In the past two months, I have reevaluated Linea, which feels like watching a process that has grown from an 'airdrop paradise' into an 'urban system.' On one side, the Exponent growth program aimed at developers is already running effectively, distinguishing 'who is really bringing in users and who is just inflating the data'; on the other side, Native Yield is directly connecting the ETH brought across the bridge to Lido V3 for readying yields. Further out, Swift announced plans to add a blockchain ledger using Consensys technology at its core, and SharpLink is gradually planning to lay down a treasury of 200 million USD worth of ETH on Linea. These latest developments combined made me, who has been navigating the blockchain for many years, suddenly realize: Linea is bringing ordinary users, builders, and traditional finance onto the same track.
Let's start with the most down-to-earth data. In DappRadar's 2024-2025 review, Linea has seen over 200,000 daily active wallets, more than 86 million transactions throughout the year, and a contract interaction volume of 27.4 billion USD. Social dApps accounted for about 42% of interactions, and the user growth related to chain games has an exaggerated triple-digit increase compared to last year, indicating that this chain is not just about old DeFi players making strategies. A large number of social products and games are bringing real ordinary users in, turning 'getting on-chain daily' into a habit.
From a builder's perspective, my most commonly used phrase recently is: 'Linea is a developer-friendly chain, and it has prepared a toolbox seriously.' The official developer page divides resources into three parts: Discover, Develop, and Distribute, detailing everything from SDKs, templates, node services to contract examples, complemented by Builders Club, Launchpad programs, monthly hackathons called Dev Cook-Offs, and regular technical sharing, effectively eliminating the awkwardness of 'not knowing what to do after writing Hello World'. Exponent's three-month growth plan this round is even tougher—rewards are based solely on real users and retention, helping you push your product from 'capable of running' to 'having users', while also laying the groundwork for subsequent token issuance and liquidity. For someone like me who enjoys writing while trying, Linea essentially provides a complete runway from '0 to 1 to 10'.
But having developers alone is not enough; users must find it easy to get started, and this is where Account Abstraction becomes the keyword. The tactic on the Linea side is quite simple: no reinventing the wheel but bringing in mature infrastructure to use. thirdweb's Smart Wallet SDK, updated in November, already natively supports running EIP-4337 compliant smart wallets on Linea, using Pimlico as Bundler and Paymaster on the backend. Developers can directly offer users one-time login, batch transaction packaging, and gas payment with any token; Particle has even earlier integrated social login + modular AA on Linea, making the experience of 'one-click entry into an on-chain wallet with phone number/email' a reality, all backed by the ERC-4337 UserOperation and EntryPoint architecture. For someone like me who often brings new people into the circle, the persuasive power of 'you can open a wallet without first memorizing 12 mnemonic words, and it can also help you cover gas' is greater than explaining any zk technology details.
Native Yield connects 'cheap on-chain operations' with 'Ethereum yields'. According to the plan from the community design draft in August, the action of bridging ETH to Linea remains unchanged. Funds first land in the liquidity buffer pool of the official bridge, ensuring that there is enough un-staked ETH available when someone wants to withdraw. The portion that exceeds the threshold will be periodically sent to Lido V3’s stVault for staking by a licensed Native Yield Operator. The yield does not mint stETH but rolls in the treasury, then flows back to the Linea ecosystem according to the rules, subsidizing LPs and active users. Lido V3 has made the stVault a configurable treasury: it can set validator combinations, collateral caps, and 'escape pods'. In case there are issues with upstream protocols or governance, the treasury can directly separate to protect the ETH inside. For end users, what I see on the front end is only 'transaction fees are still a few cents, and the chain is still easy to use,' but the inner layer has an observable logical ETH interest curve.
This 'yield line' connects upward to the institutional treasury layer. At the end of October, SharpLink announced it will deploy the equivalent of 200 million USD in ETH to Linea in batches over the next few years, with assets fully custodied at the regulated Anchorage Digital Bank, using ether.fi for staking, and then layering EigenCloud's re-staking and AI workloads. The overall strategy aims to earn PoS yields while obtaining incentives from Linea and cooperative agreements, and also to expose itself to the new narrative of 'using ETH for secure AI computation'. Several media outlets and EigenCloud's own blog have emphasized two points: first, this is a multi-year gradual deployment, not a 'one-time gamble'; second, it operates entirely under institutional-grade custody and compliance frameworks. For someone like me who is retail, this has a simple significance: someone is willing to take hundreds of millions of USD and patiently test a new type of treasury management scheme on the same chain, so putting a small portion of my position on this track makes me feel much more secure.
The larger outer ring is the 'shared ledger upgrade' thrown out by Swift and Consensys at the end of September. The official press release makes it very clear: Swift aims to embed a blockchain-style shared ledger in its decades-old payment network, allowing cross-border payments and tokenized asset settlements to become truly 7x24 hours, real-time reconciliation; Consensys is responsible for prototype design and early technical validation, with over thirty global banks already queuing up for the first pilot tests. The signals behind this, as highlighted in Consensys's own blog and industry analysis, indicate that this is the first time traditional financial infrastructure is seriously treating 'Ethereum + zk scalability' as a long-term solution. For someone like me who frequently uses stablecoins to transfer money to friends overseas, this matter is quite clear—I can see that every on-chain payment I make on Linea is getting closer to the technical path that future banks will run on the Swift ledger.
Returning to the chain itself, Linea is also strengthening its internal capabilities for this ambition of 'connecting outward'. L2Beat's risk page currently still marks an overall withdrawal limit of 30,000 ETH per day, reminding everyone that this chain has real-world authority boundaries for the bridge and Sequencer before it is fully decentralized; however, the product roadmap updated in August has written 'trust minimization' and 'performance upgrades' into the priorities for the next 9 months: Q4 aims to reach 0.5 gGas/s (about 5000 TPS) throughput, with a target for Phase 1 trust minimization by the end of 2025, and the goal for Q1 2026 is to complete the Type-1 zkEVM upgrade to bring execution and storage as close as possible to the Ethereum mainnet. Several third-party deep reports have repeatedly emphasized: the most important thing in the short term is the implementation of dual burning and Native Yield, while in the medium to long term, it depends on whether it can deliver Type-1 and real-time proofs of these 'hard indicators' on time. As someone like me, I will honestly keep these two points in mind—enjoying the cheap and useful interactions while admitting that this chain is still transitioning from a semi-custodial state towards a more robust trustless environment.
I'm quite concerned about the people creating content and games on Linea because they determine whether a chain is 'only for DeFi players'. From task parks like Linea Park to various Voyage events and chain games like Yooldo, which have been backed by the ecological investment alliance, what you can see is: this chain does not intend to be just a cold liquidation layer but is trying to bring in lighter scenarios like social, content, and games. According to DappRadar's report, social dApps once accounted for over 40% of on-chain interactions, and the growth rate of gaming users is far higher than that of DeFi. This is a significant real benefit for someone like me who writes daily in Binance Square and hopes readers can easily 'click a couple of times to get on-chain'—I do not have to worry that readers will only see a bunch of complex protocols on this chain but can easily find a few genuinely fun products.
Ultimately, the Linea strategy I set for myself is not mysterious at all. As a user, I will continue to keep most of my 'safest sleeping' ETH in the mainnet, slowly moving a portion I’m willing to exchange for higher capital efficiency to Linea, to experience Native Yield and see what new applications Exponent has ignited; as a builder who occasionally writes some code, I will spend more time exploring their developer center, Launchpad, and hackathons, thinking carefully about whether what I want to build can leverage the existing infrastructure and traffic on this chain. When the day comes that the shared ledger of Swift really starts to run stably, and the large deployment of SharpLink’s 200 million USD is completed, I can at least confidently say: I am not standing outside the story watching the excitement, but have long been using a small portion of my position and time to learn and walk on this track.
