At their core, crypto wallets function as your personal interface to the blockchain, a digital ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies and many in-game economies. Unlike a traditional wallet, which holds physical currency, a crypto wallet does not store your cryptocurrencies directly. Rather, it holds the keys (your access codes) to access your digital currencies on the blockchain and execute transactions.

The Gameplay of Crypto Wallets: Keys and Addresses

Your crypto wallet operates through a combination of keys and recovery phrases, which are crucial for accessing and managing your assets.

Understanding SRPs and Keys

• Secret Recovery Phrase (SRPs): This is a series of words generated by your wallet when you first set it up. This phrase acts as a master key to access your funds, making it possible to recover your wallet if your device is lost or compromised. The SRP’s importance cannot be overstated; it must be kept private and secure at all costs.

• Private and Public Keys: Your public key is a wallet address that you share with others to receive assets. Think of it as a bank account number, or your character’s name or ID in the game world. Meanwhile, your private key is your password, which must be kept confidential to ensure the security of your assets. It is akin to the PIN to your bank account.

Choosing Your Gear: Types of Crypto Wallets

• Hot Wallets: These wallets operate online and provide ease of access and convenience for swift transactions and trades. While they offer more flexibility for frequent trading or payments, their internet connectivity makes them more vulnerable to security threats. Examples include MetaMask and Trust Wallet.

• Cold Wallets: These are offline storage options that significantly reduce the risk of online hacking. Hardware wallets are a popular form of cold storage, offering a high level of security for long-term investments. Examples include Ledger, Keystone, and Trezor.

Fortifying Your Keep: Wallet Best Practices

Let us walk through some security best practices that would ensure that your digital assets are always safe.

Your SRP is the key to your wallet and, by extension, your digital assets. You should never share it with anyone. If you are asked to import your SRP as part of gameplay, you should immediately alert the dapp’s support teams as it is highly likely that it is a phishing application.

You should keep your SRP in a secure, offline location. Consider using a physical medium, such as paper or metal, to store it and place it in a safe or deposit box.

Strengthen Your Wallet’s Defences

Utilize every available security measure to protect your wallet. This includes enabling two-factor authentication, using strong and unique passwords, and opting for wallets that offer biometric security features.

Stay Up-to-Date

Regularly update your wallet software to the latest version. Updates often include security enhancements and new features that can patch vulnerabilities and protect your wallet from emerging threats.

Be Vigilant Against Scams

The digital currency space is fraught with phishing scams and fraudulent schemes designed to steal your private information. Always verify the source of any communication claiming to be from your wallet provider or associated service. Never share your private keys or SRPs with anyone or any service unless you are sure of its legitimacy.

Wrapping Up

In the confluence of gaming and blockchain, your crypto wallet is your base of operations, your sanctuary. By choosing the right wallet and practicing good security habits, you can protect your virtual riches, engage more deeply with your favourite games, and even monetize your gaming prowess. Welcome to the next level of gaming, where your skills, strategy, and security savvy lead to real-world rewards.

Be ready to use your digital wallet know-how and gaming prowess to participate in the upcoming Linea Park Voyage!

Alpha v2 was successfully deployed to Linea Mainnet on February 13th and introduces two new features to Linea: Proof aggregation and data compression. Let’s look at each of these features in detail.

Proof Aggregation

Each Linea transaction is rolled up into a batch and published to Layer 1 (L1). Previously, in Alpha v1, each batch was verified with a zkSNARK proof to validate the computational integrity of the submission. This verification process incurred a fixed gas cost of approximately 400k gas on Ethereum.

With proof aggregation, Linea can recursively prove many consecutive batches of transactions into one single final proof such that the verification cost to verify N batches is N times cheaper.

Since the upgrade, Linea has gone from one batch per proof to averaging ~30 batches per final proof, making the fixed proof verification costs on Linea 1/30th the price of Alpha v1.

The ZK proof verification costs for Linea now make up a negligible amount of the overall costs at ~0.5%.

Data Compression

To reconstruct Linea's state, we transmit Layer 2 (L2) transaction data to the L1 smart contract. Acknowledging the hefty L1 gas fees, primarily driven by data storage costs, we've implemented a strategic data compression approach.

The Linea prover not only validates state transitions based on L2 transactions but does so with a crucial twist - operating on a compressed input. This innovation ensures that the L2 prover accurately decompresses the input, resulting in substantial "data usage savings" on L1.

Our lossless compression algorithm – akin to gzip and deflate, two widely used data compression algorithms – efficiently encodes repeated bytes, achieving a remarkable compression ratio. During high-activity periods, such as frequent calls to a Uniswap contract, the compression ratio can soar to 15x. Furthermore, the simplicity of the decompression process ensures affordability within a SNARK circuit, aligning with the imperative of keeping computational costs low.

As part of this upgrade, Linea is also storing more data per submission. Previously publishing ~70kb data per data submission, Linea is now posting up to the near maximum for a single Ethereum transaction at 123kb.

Here is an example of the cost savings from the upgrade:

This Alpha v1 finalization transaction on Ethereum verified 146 Linea transactions in a single batch costing ~1.2M gas.

This Alpha v2 finalization transaction verified 38,396 Linea transactions across 31 batches and 8095 blocks amounting to 261 blocks per batch. Each batch costs ~2.6M gas with an additional 0.5M gas cost for the finalization.

This means that the equivalent of 261 L2 blocks for Alpha v1 would have been ~4x more expensive in L1 gas than Alpha v2

And for the data compression, Linea has gone from averaging ~150 transactions in a single batch to ~1,500 transactions. A 10x increase in the number of compressed transactions squeezed into a single batch and data submission.

Overall, these cost reductions amount to a total average of ~4x cost reduction per finalization for Alpha v2 compared to the previous version

What’s remarkable is that Linea has achieved data compression whilst continuing to publish transaction input data on Ethereum. Here is an example data submission where you can see hashes of the transaction data included as calldata:

What Does This Mean for Users

Reducing the L1 Rollup costs for Linea allows gas fees on Linea to be reduced. Gas fees have been immediately reduced by 66% with Alpha v2 making Linea up to 1/40th cheaper than Ethereum L1 prices and making it one of the cheapest L2 rollups in the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Linea team is already preparing for EIP-4844 and the Dencun upgrade on Ethereum on March 13th. 4844 will allow Rollups like Linea to post data submissions as blobs versus calldata and Alpha v2 sets Linea on the path to leverage this new data availability solution. Whilst it is still not certain how much this will reduce costs in practice due to the creation of a new market, it is certain to reduce prices. Linea is targeting to enable the use of blobspace shortly after the upgrade to provide more cost savings to the Linea ecosystem.

To the wonderful Linean community, thank you for your support. We’re thrilled to be delivering significantly lower gas fees to our ecosystem. The community’s involvement, voice, and partnership is a cornerstone for success as we take Linea from an idea to the decentralized home of web3 where dapps thrive.

Let us know on X what you think about the upgrade!

Base is coming to ETHDenver to connect with the builder community, bringing Home Base to the show floor from February 29 - March 3. Come by from 9am to 6pm to experience the best of onchain culture and creativity.

At Home Base, you can:

• Attend interactive demos and workshops hosted by teams from across the Base ecosystem, including Coinbase, SmallBrain, PurpleDAO, Moonwell, ETHLas, fxhash, Refraction, and more

• Connect with builders who’ve built sticky onchain apps & experiences on Base

• Meet the core Base team on the ground, and get first-hand information about resources available for Base builders (Base Grants, Base Bootcamp, Base Guides)

• Have fun onchain: Play the onchain game Base Hunt to win merch and prizes (more information coming next week), mint onchain art, and explore unique onchain experiences being built on Base

Stay up to date with our programming here.

Home Base is your hub for creativity, culture, and connections on the show floor — and we'll be providing fun moments throughout the day.

Want to meet other Farcaster x Builders?

We’re hosting a Base Meetup at the Farcaster Happy Hour: Join us for a Base Meetup at the Farcaster Happy Hour hosted by Purple DAO, Eventcaster, POAP, and Privy on Saturday, March 2nd from 6 - 11pm MST. Join us for a surprise & delight Frame to IRL experience.  Sign up here.

If you’re looking for even more time with Base, check out Club Hologram (Thursday, February 29). Presented by Wormhole, AMD, and Base, Club Hologram is a place to connect with builders by day, and interactive installations by night. Apply to attend.

Meet us at ETHDenver

Base is for builders, and we’re at ETHDenver to help you build. We can’t wait to see you.

Going beyond the reactive measures of threat prevention in web3, Linea has developed a distributed threat prevention strategy that operates in real-time. A cornerstone of this method lies in Linea’s security partnerships, dedicated to continuously monitoring on-chain activities and overall economic risks.

Let’s look at each of the mechanisms that form a part of Linea’s real-time threat monitoring playbook.

Bridge Monitoring

Linea engaged with Hexagate to conduct a detailed attack surface analysis for the Linea canonical bridges and specific smart contracts. This involved mapping possible threat vectors on the Linea architecture including the token bridge smart contracts and zkEVM contracts on Ethereum.

Once this was done, sophisticated AI-based Bridge monitoring was put in place, including invariance detection, which ensures bridged assets are fully protected.

On-Chain Monitoring

Linea has partnered with leading security organizations such as Hexagate, Hypernative, and Cyvers for round-the-clock on-chain monitoring. Using a sophisticated set of tools and practices, these partners play an essential role in detecting any unusual operations or potential threats to the network.

This is one way that on-chain monitoring works: Our security partners scan the entirety of the smart contracts deployed on Linea and, using advanced AI/ML techniques, assess whether any of those pose a threat such as a smart contract vulnerability, a governance threat, or an imbalance in account statements to these Linea smart contracts. If they discover a potential risk, they alert the network, which can then pause those transactions to avoid a loss.

Through this process, Linea significantly reduces the possibility of ecosystem threats such as reentrancy attacks, front-running attacks, and approval vulnerabilities. By making the network more resilient and secure, these partnerships give Linea an unmatched edge against potential threats. The Linea team is actively encouraging the broader Linea ecosystem to adopt similar practices to protect their protocols, bridges, liquidity pools and TVL.

On-Chain Hardening

The second component of Linea’s real-time threat monitoring strategy for security is on-chain hardening, which is a process of maintaining the integrity of the smart contracts on a blockchain. This can be done through strategies such as implementing function modifiers, which can identify and revert suspicious transactions; and using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

A compelling example of this approach is demonstrated by our partner, SphereX. The main focus of this protocol lies in using AI/ML to learn ‘good’ transaction behaviors and therefore identify and prevent ‘bad’, or unusual, transactions. The moment SphereX identifies something unusual, it raises an alert, which then leads to a reversal of that transaction. And since it only targets malicious transactions, the overall protocol activities do not need to be paused to ensure the security of other users. This offers an uninterrupted user experience and helps maintain the user’s trust in the overall health of the protocol.

Economic Risk Monitoring

In the context of DeFi, security threats extend beyond smart contracts. These economies are intricately intertwined. A failure of one platform can cause ripple effects across the network, resulting in potential catastrophes. With the understanding of such risks, Linea has partnered with Gauntlet to create an economic risk monitoring dashboard.

Gauntlet’s Linea dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the entire Linea ecosystem, from liquidation risks to lending markets and high-level market summary. This partnership means that dapps and users get an insight into the health of the Linea network, while Linea can tackle ecosystem risks head-on. It ensures the larger DeFi ecosystem is safeguarded from financial threats. Linea is the only zk-rollup that provides this kind of comprehensive ecosystem risk monitoring.

How Does this Help Dapps Thrive?

As the DeFi landscape matures, the need for innovative and effective security measures becomes more pressing than ever. Linea, through its strategic partnerships, comprehensive on-chain monitoring, on-chain hardening, and economic risk monitoring stands at the forefront of this security revolution. We offer our users a safe environment, while being vigilant to both present and future risks, taking another step on our mission of providing the safest place to interact with web3.

Explore Linea’s Full-Spectrum Security

Read the first part in this three-part series on Linea’s full-spectrum approach to security.

Core zk-proof Security

A cryptographically secure zero-knowledge infrastructure is the foundation of creating the safest place to interact with web3. Unlike optimistic rollups that prioritize trust in third parties, publishing data to Ethereum mainnet and providing a challenge period to dispute fraudulent transactions, zk rollups prove transaction validity right away. To put it succinctly, zk rollups like Linea rely on cryptography for security, whereas legacy technology pursued by optimistic rollups relies on cryptoeconomics and game theory. Building an ecosystem with zero knowledge at the heart of it is like building a city on top of solid ground.

In the world of zkEVMs, Linea’s security infrastructure is industry-leading. Linea uses zkSNARK proofs to verify the computational integrity of every Linea transaction in Ethereum, offering users high levels of security at low cost. Linea is the first zkEVM to introduce more than one client, aligning to Ethereum’s goal of client diversity. This reduces the risk of single-point-of-failure bugs compared to having a single client.

Linea also adopts a research-directed approach to ensuring overall integrity. For example, we apply formal verification at multiple levels, such as the on-chain Plonk verifier and the zk arithmetization, to ensure that key components of the software are bug-free.

Auditing

At its core, an audit is an in-depth review of a project’s smart contracts (in our case written in Solidity) by a third party specializing in identifying vulnerabilities not just in the smart contract, but also in the architecture surrounding the contract. In the context of Linea, every line of code in our smart contracts has undergone rigorous auditing by Diligence and OpenZeppelin, two of web3’s most sophisticated and popular security firms. Their reputation and expertise demonstrate our commitment to the highest level of security. You can view our audit reports here.

Moreover, we ensure that all decentralized applications (dapps) we promote have received auditing clearance from one of the following recognized providers: Diligence, OpenZeppelin, Hexen, Zokyo, CertiK, Zellic, Scalebit, Secure3, Halborn. By guaranteeing consistent, robust audits on the Linea protocol smart contracts– and incentivized dapps in our ecosystem to take up proactive security measures – we are building a more secure Ethereum ecosystem.

Bug Bounties

Beyond auditing, bug bounty programs are a crucial component of threat prevention in the L2 landscape. These programs invite ethical hackers to scrutinize systems for vulnerabilities and offer substantial rewards for their findings. For instance, Polygon paid out a record $2M bounty to a white-hat hacker in 2021 for identifying a bug that could potentially lead to losses worth $850M on the network.

Recognizing the value of bug bounty programs, we have partnered with Immunefi, a dedicated bug bounty platform. We offer a bounty that can reach up to $100,000 for identifying and reporting potential threats. This substantial reward aligns with our commitment to fortifying security by incentivizing security at the social layer.

Conclusion

As L2 solutions become more intricate, their security measures must keep pace. The pursuit of engineering excellence, auditing and bug bounty programs is one way we are safeguarding the Linea ecosystem, carrying on the principle of trust that forms the backbone of the decentralized ethos. Our threat prevention practices are just the beginning - it’s one band of our full-spectrum security system. We endeavour to foster an L2 environment that embraces transparency, resilience, and the collective wisdom of the community in its pursuit of safety and security.

Explore Linea’s Full-Spectrum Security