Linea community initiates discussion on decentralization proposals, involving measures such as block verification and reward distribution

The Linea community initiated a discussion on the Linea decentralization proposal, with the goal of making Linea a fully decentralized L2 chain, and outlined some suggestions to achieve this goal, including L1-Finality & L2-Finality, decentralization of block verification, recovery mode, block proposers, Finalization of Linea blocks on L1, reward distribution, etc. Regarding reward distribution, the proposal points out that in order to decouple it from the consensus protocol, validators need to build a consensus state Merkle tree that represents the different operations done by each participant, including voting and block proposals. This Merkle tree tracks all the activities that validators need to perform, so it can be used to calculate the rewards that each validator is entitled to. Each validator can then asynchronously claim their rewards by providing some proof of the activities they performed, and the validity of their claims will be checked against the consensus state Merkle tree. One advantage of this approach is that there is no need to add logic related to reward distribution to the consensus layer or execution layer.