas:

• Multi-chain extension of ERC-4337: The community is researching how to expand the ERC-4337 UserOp structure to include target chain IDs and other cross-chain information, which is the first step in giving smart accounts “clairvoyance.”
• Coordination with ERC-7702: As EIP-7702 (giving EOA smart account capabilities) advances, regular EOA users will also be able to seamlessly join the EIL network in the future, greatly lowering the user threshold.
• Standardized messaging interfaces: Similar to how OIF standardizes intents, EIL is pushing for standardization of underlying message transmission. Optimism’s Superchain, Polygon’s AggLayer, and ZKsync’s Elastic Chain are all exploring interoperability within their ecosystems, while EIL aims to further connect these heterogeneous ecosystems and build a universal messaging layer for the whole network.

Interestingly, EIL’s vision goes beyond just “connecting”—it’s also adding another key foundational capability: privacy.

If EIP-7702 and AA solve “accessibility,” then the Kohaku privacy framework announced by Vitalik at Devconnect may become the next piece of the EIL puzzle, echoing another core of the “Trustless Manifesto”: “censorship resistance.”

At Devconnect, Vitalik stated directly, “privacy is freedom,” and said that Ethereum is on a path to privacy upgrades, aiming to provide real-world privacy and security. To this end, the Ethereum Foundation has established a privacy team of 47 researchers, engineers, and cryptographers, dedicated to making privacy a “first-class property” of Ethereum.

This means future privacy protection will no longer be an optional add-on, but a natural, fundamental ability like transfers. To realize this, the Kohaku framework was born—essentially, Kohaku uses your public key to create a temporary stealth address, enabling you to perform private actions without exposing links to your main wallet.

With this design, future AA accounts will not only be asset management tools, but also privacy shields.

By integrating protocols like Railgun and Privacy Pools, AA accounts will allow users to protect transaction privacy while providing compliant “proof of innocence,” enabling any user to prove their funds are not from illicit sources without revealing specific spending paths.

At this point, we can clearly see the full roadmap for Ethereum interoperability:

• OIF (Intent Framework): Enables the application layer to “understand” user needs;
• EIL (Interoperability Layer): Paves the way for execution at the infrastructure layer.

This may also be a clear signal from the Ethereum Foundation: Ethereum should not be a collection of loosely connected L2s, but one vast, unified supercomputer.

In the future, when EIL is truly implemented, perhaps we will no longer need to explain to new users what L2s or cross-chain bridges are. At that point, all you will see are assets—without the boundaries of chains.