Recently, I have been closely watching @lineaeth's movements, and I suddenly feel a strong sense of contrast: on one side is the emotionally fluctuating secondary market, and on the other side is Linea, which is quietly tightening its infrastructure. The upgrade time for Fusaka is basically settled, Ethereum's mainnet is about to directly double the blob throughput and further cut the costs of L2, while Linea's official team and community have already started to publicly position themselves as 'Ethereum's verifiable co-processor.' In plain terms, they aim to help Ethereum perform more computations and produce more proofs in the future real-time proof era.
From the perspective of underlying economic indicators, this chain is no longer the small experiment it was when it first launched. According to data from L2BEAT, Linea's current total locked value fluctuates around 700 million USD, with a cumulative purchase of over 6GB of data on Ethereum in the past year, and the average L1 cost per second-layer operation is less than 0.001 USD. This indicates that it has been continuously submitting batches at high frequency, and both compression and proving links are running smoothly. On the other hand, an analysis at Binance Square mentioned that as the airdrop enters the mid-to-late stages, Linea's TVL once recovered to about 1.48 billion USD, with daily active users exceeding 310,000, and approximately 9.36B $LINEA issued to nearly 500,000 addresses, with the overall claim progress approaching 70%, indicating that a complete cycle of 'tasks-interactions-airdrops-restaking' has been successfully established and is beginning to focus more on user retention rather than simply hunting for airdrop rewards.
Fusaka's biggest change for ordinary users can actually be roughly understood in one sentence: for the same interaction, it is either cheaper or less likely to be pushed out during network congestion. Because Fusaka has raised the block gas limit of Ethereum and upgraded the blob processing method through PeerDAS, L2 can enjoy a higher data bandwidth, which is a very direct benefit for Linea, which is already following the 'full data on-chain + zk proof' approach. In the past, during peak periods when performing DeFi operations, you would feel significant gas fluctuations, and while you bridge, swap, and collateralize step by step, you would always be calculating in your mind 'are these transaction fees worth it'; now, when experiencing Linea, especially during batch interactions, my more obvious feeling is that fees have become more predictable, even when ETH fluctuates overall, on-chain operations are no longer so 'heart-wrenching'.
If Fusaka thickens the 'pipeline' of L1, then Linea wants to turn itself into a real-time proving factory. The official roadmap has already scheduled block times of 1 second, 0.5 seconds, and even 0.25 seconds, while launching a linear acceleration proving system: gradually moving from today's batch proving towards 'Real-time Proving'. In the analysis of the three forces at Binance Square, the author directly provided a vision of a five-digit TPS—when ZK proofs can cover Ethereum execution in real-time, zkEVM L2s like Linea will no longer just be an 'expansion layer', but will become a general computing cluster connected to Ethereum, where you can first calculate complex logic and then package the concise results and proofs back to L1. For users like us who are constantly tinkering with DeFi and chain games, what does long term mean? It means when you play a high-frequency strategy or even an on-chain game, you no longer have to go AFK because 'L2 is congested'.
Changes at the experience layer can already be felt today. Data from DappRadar provides an interesting perspective: in 2024, Linea handled 86 million transactions throughout the year, with over 200,000 daily active wallets, and the proportion of social and gaming dapps far exceeds that of many traditional DeFi public chains, with social applications accounting for over 40%. Gaming is also rapidly gaining traction, with projects like Dmail, SendingMe, CARV, and various chain games blending social, identity, and gaming aspects into this chain. From a user's perspective, when I use SyncSwap to swap coins, do lending on ZeroLend/Mendi, and complete tasks in CARV or some light games on Linea, it feels more like 'living on a replica of Ethereum' rather than just 'doing a few interactions to claim airdrops'. This subtlety is key to retention.
More importantly, Linea has made the user entry point increasingly 'user-friendly'. MetaMask officially highlighted Linea Voyager Snap when introducing the Snaps upgrade: you just need to install it in the Snaps directory, then open the accompanying Voyager dapp, and the wallet will automatically recognize the installed Snap, directly connect and display available tasks and progress, without you having to manually click through a pile of 'connect' and 'authorize'. Coupled with MetaMask's advancements in Smart Account and Account Abstraction over the past two years, the identity of users on Linea has quietly transformed from 'an address' to 'a programmable wallet behavior model', where batch signing, limits, and authorization strategies can be abstracted. For heavy on-chain players like me, this experience difference is very direct: previously, doing an activity required opening several web pages to click through addresses and task lists one by one, but now it is basically a collaboration of wallet + task page, allowing more time to be spent on 'selecting projects, selecting strategies' rather than wasting time on 'clicking confirmation' and copying addresses.
Of course, Linea is not without its shortcomings. On L2BEAT, you can clearly see that it is still in Stage 0, with centralized sequencers, upgradable contracts, and most permissions held by multi-signatures, which means there is still a long way to go in terms of decentralization and censorship resistance. On the other hand, its proof system has already covered 100% zkEVM, with proof code and constraint systems open-sourced, and the roadmap clearly outlines multi-prover, decentralized sequencers, and community governance. For a zkEVM led by Consensys, this approach of first stabilizing performance and product, then gradually decentralizing, can be seen as a realistic compromise.
From the perspective of Azu, if you are only starting to pay attention to $LINEA now, I would suggest shifting your focus from 'short-term price curves' to 'what exactly you have accomplished on this chain'. Pragmatically, you can start by doing a few small things: first, bridge a small amount of ETH that doesn't affect your mood, run through a circle of DeFi protocols you are familiar with, and feel the differences in costs and confirmation speeds when the network is not so congested; then install the Linea Voyager Snap, treating some Voyage/LXP/LXP-L related tasks as a 'chain habit formation plan', not to accumulate more points, but to push yourself to try more ecological projects; finally, find one or two niche areas you are genuinely interested in, such as social, gaming, or off-chain proof-related projects, and use them long-term to see if the interaction experience of these dapps has noticeable improvements after Fusaka.
As for the asset $LINEA itself, the airdrop has already gone through a large round, the participation threshold, scoring algorithm, PoH, and other details are basically settled, and what will be more contested in the future is whether this chain can truly put 'real-time proving + greater bandwidth + better experience' into the hands of users and developers. If you are willing to consider yourself a 'contributor of computing power and liquidity' in the Ethereum ecosystem for the next few years, then taking a few more steps on Linea, signing a few more transactions, and trying out a few more applications is itself accumulating samples for your future judgments. This is not investment advice, but at least you won't just stay at the level of 'I heard this chain is about to take off'.
