Linera community fundraising has unexpectedly cooled down; why is the "a16z concept" not selling well?

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On September 9, Linera announced the end of the $LNRA community fundraising round, raising a total of $848,000 from 617 participants across 69 countries, falling short of the $1.5 million minimum fundraising target. The official statement indicated that the funds have been refunded back to the participants' wallets.

Linera is backed by institutions such as a16z, having raised over $10 million in two funding rounds, and was once seen as a candidate for the next-generation public chain in the capital market. The community round was priced at $0.16, with an official promotional price as low as $0.02, and participants were incentivized with badge bonuses to join. Even so, the $1.5 million threshold was not met. The market has lost its belief in the dream rate this time!

From Diem Legacy to Prediction Markets, Linera in the Past Three Years

According to official information, Linera is a Layer 1 public chain that adopts a microchain architecture, allowing each user and application to use their own lightweight execution chain for parallel processing.

From 2022 to 2023, it was positioned as a next-generation high-performance public chain, emphasizing real-time applications and lower latency. Founder Mathieu Baudet previously participated in FastPay-related research at Meta, and the official statement claims Linera has turned that work into a viable chain.

During the same period, Meta also had Diem, which was the successor project to the earlier Libra stablecoin initiative, later halted due to regulatory issues. After the Diem team disbanded, some members founded Aptos and Sui, continuing to use Move, while Linera uses Rust.

In terms of financing, Linera completed a $6 million seed round in June 2022, with investors including a16z, Tribe Capital, Cygni Capital, and Kima Ventures. In August 2023, it raised another $6 million, with a16z continuing to participate, along with Borderless Capital, GSR, DFG, Matrixport Ventures, and Flow Traders. The total from both rounds is approximately $12 million.

The mainnet has not yet launched after more than three years, and the product side later supplemented with a short-cycle on-chain prediction market, Linera Markets, which conducts price fluctuations every minute, covering various assets such as BTC, ETH, and SOL.

In August, Baudet published a statement to reframe the narrative, stating that fast-cycle prediction markets, like the five-minute BTC price fluctuation, are generally more popular than expected, and positioned Linera Markets' one-minute market from product testing to external main narrative, aiming to create applications and generate application revenue for the chain.

The official statement claims that Linera Markets has been running on the testnet for over twenty-five weeks, with approximately 85 million transactions and over 50,000 users, with the sales page stating daily participation exceeds 8,000 people.

The community round public sale was subsequently launched, with pre-registration opening in late August, and the window opening on September 1, originally scheduled to end on the 8th but extended by ten hours. The minimum target was $1.5 million, with a hard cap of $8 million.

According to the official sales page, participants must first complete identity verification on Sonar, then purchase using USDC on the Base chain, with a minimum single purchase of $100 and a wallet cap of approximately $100,000 for the open pool. U.S. investors must meet accredited investor requirements and lock their funds for twelve months, with some regions unable to register.

The testnet badge corresponds to a separate airdrop, accounting for about 1% of the total token supply; during the community round sale, users holding badges were given priority in the reserved pool, while other users entered the open pool, with excess allocated proportionally.

The community round was priced at $0.16, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation of $160 million. The first $1.6 million purchased could obtain a Founder identity, and after the mainnet launch and completing a transaction in the official application before token generation, users could receive rewards at a rate of seven tokens for each one claimed from the community reserve, with a cost calculated at $0.02 per token.

However, the results of this community sale were not promising. On the day after the window opened, the subscription amount was about 1.1% of the hard cap, with many users questioning the project's previous claims about benchmarking leading trading applications and aligning with institutional round valuations.

Some also felt that the sales rules were not easy to understand, with unclear applicability of additional tokens and unlocking times, and many addresses in Asia were blocked during the KYC process. KOL On-chain Expert stated that if Linera launched alongside Aptos and Sui in the same cycle, it might have been seen as a high-return airdrop target, but currently, retail investors are less willing to buy into institutional narratives.

Ultimately, a total of $848,000 was raised, about 56.6% of the minimum threshold and approximately 10.6% of the hard cap, with the official announcement confirming that the minimum target was not met. Chief Product Officer Ryan Trost stated that the team consists of about five people, with limited expenses, and this round aimed to distribute tokens to core users willing to participate before the project generates revenue. The average purchase amount for testnet users was higher than expected, but the numbers indicate that this round must be refunded.

The Primary Market is Cooling, Not Just Linera's Situation

Widening the perspective, Linera's situation is not an isolated case. According to RootData, from January to August 2026, the total disclosed financing in the crypto industry was approximately $11.97 billion, a year-on-year decrease of about 52.9%, with the primary market accounting for about $11.52 billion, a year-on-year decrease of about 14.6%, and 329 financing events, a year-on-year decrease of about 31.7%. The structure of the crypto market has changed, with the total financing still supported by a few large transactions, and institutional investments becoming more concentrated.

Public sales that retail investors can directly participate in have shrunk even more significantly. Public sale tracking data shows that in the first quarter of 2026, ICOs, IDOs, and IEOs totaled about $390 million across 105 events. By early June, this dropped to about $58 million across 37 events, with both the fundraising amount and the number of events significantly lower than in the first quarter. In the first quarter of 2025, it reached about $849 million across 429 events.

This indicates that the money willing to bear early uncertainties in the primary market is decreasing, and the remaining funds are more selective about projects.

Many star projects have also underperformed in the secondary market. MegaETH was once speculated to a $6 billion FDV in the pre-market, officially listing on April 30 this year, with an opening FDV between $1.6 billion and $2 billion, peaking on the listing day. As of the time of writing, the price has fallen back to $0.037, with an FDV of only $370 million, down 80% from its peak.

Monad raised about $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm in 2024, and in November 2025, completed about $269 million in a public sale on Coinbase. After its launch, the FDV once surged to nearly $4.7 billion, but has now fallen to around $2.3 billion, a decline of 52% from its peak.

Plasma used the same Sonar public fundraising system as Linera, targeting $50 million but actually oversubscribed to $373 million, priced at a $500 million FDV. On its first day of listing, it surged to a historical high of $1.68 per token, but has since fallen sharply, currently around $0.084, down 95% from its peak. As of the time of writing, the fully diluted valuation is about $650 million, with almost all the premium built up after listing wiped out.

Previously, the primary market was willing to pay for narratives; if the story was compelling enough and liquidity was hot, public offerings could be fully subscribed or even oversubscribed. However, since the beginning of this year, the scale and number of public sales have declined simultaneously. Linera entered the market with institutional valuations from the old cycle and a new narrative, but the overall market is no longer willing to buy into the dream rate.

The Narrative is Hard to Sell Now

In fact, even launched public chains are facing tough times. As powerful new chains continue to enter the market, the block space of old chains is increasingly resembling homogeneous commodities, with users and transaction fees being siphoned off by a few networks with applications. Relying solely on throughput and zero-knowledge proofs has made it difficult to present new valuations.

As a result, old chains are also beginning to develop products.

On September 8, Ethereum Layer 2 Scroll posted a progress update in its governance forum, preparing to gradually transition from a general-purpose zkEVM to a dedicated network around the AI product Compass, with a transition period of about nine months. This is not a formal proposal; subsequent matters involving network transformation and requiring DAO approval will be proposed separately.

Its products include the user-facing Compass, the Compass API connecting over thirty large models, the privacy layer CENO, and the payment settlement product USX. The team claims CENO has contacted over thirty potential clients, with twelve currently conducting proof of concept, while Compass is still in early consumer validation.

Similar actions are not limited to just this one. MegaETH has shut down its speculative MegaMafia accelerator, shifting towards self-developed consumer applications, and using the revenue from its stablecoin product USDm for buybacks and burns. Arbitrum, Sei, and Sophon are also discussing bringing applications and transaction fees back to their own accounts.

Xiao Feng from Wanxiang Blockchain wrote this year that about 90% of crypto projects still lack clear users, sustainable revenue, or regulatory compliance. The next phase will focus on revenue, stability, and connections to the real economy, as white papers and performance metrics are no longer sufficient to support valuations on their own.

Buyers no longer bid based on the size of the story; they are more focused on whether there are users and whether there is revenue. In other words, the path of simply relying on narrative to inflate the FDV has become very difficult to pursue. The direction of the crypto capital market has changed.