The infrastructure origins of Consensys and the Linea debate

The infrastructure origins of Consensys

Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum, founded Consensys in 2015. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. Before Consensys, he worked with eMagine on the Identrus project and held a position as VP of Technology in Private Wealth. He also served as Director of the New York office of Blacksmith Software Consulting and worked with a partner to found and operate a hedge fund. In 2016, Consensys launched Infura to reduce friction for MetaMask users. MetaMask launched in 2016 to provide a way for users to connect to Ethereum. Infura acts as a blockchain data clearinghouse that provides endpoints to Ethereum’s API. This infrastructure helped MetaMask scale to 143 million users by 2025 after Infura provided the necessary API endpoints to handle the growing traffic. In 2021, Infura’s Ethereum API supported 4.8 trillion in on-chain transaction volume. During the 2021 bull market, MetaMask swap fees contributed to the 252 million dollar revenue in 2022. I see these same patterns in Linea, which Consensys developed as a Type 2 zkEVM.

Centralization risks and the Linea halt

Linea currently runs a centralized sequencer managed by Consensys. This single operator controls transaction ordering, which creates risks of censorship, MEV extraction, and liveness failure. In June 2024, Linea paused its sequencer for one hour after a Velocore DEX exploit caused $6.8 million in losses. The Linea team paused the sequencer for one hour in June 2024 after a Velocore DEX exploit caused $6.8 million in losses, and this action allowed them to censor attacker addresses during the assessment. I find this centralized control completely unacceptable. Can a network market itself as decentralized while one entity holds the power to halt all transactions? The Linea incident proved that a single operator acts as a single point of failure. This risk became concrete when Coinbase’s sequencer for Base went down in February 2025. Earlier, an Arbitrum sequencer outage in 2022 lasted five and a half hours. Matter Labs’ CEO pointed out the tension when a supposedly decentralized network halted due to a single decision. Linea’s median DEX swap fee is $0.18, while zkSync Era is $0.21 and Scroll is $0.27.

The Linea roadmap and current performance

Linea remains at Stage 0 on the L2Beat framework. The roadmap targets permissioned-set block-building via QBFT consensus in 2026. The token generation event occurred on September 10, 2025. This event distributed 9.36 billion LINEA tokens to users through an airdrop. The total supply reaches 72,009,990,000 LINEA. 85% of this supply goes to the ecosystem and 15% goes to the Consensys Treasury. Users pay transaction fees in ETH because the LINEA token carries no gas utility. In Phase 1, the team released the code under the Affero General Public License. In Phase 2, the team diversifies the Security Council to prevent concentration of power. In Phase 3, the team decentralizes the provers and sequencers. If you plan to use Linea, you must account for these centralization risks.