Fort Worth, Texas, February 15, 2024 - Today Consensys, the leading blockchain and web3 software company, announces the successful upgrade of Linea, the top bytecode-compatible zkEVM ecosystem, resulting in a reduction in gas fees by up to 66 percent while remaining 100% EVM-compatible. The upgrade not only makes Linea one of the cheapest L2s and delivers significant improvements in efficiency; it comes as Linea also reveals its approach to becoming the world’s most secure L2.
In 2023, a number of protocol and bridge hacks drained hundreds of millions of dollars and did damage to reputable projects, protocols and the entire ecosystem, both in terms of reputation and wallet balances. Over the same period, Linea was evolving from concept to testnet to successful mainnet deployment now with 1 million monthly active users.
The upgrade to Linea, dubbed Alpha V2, brings significant cost reductions to the Linea ecosystem. It’s comprised of two new features: 1. Data compression, in which the L2 calldata is compressed before submitting a batch to Ethereum, and: 2. Proof aggregation, where Linea is able to finalize many L2 batches in a single ZK proof. These collectively reduce the costs to publish on Ethereum and will lead to cheaper gas fees on Linea as a result.
“Alpha V2 is an incredible engineering and cryptography achievement. Linea is the first zkEVM rollup to implement data compression, significantly reducing rollup costs and user fees, whilst preparing the network for a further fee reduction with EIP-4844 round the corner,” explained Declan Fox, Product Lead for Linea. “Linea aims to be the safest place to interact with web3: starting from the core technology stack all the way to the security culture of our partners and dapps. This is the only sustainable path to mass web3 adoption.”
A comprehensive, community approach
Linea has actively partnered with over 20 security partners, including some of the strongest names in web3 security. These partners routinely audit and monitor in real-time every level of the Linea ecosystem, from the protocol, to the bridges, to the dapp smart contracts to deliver a safer L2 ecosystem for end-users and devs.
Technology provided by partners like Hexagate and Hypernative uses machine learning and proprietary analysis to protect Linea’s chain and bridge from numerous web3 threats in real-time.
“We’re proud to be one of Linea’s chosen security partners to protect its core infrastructure and our joint work to build Linea’s web3 Security Operation Center,” said Yaniv Nissenboim, co-founder and CEO of Hexagate. “Our strategy goes beyond conventional risk management by implementing proactive threat protection across Linea’s entire ecosystem, and we believe this serves as a blueprint for how Layer-2 security should be approached.”
“Linea takes a unique ‘immune system’ approach to securing its L2,” said Gal Sagie, co-founder and CEO of Hypernative. “We at Hypernative are happy to contribute, among other security providers, and help provide a 360-degree view of security risks across many different attack vectors. We are looking forward to working with the Linea team and the entire ecosystem."
In addition to cutting-edge cryptographically-secure ZK infrastructure, and its strong security immune system, every line of smart contract code has been checked.
"Alpha V2 smart contract changes were audited by two of the top auditing firms in the industry, OpenZeppelin and Diligence, prior to the upgrade,” Fox explains. “Modifications were made and approved and can be found in the public audit reports."
Some aspects of the protocol have even undergone an industry-leading process of Formal Verification to actually prove the absence of bugs.
But audits are just the beginning of an ongoing approach to security that never stops on Linea.
“Rather than rely solely on post-facto auditing like many Layer 2 protocols, Linea differentiates itself with a proactive security infrastructure model powered by Cyvers that operates on a 24/7 basis, actively detecting and mitigating threats as they emerge,” explained Deddy Lavid, CEO of Cyvers. “The thoroughness of security audits, including the frequency and comprehensiveness, is a key differentiator. Linea’s proactive approach could be setting new standards in this regard.”
Linea is where dapps thrive
A network can only be as secure as the sum of its parts. By cultivating a security-focused community, users are involved in making Linea a safer place to be in web3 already with over 300 dapps, 305,000 contracts deployed and 43 million transactions and counting . This helps attract dapps with a similar ethos like HAPI, which aggregates data tied to malicious activity on chain.
The Ukraine-based team’s work has led to blocking funds from reaching a few notorious actors supporting the Russian invasion. HAPI’s public scam reporting tool, Scamfari, launched first on Linea and is one of the ecosystem’s top dapps. Now the team is working with Linea and Verax on HAPI ID, a new digital identity solution.
"Linea has been a tremendous catalyst, allowing HAPI to materialize our products. To transfer our then off-chain, crowd-sourcing platform Scamfari to be fully on-chain wouldn't be possible without Linea,” said Yurii Olentyr, CEO of HAPI. “HAPI ID is also a very ambitious product and thanks to Linea’s dev-friendly experience and help from everyone involved it has been a very exciting building journey!"
All sorts of dapps working to revolutionize everything from finance and social media to the internet itself benefit from Linea’s transparent, security-focused culture and pass that peace of mind on to users.
A partnership with Gauntlet, which uses quantitative economic optimizations to help crypto protocols with incentives and market risk management, provides a real-time view on the health of the Linea ecosystem’s economy.
“We are excited to bring ecosystem-wide risk monitoring to Linea, the first L2 ecosystem to provide aggregate liquidation and insolvency risk measures to all users,” explained Nick Hewitt, product manager at Gauntlet. “Linea's security model allows users to evaluate market risk holistically across all key protocols, and represents a major evolution from the protocol-level approach of the past.”
For more details on the entire Linea security ecosystem visit linea.build/security.
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About Linea
Linea is the zkEVM ecosystem that empowers web3 dapps to thrive. We do this by connecting dapps to MetaMask’s native web3 audience, driving ecosystem engagement and technical excellence, and delivering the most robust security system in web3. With over 1 million monthly active users, 300 dapps, and $380M+ saved on gas fees, Linea is working toward making web3 safe and accessible for everyone.
About Consensys
Consensys is the leading blockchain and web3 software company. Since 2014, Consensys has been at the forefront of innovation, pioneering technological developments within the web3 ecosystem. Through our product suite, including the MetaMask platform, Infura, Linea, Diligence, and our NFT toolkit Phosphor, we have become the trusted collaborator for users, creators, and developers on their path to build and belong in the world they want to see. Whether building a dapp, an NFT collection, a portfolio, or a better future, the instinct to build is universal. Consensys inspires and champions the builder instinct in everyone by making web3 universally easy to use and develop on. To explore our products and solutions, visithttps://consensys.io/.