Consenys' Linea Targets Token Launch by Q2 2025

Linea, the popular Layer 2 network from Consensys, plans to launch a native token by the end of the year.

On Nov. 13, Consensys, the blockchain software development company behind Linea and MetaMask, announced it intends to launch a LINEA token before the end of Q1 2025.

The announcement was made at the Devcon conference in Bangkok, with the project also revealing the creation of the Linea Association, a Swiss-based non-profit organization tasked with steering the network toward decentralization.

"By decentralizing critical elements of our ecosystem, including governance, infrastructure, and community empowerment, we aim to foster a more resilient and transparent web3," said Joseph Lubin, CEO of Consensys.

The token will presumably be airdropped to LXP point holders who participated in the Linea Voyage and Linea Park campaigns, which kicked off in October 2023 and February 2024 respectively, in addition to other early adopters. Neither the date for a network snapshot determining eligibility or the airdrop were announced.

The campaigns helped to establish Linea among the leading Layer 2 networks, with the total value locked (TVL) of native DeFi applications increasing 856% year-to-date to $507 million from $53 million, according to DeFiLlama. Network TVL also grew 435% over the same period to $1 billion from $187 million, according to L2beat.

Linea has processed more than 230 million transactions since its mainnet launch in August 2023. The network hosted roughly 223,600 over the past 24 hours, according to GrowThePie.

LINEA utility

The primary utility of LINEA will be governance, with tokenholders able to participate in on-chain voting and decision-making processes. LINEA will also support payments and DeFi use cases.

Linea users can link their wallets to the MetaMask debit card to use cryptocurrency for real-world payments via the MasterCard network. LINEA holders will be able to lock in transaction fees or gain priority access to payment services.

“All these payment use cases actually are creating extra services on top of Linea and the services will be available to token holders or will be paid in tokens,” Nicolas Liochon, the founder of Linea and a Linea Association board member, told The Defiant’s Camila Russo.

Path to decentralization

The launch of LINEA and the Linea Association form part of the project’s roadmap towards decentralization, starting with governance.

Linea’s proposed governance model will adopt a multi-layered structure, comprising a Board of Directors, a General Assembly, employees reporting to an Executive Director, and a token-based governance body. However, Liochon said its governance mechanism will evolve according to community feedback.

"We'll be publishing a lot of documents about our current thinking on the governance, and we'll be getting feedback about it,” Liochon added. “We don't see it as something final… We'll actually have multiple iterations, very research-oriented, very ideas-oriented, and the final design will be decided based on the feedback that we'll be getting."

Lubin said the proposed system draws inspiration from the Ethereum Foundation, which supports Ethereum’s development but does not exercise heavy-handed control over the direction of the protocol and ecosystem.

“The Ethereum Foundation doesn't control the evolution of the Ethereum platform,” Lubin said. “It facilitates certain things, [distributes] some money to good projects that create value for the ecosystem and runs a pretty good developer conference. The Linea Association will operate along those lines. It's bootstrapping elements of the ecosystem.”

Linea’s decentralization roadmap also includes the implementation of decentralized sequencing — an important feature for Layer 2 networks. According to the team, this will be rolled out in phases, starting with known participants and eventually transitioning to a fully decentralized proof-of-stake system.

On Oct. 2, the team published a proposal titled “Towards Linea’s Decentralization,” which outlined a high-level framework for modifying the network’s block validation, block proposal, and finalization processes.