Linea’s progress on the path to decentralization is accelerating. As the web3 world’s fastest-growing zkEVM L2 blockchain, Linea has already brought widespread scalability and development to the ecosystem, powering a new generation of Ethereum builders and decentralized applications (dapps).

Leading web3 builder, Status, is joining Linea as the first contributor outside of Consensys to Linea’s open-source code, marking a major stride on Linea’s decentralization roadmap. The technically and commercially gifted team at Status are the builders behind the Ethereum consensus client Nimbus and censorship-resistant communication protocol Waku.

Status’s contributions to core Ethereum operations as well as their consumer-facing focus via Status.app make them the ideal partner to move the Linea ecosystem and core development forward. In a recent governance vote, SNT holders voted to launch a Status Layer 2 roll-up, further cementing their contributions to the ecosystem.

Status will contribute to ongoing engineering on Linea, such as supporting client and prover diversity, and will also conduct research for the decentralization roadmap and technical decentralization.

Read on for how the partnership with Status will manifest for the Linea ecosystem.

The Importance of Open-Source Frameworks

As outlined in Linea’s decentralization roadmap, we have scoped a five-phase approach to decentralization. Phase 0 began with the launch of Linea Mainnet Alpha, establishing EVM-equivalence and convening the first iteration of the Linea Security Council. With this initiation phase complete, we evolve to Phase 1, introducing a focus on Linea’s open-source stack.

In the spirit of fostering transparency and maintaining an open platform, open-source software is an essential element of Linea’s decentralization roadmap. The Linea software is licensed under Apache 2.0. This permissive software license ensures that users have the freedom to view, fork, and modify code.

Specifically for L2s, where security is critical, transparency and verification are vital. “It’s important to not have a black box and be able to collaborate on the same code, and improve the solution for everyone,” adds Cyprien Grau at Status.

A Shared Vision For Decentralization

The partnership between Linea and Status underpins each organization's development strategies and fosters a shared vision to accelerate decentralization in the ecosystem. For Linea, these objectives include allowing users to independently verify code, creating an open system to catch more issues and bugs, and furthering development.

"Status is the ideal partner for this exciting next phase of Linea decentralization. The Status team's technical experience in Ethereum will help shape a diverse research community and solidify the Linea protocol as the gold standard for scaling Ethereum," says Declan Fox, Product Lead at Linea.

With an upgraded tokenomics model and monetization and community-building opportunities through Status apps, Status aims to provide developers with a new experience, while focusing on the decentralization of the chain and unlocking incentivized governance of Status Network.

Status will enhance its contribution by modifying Nimbus, the fourth most utilized consensus client on Ethereum, to serve as a Linea client with the launch of its execution client. This consensus client may also be leveraged for sequencer decentralization. Developers at Status Network will also engage directly with the Linea codebase, intending to operate an identical version of Linea in parallel, thereby strengthening the entire ecosystem.

Together, the teams will work on decentralizing the sequencing and the proving processes of the chains, to increase interoperability between the two and contribute to the scaling of L1. “We want to explore the design space for what rollups can do – with Linea, we can leverage the most performant zkEVM stack while having the capacity for experimentation,” says Cyprien Grau at Status.

Lineans can head to the Linea Community Forum to exchange early ideas and Linea Docs for a directory of repositories and further resources.

-

Dive into Linea’s full decentralization roadmap to stay updated as we move through the next phases in quick succession.