Linea is a year older, much cheaper, faster and more exciting than ever before.

2024 came in with optimism we might be pulling out of a bear market, and it’s going out with excited visions of bulls strapping on rockets bound for the moon or another galaxy.

The story of the past year has been similar for Linea and its Mainnet that was still less than 6 months old when calendars turned to 2024 in January. Twelve months later the network is becoming the place to build a digital life.

Building the home network for the world

Linea is laying the foundation for everyone to live onchain. It’s an ambitious goal that means not compromising on security while still building a network that’s fast, user friendly and inexpensive.

Fortunately we can accomplish this audacious and pioneering work without re-inventing the wheel; through leaning on the established success and security provided by Ethereum and pushing zero-knowledge technology further.

Bringing an Ethereum bytecode equivalent zkEVM L2 to mainnet launch in 2023 was just the beginning of an ongoing building process for the Linea team.

The work continued in 2024 with the Alpha v2 update in February that drastically reduced the cost of running the network on top of the Ethereum L1 through the addition of proof aggregation and data compression. The result was a massive reduction in gas fees, making Linea among the cheapest of the L2s. And that work has continued up until the present moment, when Linea has just recorded the lowest L1 cost per L2 transaction of any rollup.

Alpha v2 was soon followed by the DenCun upgrade to Ethereum and the introduction of EIP-4844 proto-danksharding. The successful integration of the new blob space provided by the upgrade was completed on Linea on March 27. The result was a significant improvement in block times and another fee reduction by a full order of magnitude.

Most recently we’ve pushed the Alpha v4 update just this week, which enhances security, lowers transaction costs and generally makes things run smoother while future-proofing the protocol.

A place to identify online

A key part of building the home network for the world and a place to live life onchain is establishing systems for digital identity, which was another major focus in 2024. This work started with the introduction of Proof of Humanity on Linea and continued throughout the year with the introduction of Linea Names via our partnership with ENS, the Ethereum Name Service.

The team took things a step further and introduced project-specific subdomain names, starting with the Efrogs community. This first of its kind capability on an L2 links a unique, human-readable Linea Name to NFT ownership verified onchain. If a holder sells their NFT, the associated ENS subname is also transferred.

Linea’s partnership with ENS doesn’t end there. As this post is being composed, ENS has just announced that it will use Linea’s tech stack to develop its own L2, Namechain, and will also contribute to the open source Linea codebase. Rarely have we seen two such giants in the Ethereum ecosystem joining forces to advance digital identity.

Building together in the open

Before ENS decided to contribute to Linea’s code, leading web3 builder Status showed the way in August by becoming the first contributor outside of Consensys to Linea’s open-source repository, marking a major stride on Linea’s decentralization roadmap. Status are the builders behind the Ethereum consensus client Nimbus, securing 10% of proof-of-stake, and censorship-resistant communication protocol Waku.

Linea has partnered with a number of other big names in the crypto ecosystem to move forward and always up in 2024. Often one partnership opens the door to many others. That’s the case with Linea’s integration of the industry-standard Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), announced in October. Leveraging CCIP lets developers build secure, rich cross-chain applications to expand the multi-chain ecosystem.

Defi powerhouse Lido integrated with Linea in January and our friends at DapDap brought Uniswap v3 to the network the following month. Turtle.Club also brought its alternative “phantom” liquidity approach to Linea, starting in August. To round out the year, Consensys made a significant investment in Nile and its high-performance veDEX built on Linea.

The future is happening here now

What does living life onchain on the home network for the world look like? This began to take shape in 2024 through a number of onchain and social activities like Linea Park, Culture SZN and the Linea Guild Games. These successful campaigns highlighted the superior creators, developers and dapps bringing their talents to Linea, expanded our growing community and demonstrated the future of digital gaming, finance, social and more.

Over the past year the Linea Surge also shored up liquidity on the network and our series of Dev Cook-Offs helped keep the ecosystem in an always shipping mindset.

To help bring it all into focus, we’ve been chronicling how Your Life on Linea can and will evolve as we continue to build today and tomorrow.  You helped by sharing examples of your own lives on Linea:

Some parts of life still happen offchain and even offline. Linea doesn’t neglect meatspace, in fact we make the best of it with some of the most memorable IRL events in the industry. The past twelve months saw us meet with and celebrate all our builders around the world, including at:

• Linea @ ETH Denver

• Linea @ SheFi Summit Denver

• Linea @ Token 2049 Dubai

• Linea @ ArtsDAO Fest Dubai

• Linea @ SheFi Summit Brussels

• Linea @ EthCC X

• Linea Voyage Waypoint Brussels

• Linea @ SheFi Summit Singapore

• Linea x Mondo Party @ Ce La Vi Singapore

• Linea @ Token2049 Singapore

• Linea @ Devcon Bangkok

Obviously 2025 will be even bigger

How could it not be? It’s really already started. It began in Bangkok at DevCon when we announced the Linea Association, a huge step in the network’s commitment to progressive decentralization.

That was followed by rapid expansion of the MetaMask Card on Linea to the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico and our Crypto Holiday Challenge underway now.

Payments and real-world transactions on this groundbreaking crypto debit card are a key bridge between your life before 2024 and Your Life on Linea.

2025 will see everything we’ve covered here continue to expand along with the debut of the LINEA token.

And that is still only the beginning.

Happy New Year and Happy Holidays from all of us at Linea.