The milestone comes after a successful public testnet and brings us one step closer to a more scalable Ethereum. Linea will begin onboarding launch partners today.

Today, Linea reached an important milestone in our journey towards a more scalable Ethereum – we have started to roll out the mainnet alpha release of our zkEVM rollup network.

This milestone follows a successful testnet phase that saw 5.5M unique wallets commit over 46M transactions, making Linea one of the largest and fastest growing projects on Goerli. This week Linea will begin onboarding its launch partners, before opening the network broadly during ETHCC.

Linea combines the power of zero-knowledge proofs with full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) equivalence, allowing builders to create scalable decentralized applications (dapps) or migrate existing ones without the hassle of changing code or rewriting smart contracts.

To deliver mainnet alpha, the Linea team have developed, tested, and prototyped various upgrades to key components of the zkEVM architecture. These changes significantly improve the network’s performance, user experience, transaction costs, reflecting our unwavering commitment to building the most scalable, efficient, secure, and user-friendly Ethereum layer 2 (L2) rollup.

Launching alongside a growing ecosystem of over 100 partners, Linea empowers users, builders and developers to build a new generation of scalable Ethereum dapps. The alpha release delivers faster throughput, and transaction fees up to 15 times lower than Ethereum layer 1 (L1). In addition, the release enables deeper integrations with MetaMask, which plans to offer Linea to users of their popular Bridge, Swap and Buy features in Portfolio.

As partners begin migrating to the alpha release this week, they will unlock a constellation of new scalable dapps from gaming and identity to decentralized social networks and NFTs.

All You Need to Know About Mainnet Alpha

What is mainnet alpha?

The alpha release is an important step on our journey to a performant, fully decentralized, scalable network. During alpha we will begin a measured onboarding of partners and users, monitoring the system while supporting those who are building new capabilities with it. The release is our first complete system in mainnet and will serve as “training wheels”, where users will be able to learn in a live environment. We will be taking precautions to protect users and partners, but this is an exciting chance to use Linea in live applications.

What is included in the upgrade?

The latest major upgrade (codename: Linea Alpha v0.2.0) was executed on June 13, 2023 at 12:00 UTC and modified key architectural components in anticipation of the mainnet launch . Here’s a quick summary of the changes introduced in the Linea Alpha v0.2.0 upgrade:

• Batch conflation to reduce fixed (verification) costs for L2 blocks

• New version of the Canonical Message Service (“pull” execution → “push” execution model, removal of message deadlines, and reduction/removal of service fees)

• Minimum viable product release of Postman SDK and cross-chain message execution system

• New version of the Canonical Token Bridge (with support for N-N ERC20 token bridging and reserved/well-known token registry)

• Upgrading the rollup zkEVM contract to use a new outer-proof system (switching from Groth16 to PLONK) and integrate with the new security council system

• Upgrading prover and block production + trace generation components to support the new architecture (especially support for batch conflation)

We will share more details on these upgrades on Mirror and Release Notes in the coming days.

What limitations, if any, are in place on the mainnet alpha release?

As we roll out mainnet alpha, we have worked with partners to align on initial safeguards to protect users, dapp partners and the network.

During our first week, RPC calls to the network will be made available only to launch partners and the bridge UI will be protected by a password.

During ETHCC, we plan to open the network, but maintain some limits on withdrawals, working with our bridge partners to reduce and eliminate these limits over the first 90 days.

There will be an initial delay between the L2 and the L1, with state changes committed to the L1 after at least eight hours. This gives the team time to monitor and, if necessary, act to protect users assets in the scenario of a malicious actor.

Linea mainnet alpha does not have full coverage of the EVM opcodes and precompiles. The specification for the arithmetization with full coverage has been published and will be implemented to Linea following feedback.

These limits enable us to kickstart the bug bounty, monitor the performance of the initial system and create an environment for partners to integrate and test before opening fully to end users.

How do you balance initial security with your goal of decentralization? What is your roadmap, post mainnet alpha?

Ensuring the security of mainnet alpha is a top concern and an ongoing endeavor. The team behind Linea has established an initial Security Council to respond to urgent issues, while the team actively pursues a progressive enhancement of the system's decentralization and trust minimization over time.

The roadmap can be broken down into five phases, which the team intends to deliver sequentially in collaboration with the broader Linea ecosystem and community. Each phase moves the Linea network closer to its target state of being a mature rollup secured by Ethereum.

A full roadmap of anticipated decentralization phases can be found here and more details on our Security Council and risk mitigation framework can be found here.

When can users access the upgrade?

We will make the network available to users next week, once partners have had an opportunity to onboard their dapps and infrastructure.

What is next for the Linea Voyage?

Over the past two months, hundreds of thousands of early community members and more than 50 partners joined our Linea Voyage, a collective effort to shape and strengthen Linea ahead of mainnet. We are humbled by the outpouring of support during testnet and have commissioned a set of digital NFT art pieces inspired by their contributions to the network.

This week, MetaMask and Consensys NFT will onboard onto mainnet alongside our partners. When we open the network to users next week, we will use the opportunity to introduce the art as Linea’s first official NFT collection, which we will present to Voyage participants during a livestream on July 18th.

You can register for the livestream here.

Does Linea have a token?

Linea uses Ether, bridged directly from Ethereum Mainnet, as its native currency. Any advertisements of an existing or imminent Linea token sale or drop are scams and users should be cautious to avoid these.

Which partners are integrating with Linea?

We have had over 100 partners integrate with our testnet and dozens more are onboarding this week. You can browse our growing ecosystem of dapps, infrastructure and developer tools here.

How can the community get involved?

While the Voyage is over, we still need the community’s help in strengthening and shaping Linea.

Developers can get involved with our ongoing bug bounty, join our Discord to learn how to integrate their project, and apply for funding from our newly launched Ecosystem Investment Alliance.

Where can we learn more?

The Linea team is excited to host the world in our own backyard.

For those planning to attend ETHCC please drop by our co-working space and happy hour on Wednesday July 19th, 2023.

For those that cannot visit with us in person, you can register here for a livestream hosted in our Paris offices next Tuesday, July 18th where we will do a deep dive into what's shipping, details on our Voyage NFT and updates on our growing ecosystem of partners.

We will also share more information on our bug bounty, upcoming hackathons, ETHCC activations, and more on Mirror and Twitter.