Linea is an Ethereum Layer 2 that tries to make on-chain activity feel much less painful, especially for people who already live in MetaMask. Built by Consensys, it’s a zkEVM rollup, which means most of the computation happens off Ethereum, but the final proof and data get settled on Ethereum for security. Linea’s mainnet alpha went live on 11 July 2023, after a testnet that handled over 46–47 million transactions from around 5.5 million wallets in just a few months, making it one of the busiest projects on Goerli at the time. The idea from day one was simple: keep Ethereum’s security and tooling, but reduce fees and make transactions feel closer to using a regular web app.
From a trader’s point of view, the appeal is mostly about cost and speed. Consensys has repeatedly said that Linea can bring fees down to roughly fifteen times cheaper than mainnet Ethereum, thanks to batched zero-knowledge proofs and compressed data. In practice, that usually means swaps, claims and rebalances that would cost several dollars on mainnet can drop to cents on Linea, depending on network conditions. Because Linea is “EVM-equivalent,” the same Solidity contracts that run on Ethereum can usually be deployed with no or minimal changes, and tools like MetaMask and Infura plug in natively. For active users, that cuts down the learning curve: bridging to Linea feels more like switching networks in your existing wallet than moving to a completely foreign chain.
The ecosystem that has grown around that infrastructure is now large enough to matter for capital allocation decisions. DeFi trackers like DeFiLlama and various news outlets reported that Linea’s DeFi total value locked (TVL) reached about 893 million dollars on 2 September 2025, then crossed the 1 billion dollar mark on 3 September, hitting roughly 1.02 billion dollars. Later data in the same week put TVL around 1.29–1.33 billion dollars by 8–9 September 2025, making Linea one of the fastest-growing zkEVMs in the Ethereum ecosystem. Under that headline number you’ll find the usual DeFi components: decentralized exchanges, lending markets, restaking and yield platforms, plus various meme and long-tail tokens that tend to appear once liquidity arrives.
A big driver of this growth in 2025 is Linea’s Ignition program. Announced around 2 September 2025, Ignition is a large liquidity incentive campaign aiming to push more than 1 billion dollars of extra TVL onto the network by rewarding users who provide liquidity on selected DeFi protocols. The program is funded with 1 billion LINEA tokens from the ecosystem fund and is scheduled to run until 26 October 2025, targeting key pools on platforms like Etherex, Aave and Euler, among others. For traders and liquidity providers, this translates into boosted yields and heavier order books while the campaign is live, but it also raises the usual question: how much of the TVL is “sticky,” and how much will leave once the token rewards slow down.
Another important change in late 2025 is the launch of the LINEA token itself. According to ecosystem documentation and third-party overviews, the token and its first large airdrop went live on 10 September 2025, with more than 9.3 billion LINEA allocated to almost 750,000 eligible addresses, including early users, builders and liquidity providers. This airdrop turned what had been a purely infrastructure play into something that now also has a direct, tradeable network token attached. For investors, that opens up a new way to express a view on Linea beyond just using DeFi protocols on the chain. It also introduces the dynamics of token emissions, unlock schedules and governance design, which will shape how attractive LINEA looks compared with other Layer 2 tokens over time.
The growth story isn’t the whole picture, though. On 2 June 2024, a decentralized exchange called Velocore, deployed on Linea, was exploited due to a contract vulnerability, with more than 700 ETH (about 2.6 million dollars at the time) drained through a third-party bridge and total losses around 6.8 million dollars. In response, Linea’s operators deliberately halted block production to coordinate a response and try to limit the attacker’s ability to move funds. That step helped contain the damage but also triggered strong criticism, because it showed that a small group could effectively switch off the chain. Linea’s team later repeated its plan to further decentralize the network and reduce such emergency control, framing the pause as a necessary short-term measure in a still-maturing system.
For anyone trading or investing on Linea, that incident is a useful reminder of where the main risks sit. The exploit itself came from application-level code, not a failure of the underlying zkEVM, but user experience was still affected when the chain paused. Smart contract risk, bridge risk and governance risk are all part of the package, just as they are on other Layer 2s. At the same time, the competitive environment is intense: Linea is up against optimistic rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism, as well as other zkEVMs such as zkSync and Polygon zkEVM, all of which pursue the same promise of cheaper, faster Ethereum with their own incentive programs and tokens.
The simplest way to think about Linea as a trader or investor is to separate your exposure into layers. One layer is just using the network: bridging assets over, trading on DEXs, providing liquidity, maybe farming Ignition rewards while they last. A second layer is picking specific protocols on Linea whose models you understand and trust, accepting that yields may be boosted today by incentives and may normalize later. A third layer is the network token itself, which concentrates your bet on Linea’s long-term position in the Layer 2 race. None of these paths is automatically good or bad; they simply come with different mixes of fee savings, opportunity and risk. What Linea does offer, as of late 2025, is a combination of strong growth, deepening liquidity and real-world stress tests, wrapped in tooling that already feels familiar to Ethereum users—which is exactly why it has become part of the conversation for both traders and longer-term investors watching the Layer 2 space.
