The Voyage has been a great success so far, with 450,000 participants across Linea and our partner ecosystem. We are thrilled to invite you to the third week of exciting activities exploring NFTs.

Two weeks ago, we invited you to join us in exploring the endless possibilities of a Layer 2 (L2) network with the Linea Voyage. You, the builders, showed up, and how!

The participation in the Voyage across Linea and our partner ecosystem has been beyond our expectations. The bridging campaign that ran in the first week of the Voyage had 450,000 participants. The number of transactions on the Linea network has reached 2.5M.

Before we dive into the details of the tasks for the NFT week, we would like to share what we have learnt from the first two weeks of the Voyage.

As a record number of builders have chosen to stress-test Linea during this time, we also ran into some hiccups with the network, as was expected. One of the intended outcomes of the Voyage is to find ways we can improve our network, and these inconveniences show us where we need to put in more work. Let’s take a look at some of the issues Linea encountered in the past two weeks, and what we have done to improve those.

One of the things you may have noticed is that the transaction fees among several testnet networks skyrocketed during the Bridge week of the Linea Voyage. This was a result of very high bridging activity on Linea. This is also one of the reasons we did not extend the Bridge week, even though many in the community were asking for it. We reiterate our apologies to other teams that were building on these testnet chains.

Another issue we ran into was unstable RPC connectivity for Linea during the Bridge week. The main reason for this instability was the large number of requests that reached both the public endpoint operated by the Linea team and Infura, which is available only for selected partners at the moment. During the campaign, we reduced the rate limit, increased the number and size of nodes in order to ensure stability, and several partners also started running their own nodes. Moreover, the Linea Message Bridge (used by some of the partner bridges of the Bridge week) has been under hard stress, but we are already at work to fix it.

Some testnet faucets operated by third-party providers also experienced some issues. This is normal as faucets are not meant to perform well under high stress, because that’s not their main purpose.

Most of the concerns related to the Linea network In general were mainly a result of extreme load on several components. Our team and partners worked hard to ensure the best experience possible to users by scaling their infrastructures in a very short time during the Bridge week. We can’t thank the team and our partners enough for their unwavering support. We invite users to actually see and check the slick experiences that our partners are able to offer, and we can’t wait to see the mainnet experience.

Lastly, we are aware that some users have not been able to finalize some of the Bridge week tasks. We would like to reassure you all that the Linea Voyage still has several weeks where users will be able to earn many points!

We would like to assure you that these hiccups of the testnet phase will be resolved as we prepare for our mainnet launch. It is better we identify these issues on testnet than on mainnet!

For any information on how to use our early testnet partners, you can check out our docs here.

Now, as we close out another great week of the Voyage, we are excited to announce that the theme for the next week is non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

During this week, our mission is to inspire you all to immerse yourselves in the world of NFTs and discover the vast possibilities they offer. NFTs can be a fun way to understand the benefits of tokenization of assets and identity. Our partners for this week’s tasks are ghostNFT, NFTs2me, Zonic and Bilinear.

By participating in the tasks that Linea and our partners have set up for you during this week, you can get a taste of what it means to be a part of the NFT community. From creating and deploying a new NFT project on Linea, to buying and selling NFTs, you will know by doing what it takes to become an NFT master.

You will be tasked with creating token-gated content, airdropping soulbound NFTs to Ethereum name service (ENS) addresses, and mint game NFTs, among other things. You can check out our tutorials to know more about how to interact with Bilinear, Zonics, GhostNFT and NFTs2me.

The activities in the NFT week will run from May 16th 2023, 9am Eastern Time (ET) to May 21st, 2023, 11:59pm ET. You will have four days (until May 25th, 2023, 11:59pm ET) to claim points on the completed activity as long as it is performed by the May 21 deadline.

All eligible addresses will be updated daily, every 24 hours. If you’re seeing “You are NOT eligible” be sure to check back after addresses have been updated.

As we mentioned earlier, our primary aim with the Voyage is to prepare Linea for its launch on mainnet later this year. We are grateful to each and every one of you who have so far participated in the different tasks and helped us stress and test the network at scale. We are committed to build a truly robust L2 network in Linea, and are thrilled at the support we have received from the web3 community.

If you stick with us through the nine-weeks of the Linea Voyage, you will be eligible for a set of NFTs that will be based on your contributions throughout that period, and your cumulative position on the leaderboard. More details on these NFTs will come later in May.

You can follow us on Mirror, Twitter, and Lens, to stay up to date with the latest challenges and tune in for ones that interest you.