Recently, I have been keeping an eye on Linea's new trends, and I feel that its temperament is completely different from the beginning of the year: on one hand, the official has put 'Native Yield' in the spotlight, allowing ETH to automatically participate in staking through bridges to Layer 2; on the other hand, Swift announced that it will integrate blockchain shared ledgers into its cross-border payment network, with the prototype built using the architecture from Consensys; furthermore, SharpLink, a publicly listed company in the U.S. stock market, is preparing to deploy a $200 million ETH treasury in batches on Linea. These three lines are intertwined, making me realize that my small operations on this chain daily are actually connected to the 'serious financial engineering' from institutions and banks on the same underlying infrastructure.
Let’s start with the user-facing Native Yield. The official design is quite simple and straightforward: you bridge ETH to Linea as before, and the funds initially stay in the official bridge's liquidity buffer, ensuring there is enough un-staked ETH available whenever someone wants to withdraw. The 'excess part' above the buffer is regularly sent by a licensed Native Yield Operator to Lido V3’s stVault for staking. The staking rewards do not mint stETH but are rolled directly in the treasury and ultimately distributed according to the rules to LPs and protocol users providing liquidity in the Linea ecosystem. The entire process is monitored by the Linea Security Council, and the treasury itself is also a non-custodial structure, with the validator's withdrawal address pointing to the stVault rather than a centralized account; the corresponding details are well-documented in community design documents and the official Lido blog.
For players like me, who prefer hands-on experiences, the most intuitive change after the launch of Native Yield is the shift in psychological accounting. In the past, when bridging ETH to Layer 2, if you didn't manually throw it into a staking pool or lending protocol, those coins would just sit idle; now, after bridging a small amount of ETH to Linea and opening a few DeFi positions, I find myself instinctively asking: 'The underlying ETH behind this is actually already working on the mainnet, and the interest will eventually flow back according to the protocol rules.' The transaction fees remain the same, with operations costing dozens of dollars, and gas costs still at the level of 'a few dimes or even cents,' but the yield structure has shifted from 'only looking at the APY given by the front-end protocol' to 'protocol yield + ETH staking yield' being added together. This feeling of 'the money hasn't changed places, but there's an additional interest curve underlying' is quite exciting.
Of course, Native Yield is not just about giving interest for free; it also brings the 'inescapable security issues' to the table. In Linea's scheme, the bridge contract will always maintain a liquidity buffer, and every time someone withdraws from Layer 2 to L1, it will first use this un-staked ETH for redemption; only when the withdrawal demand is extremely concentrated and the buffer is insufficient will it enable 'stETH backing,' temporarily using the liquidity tokens provided by Lido, and then the Native Yield Operator will repay this 'short-term borrowed stETH.' This structure sounds a bit complex, but there are two key points: first, under normal circumstances, users do not need to wait for unstaking to withdraw; second, in extreme situations, there is a backup channel with Security Council adjusting parameters and emergency switches, which is at least much better than schemes like 'you lock your ETH and leave it to fate.'
Shifting the perspective from individual to global, Swift's announcement is a significant signal. At the end of September, Swift announced in Brussels that it plans to add a layer of blockchain shared ledger to the existing infrastructure, aiming for 24/7 settlement of cross-border payments and tokenized assets, with Consensys and over thirty major global banks listed as partners. External research reports and industry media quickly followed up with analyses, stating that this prototype runs on Ethereum and its Layer 2 scaling, and Linea, as Consensys's flagship zkEVM, is naturally included in this experiment. Simply put in terms Azu can understand: for decades, Swift has been transferring money from one country's banking system to another, and now they are preparing to incorporate a 'chain-based ledger' into the tech stack, and this ledger shares an underlying logic with the stablecoins I normally transfer on Linea.
The practical impact of this matter is greater than everyone imagines. In the past, when friends asked me, 'Which chain is convenient for settling a small payment to a foreign designer?' I would be torn between various L2s: some are cheap but have a thin ecosystem, while others have a good ecosystem but are cumbersome for the other party. Now, I would recommend Linea first, asking the other party to open a wallet that supports Linea. I would withdraw some USDC from CEX, bridge it once, and directly send it on-chain; the other party would see the funds in a few minutes, with transaction fees low enough to be treated like sending a red envelope through messaging software. When I envision the scene after Swift's ledger is implemented — where large settlements between banks use the same technical track — I suddenly realize that my small on-chain transfer is actually stepping onto a track that might be chosen by banks and settlement networks in the future.
Another significant piece of news comes from SharpLink. On October 28, this NASDAQ-listed company, which holds a large amount of ETH, announced its intention to gradually deploy $200 million worth of ETH to Linea over the next few years, with assets fully managed by the regulated Anchorage Digital Bank. The specific strategy is to stake through ether.fi, then layer EigenCloud's re-staking, along with incentives from Linea itself and its partners, transforming the ETH that was originally 'lying in the vault' into a combination with returns, re-staking, and AI workload exposure. The press release and various interpretations emphasized a few key phrases: multi-year, risk-managed, institutional-grade. These phrases have a significant psychological impact on retail investors like me — we used to think that DeFi was just a bunch of retail investors tinkering on-chain, but now companies are coming in with hundreds of millions of dollars in treasury through compliant paths.
From Azu's own perspective, these three lines combined perfectly position Linea as a 'multi-layer demand' intersection: at the bottom is Native Yield, helping every ETH that bridges in find an 'automated earning' destination; in the middle are DeFi players like me, amplifying or splitting this yield into different risk tiers through various protocols; at the top is a large treasury like SharpLink, treating the same chain as a serious asset management platform. Looking further out, there's Swift and those banks conducting cross-border ledger experiments, using the same technology stack. When you then look at Linea's own roadmap — currently Type 2 zkEVM, aiming to upgrade to Type 1 around 2026, with TPS increased to 5000+, and Alpha v2 already reducing gas costs by two-thirds — you'll realize it's not about 'who has the most airdrops,' but 'who can become the highway that resembles Ethereum the most and is best suited for large funds and real business.'
If you're only now considering whether to get on board with Linea, Azu would give a very simple practical suggestion: first, bridge a small amount of ETH that you can completely accept the volatility of, don’t rush to open many positions; think of it as switching to a cheaper 'Ethereum branch,' using the most familiar DEX or lending protocol to make one or two transactions, to feel the fees and confirmation speed; next, take a look at the design of Native Yield to understand how this chain takes your ETH for staking and how it ensures that you can withdraw whenever you want; finally, keep an eye on the Swift ledger pilot and SharpLink deployment progress, and ask yourself — if institutions and banks really move more assets to this framework in the next few years, would you be willing to take a small portion of your funds now, stand on this track, earning returns while accompanying it for a while?
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