Honestly, when I first heard about Linea's 'deflationary model,' I frowned: is it just another set of whitepaper jargon? After connecting my wallet and running it on-chain for a few weeks, my intuitive feeling is that—this thing isn't as mystical as it seems, nor is it just pie in the sky; it feels more like an engineering design that twists 'Ethereum value backflow' and 'L2 self-capture' together on a single rope.
Let me first explain what I understand as the core: on Linea, each transaction fee isn't simply sent into some black box, but is broken down into several logical segments—one segment follows Ethereum settlement, resulting in real consumption of ETH; another segment is used to repurchase and burn LINEA on the mainnet side, continuously squeezing the supply of the token itself. It sounds convoluted, but in practical terms, it boils down to two points: the more I use it, the stronger the value anchor of ETH becomes; the busier the ecosystem, the tighter the chips of LINEA are. This isn't just about slogans; it's about the cost paths being written into the contracts and processes.
Why do I agree? Because it flows with Ethereum's current rather than swimming against it to create an 'independent monetary theory.' Many L2s have made value capture 'only good for themselves,' resulting in an increasingly distant relationship with Ethereum, high migration costs for developers, and divided user mindsets. Linea, on the other hand, takes the compatibility of 'equivalent EVM' as its foundation, keeps the toolchain stable, allows one-click migration, has cheap gas, and executes deterministically, then uses two-way burning to bind the use value back to L1 and its own tokens without bleeding on either side. This design turns 'growth - settlement - value return' into a closed loop, rather than some distant eighth phase in a roadmap.
Of course, deflation ≠ one-sided rise. I've also seen the risks: first, the early degree of decentralization is still in progress, the governance of the sorter and bridge needs to be gradually opened up; second, if the ecosystem only shears profits without sustained real transactions, deflation will turn into a paper narrative; third, the intensity of buybacks and burns is affected by fees, throughput, and cycles, fundamentally relying on applications to drive it. My own approach is very simple: focus on active chains, observe developer retention, and look at the 'quality' of fee income rather than just a single-day peak.
"Genius or scam?" My answer is somewhat conservative - it is not a magic brush, but indeed a token project that is closer to Ethereum's long-termism. It locks complex financial imaginations into a runnable, auditable, and measurable pipeline, turning 'the more you use - the more you burn - the scarcer it becomes' into a reproducible causal relationship. I like this pragmatic feeling that does not demonize or wish: first, ensure user experience and compatibility, and then let the value loop speak for itself.
If you are still on the fence, why not look at the data first like I do, instead of emotions: fee paths, burn records, application retention. Numbers won’t flatter you; they will only tell you what Linea's deflation model is really burning and whether it's worth burning.
