Consensys To Launch Linea zkEVM Mainnet At EthCC

Competition within Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem continues to heat up, with Consensys, an Ethereum development company, preparing to launch the mainnet alpha of its Linea network next week.

On Tuesday, Consensys said it will onboard ecosystem partners this week before opening Linea to the public during next week’s Ethereum Community Conference in Paris.

“The next chapter of web3 will be written on Ethereum L2s, and Linea is poised to become a major trusted L2 execution environment for scalable dapps,” said Joe Lubin, founder and CEO of Consensys.

Consensys said the launch follows five years of development, estimating the network will offer transaction fees 15 times lower than Ethereum mainnet. The company describes Linea as “EVM equivalent,” meaning Ethereum-native protocols can deploy on Linea with minimal code alterations.

Mainnet Alpha

Linea will support an ecosystem of more than 100 protocols, dApps, and tools with its mainnet alpha launch. The integrations include Consensys-owned developer tooling and software, such as the MetaMask wallet, Infura’s web3 infrastructure suite, and Consensys NFT.

Consensys said the mainnet alpha deployment includes several important improvements over its testnet versions, including a new outer-proof system, a dynamic fee mechanism, and batch conflation.

Linea’s testnet hosted 43M transactions from 5.4M unique wallets over three months. Consensys said users that participated in the Linea Voyage, a recent testnet event, will receive limited edition NFTs as a reward for their help preparing the network for mainnet, including open minting rights for the network’s first NFT collection on July 18.

Scaling Ethereum

Rollup networks address the scalability constraints of Ethereum’s Layer 1 by bundling transactions together on Layer 2 and submitting them to mainnet in batches for finalization.

Linea is a zkEVM rollup, meaning it supports code written for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Ethereum’s core smart contract engine, and is secured by zero-knowledge proofs.

zkEVMs recently emerged as a popular scaling solution, offering improved privacy and performance over most other Layer 2 designs. Linea now contends with rival zkEVM rollups from zkSync, Polygon, and, soon, Scroll.

zkEVMs Gain Traction

Since launching in March, zkSync Era is now the third-largest L2 with a total value locked of $649M, according to L2beat.

Polygon zkEVM, which launched less than a week later, ranks 10th with $48.6M. However, Polygon plans to merge its Polygon zkEVM and PoS Chain networks next year.

Despite the recent growth of zkEVMs, Arbitrum and Optimism, two optimistic rollup networks, remain the top two Layer 2s by TVL with market shares of 60.5% and 22.3%, respectively.

Ecosystem Investment Alliance

Consensys also announced the launch of Linea’s Ecosystem Investment Alliance (EIA), a collective of more than 30 venture capital partners providing funding and support for projects building on the network.

Michael Camarda, director of corporate development at Consensys, highlighted the challenges faced by emerging crypto projects amid a down crypto market and macroeconomic uncertainty.

“Raising capital as an entrepreneur can be difficult even in the best of times,” Camarda said. “Through the EIA, Consensys and our partners are excited to support projects looking to redefine DeFi, gaming, NFTs, social, and more.”

Linea announced it will offer up to $50,000 worth of hackathon prizes at the Ethereum Community Conference. Bug bounties are also available to white hat hackers.