linera-io/linera-protocol

Linera is a blockchain protocol designed to overcome the scalability and latency problems that affect most existing blockchains. Traditional blockchains like Ethereum process all transactions through a single shared chain, which creates a bottleneck: every transaction competes for limited space in each block, leading to slow confirmation times and high fees during peak usage. Linera addresses this by using a different architecture based on microchains, each user or application gets its own individual chain, and most operations happen independently on those per-user chains without needing to coordinate with everyone else. Cross-chain communication occurs when chains need to interact, but the common case stays fast and uncongested. The core idea is that most of an application's work can be parallelized across independent microchains, dramatically increasing throughput and reducing latency compared to systems where all operations must be serialized through one global ledger. Developers build Linera applications in Rust and compile them to WebAssembly (Wasm), a portable binary format that runs in a sandboxed environment. Wasm allows the smart contract code to run securely inside the blockchain nodes without native code execution risks. The Linera SDK provides the libraries needed to write these applications, and the repository includes example applications to get started. You would use Linera if you are building a Web3 application, meaning a decentralized application that runs on blockchain infrastructure, and need low latency and high throughput that existing blockchains cannot provide. Typical targets include real-time games, social applications, or financial systems where fast finality matters. The project includes a command-line wallet tool, a local test network for development, and connection to public testnets. The entire protocol implementation is written in Rust.