The inaugural Voyage closes on the eve of the mainnet alpha it helped prepare.

Hello web3 builders,

This is a bittersweet update since this is our last one from the Linea Voyage, our first ever Linea quest. We successfully concluded the Voyage on July 9th, 2023, and hope all you users, testers, and developers derived as much value exploring the Linea ecosystem as we did in battle-testing the network.

In just nine weeks, through the weekly challenges, we achieved a transaction volume of over 30M, with 5.2M unique wallets performing tasks on Linea during the Voyage. Participants in the Voyage were able to explore on-chain activities and others that incorporated quizzes, polls and off-chain activities for users to learn about Linea.

We know we have said it before, but we are immensely grateful for the interest with which the community engaged with the network to ensure that we were ready for our mainnet launch today. You helped Linea reach this key milestone in our journey towards a more scalable Ethereum!

To deliver mainnet alpha, the Linea team have developed, tested, and prototyped various upgrades to key components of the zkEVM architecture. These changes significantly improve the network’s performance, user experience, transaction costs, reflecting our unwavering commitment to building the most scalable, efficient, secure, and user-friendly Ethereum layer 2 rollup.

This week Linea will begin onboarding its launch partners, before opening the network broadly during ETHCC. You can read more about the upgrades to the network that we have shipped and about our launch on mainnet here.

As we close out the nine-week Voyage, we wanted to share with you some things we learnt.

Linea Voyage has definitely shown to be one of the most important quests in the entire crypto ecosystem. With over 90M page views of our campaigns for the quest, an astonishing participation, we believe that we were able to create an enjoyable program for our users.

A key learning for us was that it was important to have a robust ecosystem to bootstrap a network like Linea. Our network of partners was instrumental in the success of the Voyage.

We ended the Voyage with over 50 partners, coming from different backgrounds and implementing different use cases. From NFTs, to decentralized finance (DeFi), to bridging and developer tools: the success of a network is directly correlated with the power and success of the decentralized applications (dapps) that live on that network.

Another important point that we tackled over the course of the Voyage was human verification of users. The Voyage ran on the Linea testnet. This meant that from the beginning of the Voyage, the network was spammed by sybils and bots. Human-centric activity is what we strive at getting on Linea, since that is what enables us to actually bootstrap a network with an associated value. This led us to a consideration: we need to prioritize human users in the Voyage.

As a result, we acted fast and implemented multiple ways for users to get a proof of humanity, which allowed them to climb the leaderboard and leave bots behind. The objective was not to censor any transaction, but to give more value to human activity.

We also understood the importance of listening carefully to user feedback and being flexible in our own strategy. Together with our amazing Community Support team, we were able to change the timings and tasks of some of the campaigns of the Voyage according to the feedback we received from the community.

One great thing that we saw was how some community members helped others in need: there were several users who went the extra mile to support other community members, and we cannot thank them enough.

As you all know, all participants in the Voyage are eligible to mint a commemorative “proof of contribution” NFT based on their position on the leaderboard that our partners at Galxe have been tracking. We will be working with Galxe this week to review the leaderboard now that the Voyage is closed and all challenges, including our evergreen Proof of Humanity campaign, have come to an end.

This week, we will be onboarding partners to our mainnet alpha, including our friends at Consensys NFT and MetaMask. Once integration is complete, we will be able to drop these NFTs to top participants. We have been testing these integrations for several weeks so you won’t have to wait long!

Next week, the Linea team will gather at our Paris headquarters to celebrate the mainnet release this community helped prepare as we open the network to end users and developers. To mark the moment, we will host a livestream from our Linea offices to reveal the final leaderboard tiers, share the final NFT art and begin dropping the artwork to finalists. Once the drop is complete, we will open a limited edition mint for all remaining participants of the Voyage, no matter their final position on the leaderboard.

The Linea Voyage will be the first official NFT collection on Linea, serving as a reminder of the community effort it took to get Linea to mainnet as well as a demonstration of the scalability this network can support. A single, collective on-chain action to celebrate an historic community achievement.

To learn more about the NFT drop, which tier you qualified for and details on how to claim your piece of Linea history, register now for our Live from Paris event, which we will hold at 5pm local time on Tuesday, July 18th. The livestream will be hosted in our Paris office and will cover everything about what's shipping, the NFT drop, and our growing ecosystem of partners.

For the latest updates to Linea, don’t forget to connect with us on Mirror, Twitter, and Lens to know more updates. You can also check out our developer portal and technical documentation to get started on Linea.