Today we invite developers and users to participate in the first of a series of learning challenges or “voyages” across Linea and our partner ecosystem.

A key aspect of the Ethereum ecosystem is consistent improvement. When the network was founded in 2015, the Core Developers (Core Devs) and the community had already begun hashing out the roadmap that would lead us to Ethereum 2.0.

A better, upgraded version of Ethereum at the time promised three things – sustainability, security and scalability. The network’s transition to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism last fall, delivered successfully by the Core Devs and the community, was a massive step towards the fulfillment of two of those promises– sustainability and security.

The third part of the road to Serenity, as Ethereum 2.0 is often referred to, is scalability. And the next chapter of Ethereum scalability will be written on the network’s Layer 2s (L2s).

The idea of unconstrained scalability for Ethereum has been made possible by L2 researchers working on zero-knowledge proofs, pushing the boundaries of cryptography; by core developers around the world contributing to EIP-4844; and by the individuals contributing their randomness to the KZG Ceremony. Today, we invite you to join us to make this path to Ethereum scalability more robust.

The Linea Voyage is a journey that a user can undertake to learn about the infinite possibilities of an L2 network.

It consists of a set of weekly challenges and opportunities to explore the Linea ecosystem, and also help our engineering team validate and harden the testnet. With each voyage that a user undertakes over the next nine weeks, they can learn about Linea hands on, see what our partners are building with the zkEVM, and earn points towards a set of celebratory, commemorative Linea NFTs.

Our first week will focus on the flexibility of our bridge partners, providing opportunities to explore how to bridge assets from Ethereum and other L1s and other ecosystems to the Linea network. Our friends at Galxe will track the points earned for each task on a live leaderboard.

The primary goal of the Linea voyage is to prepare the network for its launch on mainnet later this year. In addition to technical validation and security audits, we need to stress the network and test a variety of activities at scale. And we need you to help us do that!

This is also an opportunity to invite the broader web3 community to participate in the project of scaling Ethereum at the protocol layer. Building a more scalable Ethereum is a community endeavor and is not limited to a handful of Core Devs and researchers. Much like the security of Ethereum is hardened through the efforts of single node validators, the scalability of Ethereum requires a constellation of scaling solutions, including zk-rollups like Linea.

How will the voyage be structured?

For the next nine weeks the Linea team will release weekly challenges in partnership with the team at Galxe. We will alternate between weeks focused on on-chain activities and others that incorporate quizzes, polls and other off-chain activities for users to learn about Linea.

Our first week is Bridge week and will feature challenges from Celer, Connext, Hop, LiFi and Multichain.

After Bridge week, we’ll host a number of polls and quizzes on our social channels before diving into NFTs, DeFi, Security and other topics. 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.

What are your goals for the Voyage?

We’re hoping to simulate a variety of mainnet scenarios over the course of this nine-week challenge. We’ll take some “rest” weeks to incorporate feedback and allow our engineering team to make adjustments, but first and foremost this is about stressing Linea and preparing the network for mainnet.

Why should I participate?

For most, this will be an opportunity to learn about Linea and participate in the project of scaling Ethereum at the protocol layer. Since we’re still in testnet, we’re hoping the lower stakes will encourage new users to kick the tires, explore our ecosystem and feel connected to the global effort of scaling Ethereum.

For those that stick with the challenges week in and week out we will maintain a leaderboard where they can track their contributions vs other testers to compete for a set of NFTs that Linea will make available to participants at the end of the Voyage, based on their final cumulative position on the leaderboard.

We will share details about the NFTs later in May, but minting eligibility will be based on a wallet address’ final, cumulative position on the leaderboard. Top participants will be eligible to mint one of four unique NFTs signifying their finishing in a specific tier on the global leaderboard.

We will also have an open-edition NFT mintable by all participants (no matter their final leaderboard position) should the Linea testnet cross 30M total transactions before the Voyage ends.

What can you tell us about the commemorative NFTs?

We are working with the same design group at Unconfined that helped us transform the artwork for our Merge campaign into the Merge: Regenesis Collection minted on the first blocks of Proof of Stake Ethereum. The NFTs will celebrate the collective effort shown by the Ethereum community, who from the Genesis Block have worked to build a sustainable, secure and scalable foundation for web3.

We will have four “editions” of the NFT, each corresponding to a threshold of activity accumulated across all voyages and a fifth, commemorative edition NFT that will be unblocked for all participants should we reach 30M total testnet transactions by the end of the Voyage.

The commemorative NFTs do not imply there will be a Linea token in the future and we will have no obligation to participants in the Linea Voyage outside of the commemorative Linea NFT itself.

How have you determined the activities that will be included? Will some be weighted more heavily than others?

We are working with our early testnet partners to blend some on-chain with a few off-chain activities. We wanted to create some fun ways to get involved with a set of more technical tasks that actually help us validate performance of the testnet.

What happens if challenge or activity strains the testnet to the point of breaking?

We hope that our early community will be interested in learning more about Linea and expect a surge in volume.

We are running this during the testnet to strain the system when the stakes are lower and no one is running production workloads. We are also staggering the on-chain portions of the Voyage between sprint cycles to allow our engineering teams time to address any stress points we identify.

In the event of a bottleneck or bug arising that prevents the network from operating as usual, we may pause the challenges temporarily to address and resolve the issue. This is what we’re after! Better on testnet than on mainnet.

If I need help getting started or with one of the on-chain activities, where can I get help?

You can find guides on how to use our early testnet partners under here. If you need more help, please search or post in our community forum or join our Discord.