The zkEVM race in 2025 feels less like a sprint and more like a test of who can build something millions of people will actually use every day without noticing the tech underneath. Some teams chase theoretical perfection, others chase headlines, Linea quietly focused on making Ethereum fast and cheap while still feeling exactly like Ethereum.
It all started in the ConsenSys labs in early 2023 when a small crew decided the only way to win scaling was to stop trying to reinvent the EVM. Instead of custom bytecode or new languages, they built a lattice-based SNARK prover that could eat vanilla Ethereum transactions and spit out tiny proofs. Mainnet went live in the summer of 2024 with zero fanfare, just a chain that let you run the same contracts you already had for a fraction of the cost.
The turning point came with the Exponent upgrade that dropped in November 2025. Proving time collapsed by more than a third, blocks started landing sub-second, and they flipped on a dual-burn model that destroys both ETH and the native token on every transaction. Overnight Linea went from another rollup to a chain that actively feeds Ethereum’s own deflationary fire while keeping user fees microscopic.
Institutional capital showed up almost immediately after that upgrade. Treasuries that had watched L2s for years finally saw a rollup with full EVM equivalence, no weird abstractions, and a clear path away from centralized sequencers. Quiet nine-figure deposits started flowing in from names that never tweet, pushing total value locked from hundreds of millions into billions practically overnight.
The partnership list grew the way good infrastructure always does, through word of mouth rather than marketing. MetaMask turned Linea into the default cheap lane for millions of wallets. Aave, Curve, and Yearn deployed natively. Brevis brought coprocessing, ZeroLend brought credit, and suddenly there were four hundred plus projects all building because the developer experience was boringly smooth.
Numbers do not lie: by late 2025 Linea sits at 2.3 billion locked, driven by real DeFi volume instead of farming wars. Monthly transactions clear fifty million without the chain ever coughing. Stablecoin supply alone tops one and a half billion, and the growth curve still points straight up while many competitors fight just to hold ground.
Governance finally formalized with the Linea Association taking over in the fall. The setup is deliberately restrained: a council elected by token weight oversees the staged handover of sequencer and prover roles. Phase one finished with permissioned but audited operators, phase two opens the prover network wide in early 2026. Proposals need serious skin in the game to even reach a vote, keeping drama low and progress steady.
For everyday users the experience is almost suspiciously simple. You bridge once through MetaMask, pay gas in ETH like always, and everything else just works. Swaps cost pennies even when Ethereum mainnet is choking. Developers copy-paste contracts without changing a line of code. The chain never asks you to learn a new mental model, and that single decision has pulled in more real activity than any airdrop ever could.
Risks remain, of course. The prover network is still smaller than ideal until full decentralization lands. A bad oracle day could still hurt. The dual-burn ties the native token tightly to Ethereum sentiment. Yet the attack surface is tiny, the code has been hammered by every major auditor ConsenSys can pay, and fallback data availability on Ethereum means the chain never truly dies.
The native token plays a clean role: most of the burned fees flow back to stakers who secure the network and vote in governance. There is no premine dump schedule, no mercenary emissions, just steady buy pressure as usage climbs. It is a straightforward bet that the chain people actually use will end up mattering.
Competition has not gone away. Scroll keeps perfecting the academic ideal. zkSync keeps pushing bold account abstraction. Starknet keeps rewriting the VM for raw power. Polygon keeps juggling twenty products at once. Linea simply keeps delivering the version of Ethereum most people already know and trust, only faster and cheaper.
Try it yourself: move a small bag over, run a few swaps, deploy a toy contract. You will probably forget you are on an L2 at all. That forgettability is the point.
Zoom out far enough and the picture is obvious. Ethereum wins the decade by becoming invisible infrastructure for everything from remittances to gaming to corporate treasury. The rollups that survive will be the ones that disappear into the background and just work.
The next half year brings full Type-1 equivalence, open prover participation, and tighter cross-chain messaging. Nothing revolutionary on paper, just the quiet steps that turn reliable into essential.
Linea never tried to be the coolest zkEVM. It just tried to be the one you never have to leave.
