Let me make my stance clear: I am not a 'new public chain enthusiast'; I am just an ordinary builder who has been tempered by high gas fees, congestion, and slow confirmations on L1. It wasn't until I moved an old project to Linea that I truly felt: Ethereum's future may very well thrive within the veins of this L2.
This is my first time deploying a contract on Linea, and I hardly changed any code; Hardhat worked flawlessly. That kind of 'Ethereum equivalent' smoothness felt like inserting an old key into a new lock, and it just clicked open the door. More importantly, the user experience is directly reflected in the data: transaction fees have dropped to a range that my team can accept, and the confirmation speed is so fast that I don't have to repeatedly explain 'just wait a bit longer' in the community group. The underlying system uses zero-knowledge proofs to package the execution onto L1, and the security anchor is still Ethereum, which gives me the confidence to keep large amounts of funds within the ecosystem.
Why do I say the future is not in L1? It's not that L1 is unimportant, but L1 should serve as the 'settlement layer' and 'source of trust', while high-frequency business, user interactions, and creative experimentation should all be left to L2s like Linea to handle. Linea's approach is very pragmatic: maintaining high compatibility with Ethereum to reduce pitfalls for developers; continuously optimizing the proof system to make 'cheap and fast' a daily reality rather than an occasional occurrence. For users, transferring, interacting, and minting are no longer 'wait a moment, then refresh', but 'just click, and it's done'.
What moves me more is the design concept of value flow. Linea does not 'pull' traffic away from Ethereum, but rather channels fresh water to the second layer, allowing value to flow back to the first layer: data availability is on L1, proof is validated on L1, and security returns and ecological flywheels still revolve around ETH. For someone like me, who values security while pursuing efficiency, this path is much more credible than the story of starting from scratch.
Of course, Linea is still evolving: decentralized sorting is on the way, cross-chain bridges must always respect risks, and developer incentives also need to be adjusted while running. I don't want to hype it as the 'perfect answer', but it is indeed on the right path—neither diverging from the soul of Ethereum nor providing truly feasible performance and cost curves for the application layer.
If you are a user, you will feel that interactions are finally no longer 'too expensive to hesitate, too slow to get angry'; if you are a developer, you will find that the migration cost is low enough to try immediately, and the cost of failure is small enough to dare to iterate. For me, that's enough. L1 is the root, Linea is the crown; if the root is deeply planted, the crown will grow quickly. The future of Ethereum does not need to be entangled in every minor adjustment of L1, but rather in whether a second layer like Linea can truly mesh together the three gears of 'security + speed + compatibility'. At least for now, I have prioritized the next version of the team's product on Linea.
