2025 will be remembered as the year a broken L2 paradigm began to shift to something more stable and enduring. This is the year the ecosystem grew up, and much of that foundation was laid in recent months by Linea.

Over the past several months with the launch of the LINEA token, Linea established itself as the most ETH-centric L2.  Linea tokenomics drives a non-extractive economy, designed to benefit every participant in our network over the long term.

“The networks that will matter in five years aren't the ones optimizing for today's benchmarks,” explains Declan Fox, Head of Linea. “They're the ones designed to be self-sustaining economies that strengthen Ethereum, not just sit on top of it.”

This commitment is built on revolutionary, ecosystem-first tokenomics. Our design dedicates 85% of the total supply to ecosystem growth, public goods, and R&D, mirroring the original design of ETH itself and featuring zero team or investor allocations. Supporting this sustainable structure is our dual ETH/LINEA burn mechanism, which has already burned 33 ETH and 38 million LINEA so far.

The Linea Consortium was established this year to secure this non-extractive ecosystem. The consortium is stewarded by individuals with experience at some of Ethereum's most important organizations, including Consensys, ENS, Eigen Labs, SharpLink and Status.

Linea improved L2 performance and UX by achieving 100% prover completeness, pushing throughput to 27.5 mGas/s, and ensuring maximum compatibility. Our zkEVM integrated five Ethereum upgrades, catching up to Paris, Shanghai, Cancun, Prague, and Osaka, achieving real-time parity with Mainnet. This involved an epic speed-running of several years of updates delivered in less than a single calendar year, demonstrating something the industry wasn’t sure was possible: a zkEVM can keep pace with Ethereum’s evolution, upgrade for upgrade, without compromise. 

We’re now moving in full synchrony with Ethereum, making Linea an environment where builders can deploy with confidence, speed, and the newest EVM capabilities on day one.

Meanwhile we saw groundbreaking adoption across institutional, DeFi, and community sectors. The $LINEA Token Generation Event (TGE) rewarded 750k wallets in the community, with over 92% of eligible wallets claiming the airdrop. User growth was evident through the MetaMask Card, which saw over $1.25M in weekly spend, contributing to a TVL highpoint of $1.64B.

Linea quickly welcomed key DeFi powerhouses, including Aave, Etherex, 1inch, Euler, Maple Finance, Myriad Markets, and Kraken. We secured major market share on Aave, KelpDAO and Renzo. To track it all, we also launched the Linea Hub to streamline user experience. 

On the institutional front, Linea drove adoption by securing a $200M commitment from SBET for deployment, currently expected in early 2026.

“What they see is a network where the economics work for everyone in the system, not just the insiders who got in early,” adds Fox. “When Linea succeeds, users pay less, builders earn more, token holders benefit, and Ethereum gets stronger. That alignment is rare. It's also the only way this works long-term.”

In 2026, the Linea economic flywheel will accelerate, driven by our focus on being the best chain for onchain capital. Our primary goal is to deliver Linea Yield Boost (previously known as Native Yield) to provide the best risk-adjusted returns on capital.

“This is the beginning of what I call the sovereign era. Where Layer 2s stop being infrastructure projects subsidized by treasuries and become actual economies. Self-financing. Transparent. Built to compound value for everyone who participates,” concludes Fox. “2026 is when that vision becomes tangible reality. If you believe networks should serve the people who build on them and that Ethereum should scale without compromise, then what we're building at Linea is for you. And this is just the start.”

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