Building a Private, Gasless Network in Public: A 2025 Transparency Update
When people hear ‘gasless Layer 2’, their reaction is usually one of two extremes: some see it as a long-overdue improvement to user experience. Others assume it cannot work without sacrificing security, reliability, or decentralisation.
In 2025, Status Network did not focus on convincing people that gasless execution was possible; we proved it by building a scalable protocol in public.
The goal was to realise a technically ambitious idea: build a Layer 2 that requires no gas fees for execution, that is resistant to spam and abuse, and that is uncompromising in its preservation of user privacy.
In the continued spirit of building this platform in public, we’ve put together the following transparency update for the community, giving you a look at what the team built, tested, and iterated on over the last year as we enter an exciting new stage of development in 2026.
Status Network is built around two core constraints that apply across every layer of the system.
The first is native gasless execution. Transactions on the network are designed to be submitted, validated, and executed without users paying gas fees.
The second is preserving user privacy. Gasless execution is not treated as simply a convenience feature. It is a privacy primitive that removes transaction fees as a source of behavioural tracking and metadata leakage.
These constraints informed protocol design, node architecture, application infrastructure, governance mechanisms, and ecosystem incentives throughout 2025.
Work on the Status Network protocol started in 2025 with a simple question:
Can a fully gasless Ethereum Layer 2 function reliably under real-world conditions?
To answer that, the team defined a clear technical roadmap early on and built a robust, reputation-based system around a single primitive: Rate Limiting Nullifiers (RLN).
RLN replaces gas fees with reputation-based access and throughput restrictions.
Over the course of the year, this primitive moved from a theoretical concept into a functioning layer of the Status Network protocol.
Implementing RLN on Status Network required both building the underlying cryptography and creating an entire execution path capable of handling gasless transactions at scale.
To maintain the project’s sovereignty while staying plugged into the broader ecosystem, the Status Network Monorepo was created as a fork of the Linea zkEVM monorepo. This made Status Network a standalone codebase, while still allowing upstream compatibility with Ethereum and Linea upgrades.
On the execution side, the team developed custom plugins for the Besu execution client, enabling native zero-fee transaction handling. A dynamic throughput system was introduced to adjust gasless quotas in real time based on Karma reputation tiers, ensuring fairness and spam resistance without static limits.
Several core components were built or hardened to support this model:
- A high-performance RLN prover, written entirely in Rust
- A sequencer coordinating gasless transaction validation between RPC nodes and the prover
- A high-performance database architecture for anti-spam and deny-list management, accessed via gRPC for near-instant responses
The primary concerns of this approach were reliability and operability.
CI pipelines were fully decoupled from external dependencies, enabling a transparent and open-source build process. Production-ready Docker images were published for all core services, and deployments were streamlined in collaboration with Gateway.
Throughout the year, the protocol stayed aligned with upstream Ethereum and Linea changes, stabilised end-to-end gasless test suites, and reached consistent pass rates.
2025 closed with the v1.0.0-alpha release, marking the transition from experimental development to a stable, deployable protocol, and with infrastructure finalised for the upcoming Testnet v2.
A gasless network is more accessible and easier to adopt, but that only matters if people have a reason to use it.
In 2025, Status development focused on building infrastructure that is non-custodial, censorship-resistant, and modular. This architecture aligns with Status’s foundational principles of privacy and digital sovereignty, ensuring there are no hidden control points or centralised control over the application layer.
The Status Network Bridge was released as the primary native bridge from Ethereum to Status Network. Its frontend is fully decentralised and can be run by anyone, meaning deposits and withdrawals cannot be censored or blocked by anyone, including Status.
Alongside this, the Status Network Hub launched as the main entry point to the Status ecosystem, offering new users a single place to find applications, stake tokens, or participate in governance.
Two foundational systems were completed and audited:
- SNT Staking, designed to preserve full user custody through an immutable Vault <> StakeManager architecture.
- Karma, the native reputation system, was built as a modular layer that leverages RLN to enable gasless access, ecosystem inclusion, democratic funding, and shared sybil resistance.
Work also began on the karma-sdk, which will make it easier for ecosystem partners to integrate Status Network’s reputation system into their own applications.
At the architectural level, the team designed the first yield-bearing L2 bridge that preserves rollup properties as defined by L2Beat. This design was later expanded upstream into Linea core.
Status Network built entirely custom Pre-Deposit Vaults, including both smart contracts and frontend integration, in partnership with Aragon. These are owned and operated by Status, avoiding the recurring TVL-based fees common in many third-party campaigns.
Development also started on GUSD, a new stablecoin on Status Network built with Generic Money.
Research on privacy preservation continued alongside work on the application layer, including exploration of native stealth address functionality and compliant, private yield-bearing assets designed to operate directly at the network level.
The Status Network team’s approach to developer relations in 2025 was about being where builders were already working, rather than attending a specific number of events.
At ETH Bishkek, Status Network sponsored the hackathon and supported strong participation in seeding new projects on the protocol: 17 projects applied, 8 deployed successfully, and several teams continued development after the event with direct support from the team.
At Korea Blockchain Week, the team organised Builder’s Night, presenting the mechanics of RLN, Karma reputation tiers, and Status Network’s yield model directly to Korean developers and ecosystem partners.
During Devconnect, the team was involved in multiple events, contributing talks, panels, and sponsorships across L2, privacy, governance, staking, and adoption tracks, including Staking Summit, Governance Day, Cypherpunk Congress, Stable Summit, AdoptionCon, Privacy & Compliance Summit, World’s Fair, and Ethereum Privacy Stack.
Status Network also co-organised an event with Base at ETH Belgrade, introducing the concept of a natively gasless Layer 2 to a broader regional audience.
To reduce onboarding friction, several developer tools were built and shipped:
- eth-scaffold tailored for Status Network
- status-l2-rpc-tools for running self-hosted RPC infrastructure
- Status Network OS, a retro-style gateway into the wider IFT ecosystem
A long-term investment was made in the Korean ecosystem, treating Korean localisation on par with English across documentation, applications, and education.
Community channels were actively supported, and the official Status Korea Naver blog was maintained as a primary hub for localised communication.
Status Network’s ecosystem work in 2025 focused on coordination rather than incentives.
The team defined and selected an initial group of L2 native applications. These apps receive early Karma allocation, participate in governance, enable gasless transactions for their users, and commit a portion of revenues back to the L2 funding pool.
After research and due diligence, development began with a DEX and a CDP stablecoin, with lending markets, a launchpad, and privacy layers currently in final discussions.
On the infrastructure side, Status Network positioned itself as a core contributor within the Linea ecosystem: cementing its role as the first external L2 launched on the stack, an active contributor, and a board member of the Linea Consortium.
More than 250 partner conversations were held across infrastructure providers, applications, LPs, and service teams. Key partnerships were closed and locked in ahead of Testnet v2 to ensure immediate readiness.
The first Status Network grant funded Karma Climber, a native game designed as a reusable primitive for onboarding, quests, Karma distribution, and future monetisation. Alongside Status Mines, it was launched on testnet to validate games as effective engagement surfaces.
This update reflects what the Status Network team has built, tested, and explored in 2025.
As Status Network enters 2026, our principles and priorities remain unchanged:
Privacy-first design, sustainable economics, and governance grounded in real community participation.
Future updates will continue to follow the same approach: build first, explain clearly, and keep the process visible.
