Linear AMA Recap

31 Aug 202020:08

AMA

Linear AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here
Kevin Tai, CEO & Co-Founder of Linear Finance (@KT_LinearFinance)
Welcome Kevin, thank you for taking your time today!

Kevin Tai

Hello, am very glad to be here joining you guys today.. Thanks for having me

Cryptodiffer Team

Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Kevin Tai

Of course, I am Kevin, the Co-Founder of Linear Finance. I am originally from TradeFi and started my career in Silicon Valley doing M&A at an investment bank for large scale enterprise software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle. I subsequently went to business school and afterwards ended up in Asia working at banks such as Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse and finally at Mirae Asset Global investments. My primary work was in collateralized debt and structured products. My journey into crypto started as a miner where i was mining altcoin using FPGAs and was heavily involved in the communiyt development of bitstreams. But for the last 1.5 years i have been investing into DeFi projects and started Linear last year with my other Co-Founder Drey

Cryptodiffer Team

Great, thank you for the introduction!
let's now talk about Linear!
Q2: Can you introduce Linear Finance to us?

Kevin Tai

So Linear Finance is the first cross-chain compatible decentralized synthetic asset protocol where users can come and cost-effectively stake, build, and purchase a wide gamut of synthetic assets. Our LINA token is ERC-20 but our protocol is built on Binance Smart Chain which allows users to reap the benefits of a faster chain. Hency, if you come any try our protocol, you will see transactions speeds that are substantially faster and much cheaper than our ETH counterparts. A round robin transaction on Linear will costs 5-6 USDT in gas, on our ETH competitor, nowadays its like around 500-600 USDT. Also, we are cross-chain compatible so all of our assets can be swapped between BSC and ETH so you can access both DeFi ecosystems.
👍

Cryptodiffer Team

The last one from us before we open chat for community questions

Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans

Kevin Tai

Yeah, so we started the project in mid of last year and around September we went out to do our public fundraising, generating about 2.3m USDT from strategic partners such as CMS, Hashed, Alameda Research, NGC and Genesis Block Ventures. Upon launch we started a pre-staking program which saw over 60% of LINA holders staking. Our Mainnet Linear Buildr and Linear Exchange (both built on BSC) were launched last month and we have seen tremendous support from the community on using our dApps. Id like to thank our partners such as Band for working hard to provide us the price oracles, Hashed for helping with our market entry into Korea and Moonbeam on working us for the future Polkadot integration.
From the marketing side, we have quite a large western community of users on TG and Discord and groups in Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Turkey, and soon France.
Currently, some of the major exchanges we are listed on include MXC, Bitmax, Huobi, Coinone, FTX, Bithumb, Upbit
Going forward, we have a quite a lot on our plates as we will have substantial product tech updates to our Exchange over the next few weeks including our dashboard, liquidation protocol, and advanced TV trading functionality/design. On the synthetic asset side, we currently have a few spot crypto and Gold and Silver but will be adding a number of synthetics that will revolve around existing crypto pairs, currency pairs, and more importantly, thematic portfolio indices.
In the medium to longer term, the team remains focused on building partnerships with other BSC and ETH DeFi projects and then our DOT integration which we expect to be out near the end of this upcoming year.
👍

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers!
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Cryptodiffer Community

I've known Lina to be an Ethereum based project but later swapped to BSC and now it's on its own mainnet, congratulations on that, however, what will happen to the Lina token on Ethereum and BSC? Can they be swapped to mainnet Lina or they will be burned permanently?

Kevin Tai

As we are a cross-chain compatible protocol we will exist on both the BSC and ETH chains with our main buildr product and Linear exchange on BSC. As such, we are working with exchanges to offer both versions of our tokens to our users.

Cryptodiffer Community

What parts of the Linear Finance system architecture do you want to add to Polkadot? Where is the process of integrating Linear Finance into Polkadot?

Kevin Tai

This is actually a really good question. Whilst we are working on the integration with Polkadot, we are beginning to envision what Linear will look like on DOT. The DeFi ecosystem is being built out so we are confident the external pieces will be in place. But, for Linear, it's very possible that we have another version of Linear that is just for DOT with a bridge between BSC and DOT. The reason being is that building an aggregated debt pool remains which is accurate remains to be the structural challenge in this case. Nevertheless, we are assessing all avenues in this regard and this will be touched upon when we release Linear testnet on DOT.

Cryptodiffer Community

Do the token holders have right to participate in the governance of the project? On what kind of decisions can they vote on about the project?

Kevin Tai

Soon we will be adding a LinearDAO and likely a Linear Council both which will be governing certain aspects of the protocol including P-Ratio, Exchange fee revenue split, multi-collateral assets, and particularly which assets we will have on the exchange (hint hint stonks).

Cryptodiffer Community

Synthetix has been operating in this field for a long time, has a certain first-mover advantage, and has put the Layer 2 expansion solution on the agenda, and ETH 2.0 is also in full swing. Why can Linear Finance stand out in the DeFi synthetic asset track?

Kevin Tai

Yes, certainly they have a first mover advantage but their protocol is not built for faster chains, they are ETH maximalists and have committed themselves to L2 which at the end of they day is great but not ready for DeFi adoption given the issue with finality. Moving from optimism L2 to L1 means your tokens are locked for 7 days before you can actually have access. Don't believe me? Ask them. That and the fact that without the adoption of Optimism throughout the DeFi protocols would currently mean that all composability is lost. SNX sacrifice composability and user experience for transaction speed and cost. We don't need do that at Linear and other public blockchains like BSC.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hi Kevin,
I'm pretty impressed with Linear and it's recent growth. I've prepped my two questions in advance,
Hope not too much where answered already. They are:
1) You only just released an update on the platform to defend against traders frontrunning the oracle. However some newer and/or more impatient members where a little concerned with the 2 hour notice and the lack of communication in the 40 hours of downtime. How are you planning to address this in future updates?
2) There has been talk and rumor about new listings, which I'm sure are coming; Do you have a timeframe and a niche from where we could expect new markets to open up on the Linear exchange?

Thanks for your time!

Kevin Tai

Hi Gib, thanks for bringing this up. For your first question, we apologize for the inconvenience the downtime has caused but we needed to take rapid and immediate preventative measures in this case which was to limit the trading on the exchange at the time. It took our dev team some time to make the appropriate changes to the protocol and come up with the right solution. I certainly apologize for not providing more updates during the downtime but preferred to come to users with a solution rather than additional problems. Nevertheless, the concerns are noted and we will do more going forward. For your second question, over the next two weeks we will have additional assets coming onboard, BAND is currently testing these new assets for the oracle pricing so stay tuned.
👍
Ok for some more question

Cryptodiffer Community

You said that we will offer multi-collateral staking soon. Can you tell us more about this? What assets besides LINA can we stake?

Kevin Tai

Multi-Collateral staking is a huge challenge for us and will be a major achievement when completed as this allows users with selective assets to come onto our protocol, stake, build LUSD and then use it to purchase our synthetic assets. Projects build whole protocols around a multicollateral staking and stablecoin issuance. We will have it done this year and its likely users will be able to stake wBTC, wETH and a few other surprised tokens

Cryptodiffer Community

Linear Finance has announced a partnership with Moonbeam Network. How will this partnership help you integrate into the Polkadot ecosystem and succeed in DEFI?

Kevin Tai

The partnership with Moonbeam is very important to us as their tech allows us to use our existing codebase and quickly deploy on DOT.

Cryptodiffer Community

Q3.While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?

Kevin Tai

Yes, we actually pride ourselves on our community management as we recognize that DeFi protocols are not always the easiest to use and not everthing work always as planned. As such, we always have community admins who are there to help out anytime... Please join us in our community and you will find out!

Cryptodiffer Community

What are the features and what is the short term perspective from “Digital Structured Portfolio”? When are you planning to add Actively Managed Index Strategies to Linear Finance?

Kevin Tai

I cannot comment on the products we will be announcing soon but I will tell you that the the indices we put out will be very different than what you will find at other synthetic asset protocols. They are built and structured well and have certain nuances you wont see elsewhere. We take time to put these indices together and willl also have the relevant info for the users to view before purchasing!

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you for your time, great answers!
thank you everyone who took part today!
Enjoy your weekends, everyone!

Kevin Tai

Thanks for everythign and it was great speaking to everyone
Come join us on our journey!! All the Best...