Ethereum News Today: Linea’s Centralized Sequencer Casts Shadow Over Ethereum’s Scaling Promise

Consensys, a leading blockchain infrastructure provider, announced the launch of 72 billion tokens for its Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution, Linea. Linea, a ZK Rollup powered by a zkEVM, is designed to enhance the scalability of the Ethereum network by enabling faster and cheaper transactions while maintaining full Ethereum equivalence. This initiative marks a significant step in Consensys’ broader strategy to expand Ethereum’s infrastructure and support decentralized applications (dApps) with institutional-grade services.

The tokenomics of Linea are structured around community-first principles, including productive ETH burn, native yield, and a robust ecosystem fund managed by Ethereum stewards. As of the latest data, Linea has secured $1.67 billion in total value, with 51.8% of it being canonically bridged and 34.8% in natively minted tokens. The project has also posted 4.99 GiB of data on Ethereum over the past year, with an average daily data submission of 15.90 MiB, reflecting its commitment to data availability and transparency.

Linea’s infrastructure includes a sequencer responsible for processing transactions and generating zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to validate state updates on Ethereum. However, the system currently operates with a centralized sequencer, which introduces potential risks related to MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) extraction and censorship. The sequencer holds the authority to submit transaction batches, and users have no mechanism to force inclusion of their transactions. Additionally, the sequencer can freeze withdrawals by refusing to include exit transactions, which is flagged as a critical risk.

To mitigate these concerns, the operator role is designed to transition to a public function after six months of inactivity, allowing broader participation in the validation process. Until then, withdrawals are subject to a daily limit of 18,750 ETH. The transition mechanism remains theoretical, and no public tooling is available to facilitate this process at the moment.

The system relies on a Plonk-based proof system, which requires a trusted setup. Verification keys are hardcoded into the verifier contract on-chain, ensuring the integrity of the proof system. Linea’s prover architecture is composed of Corset and gnark components, enabling the generation of SNARK proofs for execution traces. These proofs are recursively aggregated into a single PLONK proof for Ethereum validation, ensuring the correctness of state updates.

Despite its current stage of development, Linea has already integrated advanced features such as blob-based data posting, introduced in March 2024, which optimizes data availability and reduces costs. The project’s risk assessment highlights the potential for funds to be stolen if a contract receives a malicious code upgrade, as there is no delay in the upgrade process. This underscores the importance of continuous governance and security audits to maintain user trust.

Source: [1] Blockchain Products by Consensys (https://consensys.io/products) [2] Linea (https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/linea)