As Blast’s Gold rush is coming to an end, if you’re like me, you may be wondering where the next best place is to rotate your capital. And with a 7 billion dollar evaluation after raising approximately $775 in funding, Linea, which is currently in the middle of its Surge campaign, still has approximately 4–5 months left for you to be able to farm their “LXP-L.”
In today’s article, I’m going to give my analysis of why Linea is one of the best spots to park your liquidity, identifying some of my top picks for what dapps to use, all compounded with getting the best/highest native returns on your token.
But before that, let’s talk a little bit about how the Surge campaign works and what you must do in order to be able to participate.
Proof of Humanity
Unlike most of the other L2s out there, one of the things that sets apart farming on Linea is that in order to gain any type of LXP or LXP-L at all, one must first complete a “Proof of Humanity” (PoH). LXP are the points earned from the overarching campaign that started back in 2023, but LXP-L is a more recent introduction with Linea Surge (more on this later). In order to complete the PoH, one must complete a total of three different attestations that can be found here. Personally when I completed mine, from Group A I chose to do so with Gitcoin Passport and from Group B, I did so with Clique and OxScore:
Linea Surge
The PoH is a requirement in order to receive LXP, and in the same vein, yet you can also participate in the Linea Surge incentive program and earn LXP-L. To note, you must use a referral code, so reach out to a friend that you know in order to participate, otherwise you could consider supporting this blog and using mine: https://referrals.linea.build/?refCode=JGfnsinLM2. Regardless, without registering with a referral code, you’ll be ineligible to earn any LXP-L no matter how much activity or liquidity you put up on chain.
Timeline: In its initial announcement last April, Surge was scheduled to run for 6 Volts (months), or until the network reached 3 billion dollars worth of TVL. Currently at time of writing, we’re about 3 months in and still less than $1 billion in TVL, but I’d imagine that this may change as I’d imagine that many people may be starting to bridge their assets from places which are now significantly less attractive since their TGE’s have already passed, namely Blast and zkSync.
Volt Decay: Another factor that Linea has introduced is known as Volt Decay, where with each passing month, you’ll earn 10% less LXP-L for the same amount of liquidity that you place on chain. In other words, it’s more profitable to get your assets on chain earlier and longer.
Multipliers: Although it’s not quantified t as transparently, similar as to how we saw on Blast, multipliers can be added dependent on where you put your liquidity. All protocols that are eligible to earn LXP-L are listed here, as well as which type of DeFi activity/liquidity will earn more:
Great, so now that we know about the framework of what the Surge campaign looks like, where should I put my liquidity? We’ll talk about that next…
What DeFi apps should I use?
As you can gather from the Multiplier Heatmap, it seems prudent to generally stay away from any Derivatives platforms, or Liquid-staked and RWA-related assets. Alternatively, the “hottest” places to place your funds are either through DEXes, lending/borrowing platforms and bridging platforms. Out of the three latter, I’ll give my top picks for for each one.
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes): Syncswap
There are multiple DEXes on Linea, but for me personally, I’m going to be focusing primarily on Syncswap, for not only do they offer decent returns on their LRT liquidity pools, but more importantly, they don’t have their own native token.
Lending/Borrowing: Zerolend & Mitosis
Zerolend: Unlike Syncswap, Zerolend does have their own token, but arguably most of the other eligible lending platforms do as well too. In my experience, Zerolend has been pretty easy to use, and I’ve found that they consistently have the same, if not slightly higher supply rates than what I’ve found on other lending protocols. Additionally, Zerolend allows you to double or even quadriple-dip on different assets such as $ezETH, where you can earn Gravity (Zerolend points), LXP-L, Turtle club, Renzo points, and Eigenlayer points:
Mitosis: Speaking of double dips, with no native token of their own and solid funding, Mitosis, is the primary place where I’ve allocated the majority of my LRTs on Linea.
As I mentioned in my previous article, regardless of whether or not you choose to deposit your LRTs into Mitosis, it still behooves you to get an account and to amass points based on badges — a method that can still earn you 10’s of 1000’s of points. Depending on how many points you earn, you can make your way up the following 5 tiers:
If you do decide to supply some of your LRTs, consider using my referral code 9UYGPC after you signup. This of course helps me out, but even if you don’t use mine, I still recommend you at least enter someone else’s referral code for it will give you an automatic 1.15x point accrual boost. At the very least, I highly recommend that you check out their discord to see what roles you’re eligible for — roles which will in turn qualify for corresponding point badges.
Bridging: Across and Celer
Across: So first of all, you may have noticed that Across isn’t listed as one of the “bridging” protocols that accrues LXP-L, and my understanding is that the main reason for this is because Across doesn’t hold any LPs on Linea — mainly because it doesn’t need to. From an intents based framework Across acts simply as a settlement later for 3rd-party relayers that fulfill orders, so there’s no actual need for Across to hold any liquidity itself. Therefore through natural market forces, Across is able to provide some of the cheapest and fastest bridging out there.
If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend you check out my article on Across and their Linea integration here.
Celer: Out of the bridges that have LPs, the bridge that offers the highest returns is Celer, who at time of writing offers currently 92% APY on single-sided $ETH:
Granted, the majority of this APY comes in the form of the platform’s native $CELR token, but regardless, these are rates at least 4–5x’s higher than any other bridging protocol that’s listed on Linea’s website.
Other considerations
Apart from the general upsides of earning LXP-L, there are a few other considerations that I think are worth noting. These include…
There will still be ways to earn LXP, not just LXP-L — There have been several different ways to earn LXP that have now lapsed, but the Linea Activation page continues to introduce and offer new ways to earn LXP. A recent Intract quest for instance involved Across, Mendi, and Lynex, which allowed you to earn a relatively easy 150 LXP in just a few minutes by utilizing each of their respective protocols:
Logically, I would assume that as we go on we’re going to see more and more of these opportunities to come up.
PoH — the Proof of Humanity hurtle may have deterred many from trying to farm the Linea network, but the silver lining is that it will hopefully put limits on the amount of sybil accounts that enter the space, meaning that average users should get a better allocation for any token drops than say what we saw for zkSync, where reportedly the diproportional amount of $ZK tokens were awarded to only a handful of wallets.
Point valuation — Despite it’s massive valuation, the LXP points themselves aren’t valued very high, currently trading on Whales Market at around 1 cent per point:
It’s important to keep in mind that as far as I know, we’re still several months out from any type of TGE, and there’s been no official announcements about any tokenomics.
Conclusion
In my opinion, we’re still in the middle of a current bull cycle, meaning that there will be multiple ongoing waves of liquidity that’s moving from one honey pot to the next. Few of these honey pots however have had this big of an valuation, and the good news is that we’ve still got a lot of time left to accrue a lot more points.
Once again, if you haven’t started your “Linea Voyage,” you’re more than welcome to start off by using my referral link in order to do so: https://referrals.linea.build/?refCode=JGfnsinLM2, and the earlier you start the less “decay” you’ll imbue. If you have already started with Linea Surge, do you think there’s any major protocols that I’ve missed? If so, I’d be curious to hear about them in the comments below.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone! allocation, but I’m also earning some pretty significant yields on my assets at the same time.