Linea Completes Public Mainnet Rollout

Consensys, a leading Ethereum software development firm, has completed the rollout of its Linea Layer 2 network with the deployment of a native bridge, “unlocking” DeFi applications on the network by allowing users to migrate ERC-20 tokens over from Ethereum.

Linea launched in alpha on July 11 during the EthCC conference in Paris, allowing users to bridge ETH onto the network, and also featuring native integrations for Consensys products including the MetaMask wallet, its infrastructure suite, Infura, and DLT platform, Hyperledger Besu.

The alpha release hosted more than 2.7M transactions, 100,000 weekly active users, and $26M worth of Ether bridged in five weeks.

“The public release of Linea is a major milestone, but only the beginning of our continued commitment to collaborate with the broader Linea ecosystem and community, to build a mature rollup secured by Ethereum,” said Declan Fox, product lead for Linea.

Ethereum Scaling Race

Linea is the latest among a new generation of Layer 2 rollups powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that are competing to scale Ethereum.

Until this year, ZK-rollups were not compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine — Ethereum’s core smart contract engine — meaning developers could not easily port their code from mainnet to early ZK L2s without making significant changes, hindering adoption.

zkSync Era became the first zkEVM rollup to launch on mainnet in March, followed by Polygon zkEVM just a few days later, and now Linea. Scroll is also maintaining a testnet for its forthcoming zkEVM.

Optimism, an optimistic Layer 2 scaling solution, is also hedging its bets with the launch of its OP Stack in June. The OP Stack is a modular tech stack for creating bespoke Layer 2s, allowing developers to swap out optimistic fraud proofs for zero-knowledge validity proofs. Coinbase built its recently-launched Layer 2, Base, using the OP Stack.

But despite Ethereum scaling teams shipping a myriad of cutting-edge solutions in recent months, Arbitrum One continues to maintain its position as the top L2 by TVL since launching in September 2021.

Initial Security Council

Linea will next establish an “initial security council” tasked with overseeing protocol security and responding to urgent issues in the medium term while governance is progressively decentralized over time.

“The team behind Linea has established an initial security council to respond to urgent issues, while the team actively pursues a progressive enhancement of the system's decentralization and trust minimization over time,” Linea said.

The network hosts native support for account abstraction, allowing users to create programmable wallets enabling features such as paying fees using stablecoins and advanced multi-signature settings.

Linea is currently processing 1.5 transactions per second (TPS) and offers fees roughly one-fifteenth of Ethereum mainnet. The L2 already hosts more than 150 dApps, targeting the niches of DeFi, web3 gaming, decentralized social media, NFTs, and stablecoins.

Linea has teamed up with MetaMask, Circle, Banxa, and Transak to promote network adoption with zero network fees for users on-ramping via MetaMask’s exchange aggregator to purchase USDC.e — USDC bridged onto Linea via the network’s native ERC-20 bridge — until Aug. 31.