Linea becomes latest casualty as Arkham cuts L2s based on 'importance to crypto'

Arkham Intelligence, a prominent crypto analytics and exchange platform, has announced it will no longer provide support for the Linea blockchain on its intelligence platform from January 11. 

The decision comes amid a periodic review, which Arkham carries out to determine how relevant a chain is based on factors like user demand and its overall importance to the crypto industry. 

Arkham’s recent cuts this year have targeted L2s

Arkham shared its plan to cut Linea’s support on January 9 via its official X page, claiming Linea, which is an Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Consensys, had seemingly fallen short of its criteria. 

While the X post did not mention exactly which criteria failed to meet, many in the comments section speculated that it must be because it is not generating enough activity or there’s barely any interest from users to justify the cost of its maintenance. 

More importantly, Linea is not the only L2 to be cut by Arkham, Manta blockchain, and the Blast network are also set to be removed on January 11, according to announcements shared via their X page. Only those three have so far been announced, and the announcements all came within days of each other after we entered the new year. 

Last year, there were no records of any such drops by Arkham, highlighting the start of a trend that indicates Arkham may be getting rid of the less relevant or used chains as part of its routine optimization. 

Reactions to the removal have been mostly mixed, with users highlighting concerns about how this would result in reduced visibility for Linea and Manta, making it harder to track token movements or dumps without Arkham’s help. 

Does Arkham still support any L2? 

According to data from Arkham’s platform, the remaining Ethereum Layer 2 networks that survived the recent culling include Arbitrum, Base, Mantle, Optimism, and Polygon, specifically Polygon zkEVM.

They are all famous as Ethereum scaling solutions, and thanks to the Dencun upgrade from 2024, which outsourced transaction execution to the L2s, they are less parasitic in their relationship with Ethereum, the Layer 1 they all operate on. 

This has increased their relevance, ensuring they will continue to see usage across key metrics as more users transact on ETH. It has also freed the L1 to focus on being a secure settlement and data availability layer, while outsourcing the actual traffic to the L2s. 

The Dencun upgrade introduced protodanksharding — the use of blobs — which provide a dedicated space for L2 data that doesn’t compete with standard Ethereum transactions. 

In 2025, subsequent upgrades like the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades built on the Dencun update by increasing the blob capacity. However, the Dencun upgrade was the pivotal one that made the idea viable.

The next upgrade to occur will be the Glasterdam upgrade, scheduled for the first half of 2026, which is expected to significantly increase the number of blobs the Ethereum chain can handle, subsequently boosting the capacity of its L2s. There are also plans to increase the blob capacity via full danksharding, but the timeline for that is currently unknown.

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