A look at Linea Network, a ZkEVM rollup launched by Ethereum software company Consensys, which recently announced its mainnet alpha.
On July 11, ConsenSys announced the launch of Linea mainnet alpha, which will onboard testnet partners before opening up the network to users. With over 100 partners and decentralized applications (Dapps), 5.5 million unique wallets and over 47 million transactions, this is one of the most promising zkEVM rollup launches so far this year, following Polygon and ZkSync’s announcements.
What is the hype behind Linea? Let’s dive in.
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What Is ConsenSys?
Founded in 2014, ConsenSys was set up by Ethereum co-founder, Joseph Lubin, to develop infrastructure and applications to support the Ethereum ecosystem and the development of DApps on the blockchain.
Almost nine years later, ConsenSys has established itself as a dominant player in the crypto infrastructure space, with widely-used products such as Ethereum browser-based wallet, MetaMask, crypto development suite, Infura, and smart contract development framework, Truffle, among others.
Read: What Is MetaMask?
Source: ConsenSys Blog (link)
In March 2023, ConsenSys unveiled the public testnet of Linea, their zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) L2 solution built on Ethereum. In the same week, Polygon released Polygon zkEVM on mainnet and Matter Labs released zkSync Era, two other zkEVM chains built on Ethereum as well.
Source: Linea Mirror (link)
Finally, after three months in public testnet, ConsenSys announced that they will be rolling out Linea Mainnet Alpha, starting with the onboarding of their partners before a public roll out to users during EthCC Paris.
What Is Linea?
Linea is a fully EVM equivalent zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup), designed to scale Ethereum with higher throughput and lowered transaction fees. Linea relies on an innovative, internally-built, lattice-powered prover which utilizes zkSNARK technology. It enables proofs to be generated quickly and yet does not require a trusted setup, which has long been a flaw of zkSNARK technology.
Source: ConsenSys (link)
On Linea, transaction fees are expected to be 15X to 20X cheaper than on the Ethereum mainnet. In line with their history in building developer tooling and infrastructure, Linea is designed to be developer friendly, supporting ConsenSys’ MetaMask, Truffle and Infura natively. The chain is also designed to be composable and approachable, meaning that developers do not need to be zkEVM or zk-rollup experts to build on it.
As a fully EVM equivalent zkEVM chain, this makes Linea a Type 2 zkEVM according to Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin’s classification of zkEVM chains. This means that the chain will look and feel much like Ethereum, and will support almost all existing Ethereum DApps. The core differences only affect the interactions with the L1 such as block structure and state tree, rather than the application layer (i.e. the zkEVM chain itself).
A fully EVM equivalent zkEVM also means that developers and protocols can migrate any code from Ethereum to Linea without rewriting any code or additional audits. Similarly, if developers build a product for Linea but find it more suitable for Ethereum or other EVM chains, they can easily redeploy their code elsewhere.
Source: Vitalik Buterin’s blog (link)
The Linea Voyage
Shortly after the launch of the Linea public testnet, the Linea team announced the Linea Voyage, a nine-week campaign to orientate new users to the Linea ecosystem and the applications that were live on the Linea testnet. These tasks covered all verticals, from bridging, decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, gaming, social apps, and even the use of infrastructure and on-chain analytics tools.
Across the duration of the campaign, more than 5.5 million wallets participated, generating more than 47 million transactions on the chain.
Source: Linea Twitter (link)
To commemorate the success of the Linea Voyage, participants will be able to claim a commemorative NFT which will be tiered based on the points collected on Galxe during the campaign. The NFT design will be unveiled during EthCC Paris on July 18th in a live event. The Linea Voyage NFT will also be the very first NFT collection live on the Linea mainnet.
Linea Mainnet Alpha
With the recent announcement of the gradual roll out of Linea’s Mainnet Alpha, Linea has opened up their mainnet to ecosystem partners to begin deployment of their protocols ahead of the public launch. More than 100 partners will be boarding during this period, including household names like Aave, Sushiswap, Uniswap, Stargate and PancakeSwap, among others. Moreover, with MetaMask natively integrated with the chain on launch, MetaMask’s in-built bridge, swap and buy features will all be supported.
Looking ahead, Linea will be opening up the network shortly to the public during EthCC Paris, which will be taking place from July 17 to 20.
As the mainnet launch is still in Alpha, Linea will have security measures in place to protect users from potential attacks from malicious actors. Withdrawals from the chain will be limited on launch, but these limits will be slowly removed over the coming 90 days. Additionally, a delay will be implemented between the L2 and Ethereum L1, ensuring at least eight hours before state changes are committed to the L1. This allows the team more time to monitor the chain and to take necessary action in the event of malicious actors.
What’s Next for Linea?
Aside from opening to the public, Linea has also released a five-phase roadmap for the chain’s direction after their mainnet alpha launch, which represents Phase 0 of their roadmap.
Source: Linea Docs (link)
Following the launch, Phase 1 involves open sourcing the code base under the Affero General Public License (AGPL), as well as expanding the EVM coverage of the chain, which opens up more use cases for the chain.
Phase 2 will diversify Linea’s Security Council, to prevent concentration of power within the Security Council and biases in decision making. More importantly, in the spirit of decentralization, Linea will also be refined to enable censorship-resistant withdrawals. This allows users to withdraw all funds from the chain even if rollup operators turn malicious.
Phase 3 brings to the chain greater decentralization, seeking to decentralize the provers and sequencers which, up till this point, have been run by Linea’s team. In this phase, the team will also decentralize the governance of the chain, allowing users to vote and decide on changes to be made to the network. Many believe it is around Phase 3 that a token will likely be introduced. However, there is currently no official token yet. As such, please be wary of scams claiming so.
The last and final phase will implement a multi-prover system, a system of independent and heterogenous zkEVM prover implementations. This ensures that even if a single prover fails, the remaining provers will continue to ensure the security of the chain.
How To Use Linea Network?
To interact with the Linea mainnet alpha, users have to first bridge their tokens from Ethereum mainnet to Linea mainnet.
1. Go to the Linea bridge here.
2. Connect your MetaMask wallet in the top right corner.
3. Enter the amount of ETH you want to transfer, and ensure automatic claiming is enabled.
4. Click “Start Bridging.”
5. Confirm the transaction. It should take around 20 minutes for the ETH to reach Linea.
6. Under “Recent Transactions,” the transfer should say “Bridging Complete” once it's done.
7. To check your account balance or transaction, you can use the Linea explorer here.
Now that you have ETH on Linea mainnet, you can explore the growing ecosystem of Dapps here.
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