Linea becomes the latest victim, Arkham cuts L2 level servers citing "the importance of cryptocurrencies"

Renowned cryptocurrency analysis and trading platform Arkham Intelligence announced that starting from January 11, its intelligence platform will no longer support the Linea blockchain.

This decision was made during a regular review, during which Arkham conducts periodic assessments to determine a chain’s relevance. Factors considered include user demand and its overall importance to the cryptocurrency industry.

This year’s recent layoffs at Arkham mainly targeted L2-level roles.

Arkham announced its plan to cease support for Linea via its official X page. Linea (Ethereum Layer 2 network) appears to have failed to meet its standards.

Although the X post did not specify which standards were not met, many in the comment section speculated that it was likely due to insufficient activity or minimal user interest, making its maintenance costs unjustifiable.

More importantly, Linea is not the only L2 project removed by Arkham. According to an announcement posted on its X page, Manta blockchain and Blast network will also be removed on January 11. Currently, only these three projects have been announced, and these notices were released within days of the new year.

Last year, Arkham did not record any such price reductions, highlighting the beginning of a trend that suggests Arkham may be cleaning up its less relevant or less used chains as part of its daily optimization.

Reactions to this removal have been mixed. Users expressed concerns that this would reduce the visibility of Linea and Manta, making it harder to track token movements or dumps without Arkham’s assistance.

Does Arkham still support L2?

According to data from the Arkham platform, Ethereum Layer 2 solutions that survived recent eliminations include Arbitrum, Base, Mantle, Optimism, and Polygon, especially Polygon zkEVM.

These are all well-known Ethereum scaling solutions. Due to the Dencun upgrade in 2024, which outsources transaction execution to L2 layers, their relationship with Ethereum (the Layer 1 they all run on) is less dependent on Ethereum itself.

This enhances their relevance, ensuring that as more users transact on Ethereum, their usage metrics will continue to rise. At the same time, this allows the Layer 1 to focus on providing secure settlement and data availability, while offloading actual traffic to L2 layers.

The Dencun upgrade introduces protodanksharding (using blobs), providing a dedicated space for L2 data that does not compete with standard Ethereum transactions.

In 2025, subsequent upgrades such as Pectra and Fusaka are based on the Dencun upgrade, achieved by increasing blob capacity. However, the Dencun upgrade is the key to realizing this concept.

The next upgrade is planned for the first half of 2026, called the Glasterdam upgrade, which is expected to significantly increase the number of blobs Ethereum can handle, thereby boosting its L2 cache capacity. Additionally, Ethereum plans to increase blob capacity through full sharding (danksharding), but the specific timeline is currently unclear.