Hey, I’m Emily, developer advocate for Linea, and I’m taking over the blog today!
It was incredibly exciting getting to host the first ever community call on April 4, exactly one week after the launch of our public testnet. With over 6,000 live attendees from across the globe, the turnout was amazing!
If you weren’t able to attend live, here’s a brief rundown of all the alpha, learnings, and insights provided by our guests.
Linea is an EVM-equivalent, zero-knowledge rollup.
Monolithic L1s don’t scale because they are responsible for optimizing consensus, data availability, and execution. So, we outsource execution to a separate layer called a rollup, which batches and compresses transaction data to be posted back to the L1.
But, how do we know that the data we are posting is valid? Zero-knowledge proofs use math to prove the integrity of the data, which has more secure trust assumptions and allows for faster withdrawals as compared to the fraud proofs of optimistic rollups.
So, Linea is building a type-2 zkEVM, which allows us to take advantage of the EVM’s huge amount of developer adoption. You can read Vitalik’s post on zkEVMs here.
Linea differentiates itself in a few key ways.
First off, we’re a zk-rollup and not an optimistic rollup. As stated above, this allows for more secure trust assumptions and faster withdrawal times.
Secondly, within the zk-rollup space, we are building towards a Type 2 zkEVM, which compiles down to EVM bytecode and is proved in circuit. This allows for full EVM equivalence, unlike our type 4 counterparts, which are language equivalent, but not bytecode equivalent. The additional benefit here is that because the EVM spec is still evolving, we are able to quickly match the changing ecosystem.
Lastly, and most importantly, because we are backed by ConsenSys, we are able to take advantage of our powerful tooling suite by providing native integrations. Specifically, we offer a default MetaMask wallet integration, which removes the UX barrier of adding a network manually.
Private beta ran from January 9 to March 28, and our private beta testers generated massive amounts of activity (over 1 million transactions!) to ensure our network was ready for launch.
We experienced no downtime, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Using Linea was as easy as switching out your endpoint - no code or tooling changes necessary!
So, what’s next for Linea? In the short and mid term, we’re focusing on getting to mainnet, which means security is at the forefront of our mind: putting in guardrails, getting audits, and providing bug bounties. Additionally, we’re focusing on 100% EVM coverage, decentralizing the sequencer, prover, and relayer, as well as improving data compression and much more.
In the long term, we’re targeting prover performance by moving “up and down” the layers- thinking about Ethereum equivalence and what we could potentially do with layer 3 recursive rollups.
Follow Declan on Twitter, @declanfox14
Linea’s origins started in 2019, when the ConsenSys R&D team was looking at different scaling solutions. Back then, executing the EVM seemed absolutely impossible, so the team focused on specialized rollups - specifically, anonymous payments. Focusing on anonymous payments meant we were diving into zero-knowledge technology from the very beginning.
In July 2021, our team wanted to expand the use case and had to solve two major problems:
Arithmetization: how to transform execution into something you can actually proof
The actual prover itself
We were able to solve these two problems simply by dividing the problems into sub-problems, for which we published a specification, and used lattice-based proofs, which are well known in cryptography, to power our prover. So, with 4 years of solid research under our belt, we launched Linea!
So, where does this leave us now?
We’re focusing on Vitalik’s multi-prover theory, working with other rollups so that a bug in a single prover won’t hurt the whole ecosystem. Ultimately, we believe that the future is cooperation and are excited for Linea to be part of that vision.
Follow Nicolas on Twitter, @nkeywal
We were really excited to bring on Hop Protocol, a key early integration partner and official bridge for Linea.
The first Linea bridge was actually built using the Hop UI, so our head of business development, Marco Monaco (@marcomonaco83), reached out to Hop to add Linea as an officially supported network. Hop DAO voted Linea through and it passed with an overwhelming majority, and there’s been huge volume on the bridge since.
Test out the Hop bridge here!
Follow Shane and Hop on Twitter, @shanefontaine and @HopProtocol
ConsenSys has always worked towards building a secure and scalable Ethereum while making web3 more universally useful and accessible. Supporting core Ethereum has been a priority - we’ve actually built three L1 clients since our beginning, and our R&D team works alongside the EF researchers on public goods work to make Ethereum strong.
So, as Ethereum shifted its focus to a rollup-centric roadmap to achieve scalability, our R&D team looked into L2 scalability and how it might intersect with our research around zero-knowledge technology and saw a great opportunity.
There’s been tremendous innovation in the zero-knowledge rollup space - our friends at Starkware, Polygon, Scroll, and zkSync are doing excellent work in scaling ecosystems. While we certainly compete with them, we also collaborate with them, because ultimately, we are competing against the centralized world.
Our goal wasn’t just to build an exceptional zkEVM, but also build the most developer friendly one. It works out of the box with your favorite developer tools, is rigorously audited by our security experts at Diligence, and is easy-to-use through the native integration with MetaMask.
As the web has evolved over time, it’s core to build the enabling layer of infrastructure, with the growth of appchains, gamechains, L2s, L3s, L4s and beyond.
The multi-prover idea is crucial - we’re in discussions with our competitor-collaborators. Client diversity and interoperability was a crucial and great idea for Ethereum early on, and we’re hoping to see the same for L2 and above.
Ethereum is progressively modularizing - and the data availability and execution space is ripe for innovation. ConsenSys has always been an infrastructure company and will be going forward.
L2s and above and different flavors of data availability will be important. We also intend to make Linea our home network for ConsenSys launched products moving forward.
Follow Joe and ConsenSys on Twitter, @ethereumjoseph and @consensys
As we prepare Linea for mainnet, we need help stressing the network and testing a variety of activities.
We’re exploring the possibility of launching a “quest-like” challenge that would set out some on-chain activities and technical tasks that need performance validation at scale. The concept is still in design phase, but it will be a chance to harden our technical approach while giving users an opportunity to learn about Linea and get a firsthand look at what some of our partners are building with the zkEVM.
Keep an eye out on Discord and Twitter as we share more details on how to participate as an early tester!
Follow JT on Twitter, @jt_rose
Hey, that’s me!
Want to engage with Linea further? We’re launching GitPOAPs to reward our open source contributors!
Contribute to our documentation, zero-knowledge glossary, and community tutorials here.
Contribute to our award winning prover technology at gnark and gnark-crypto.
Additionally, join us at EthGlobal Tokyo, April 14-16th, where we’ll be hosting a workshop and giving out $7500 in bounties. All you need to do is build on Linea!
Follow me on Twitter, @_emjlin
So, there you have it! Expect to see a community call every month, where we’ll be highlighting the various researchers, community members, and key partners that make Linea possible.
And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe here, follow us on Twitter, @lineabuild, and Lens, @linea.lens, and join us on Discord!
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