Hey guys! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Linear.Finance project! Can you tell us more about the founding of the project and what the problem is that you were addressing?
We founded this project near the middle of 2020 as we recognized the scaling and high gas fee issues that were plaguing the synthetic asset protocols on the Ethereum side. This is why we set out to build out Linear Finance, the first cross-chain decentralized synthetic asset protocol to cost-effectively build and manage synthetic assets.
Could you please give us a rundown of the most important things about Linear.Finance?
Yes, at Linear we hang our hat on having fast and cost-effective transactions throughout our protocol from staking LINA to trading our synthetic liquids to claiming rewards which is unique in the synthetic asset space. We also have a beautiful UI/UX for users to easily navigate and the support staff 24/7 to make sure questions are answered quickly. Our investable assets will also rapidly increase not only in terms of number but also creativity and breadth, with indices backed by institutional research. Lastly, all of our assets are cross-chain compatible!! Meaning that you can bridge them between ETH and BSC so users can access both DeFI ecosystems.
So going forth into 2021 and beyond, how will your project make an impact in the crypto space, or on the world?
We always believed that Linear’s goal as a synthetic asset exchange is to democratize access to investment assets so we will always be pushing towards this goal in every aspect of our business. As such, for 2021 and beyond, Linear users and investors can expect product proliferation in terms of what we offer on our exchange, off our exchange (in terms of yield farming initiatives) and more infrastructure access such as building new markets on different blockchain platforms and new international communities….So that more users can access synthetic assets and trade what they normally cannot!! This is our contribution to crypto and decentralized finance.
What makes Linear.Finance unique if you compare yourself to your competitors?
- As mentioned before, conducting transactions on Linear is faster and simply cheaper compared to competitors. By putting work-heavy smart contracts on Binance Smart Chain with high TPS and inexpensive gas fees, Linear users are able to enjoy fast transactions in all aspects of Linear’s protocol (e.g. staking/unstaking, building/burning our stablecoin ℓUSD/Synthetic assets, claiming rewards, trading execution and, oracle price updates) at the fraction of the gas fees on Ethereum. Moreover, users don’t have to deal with issues about L2 “finality” unlike our competitors where users have to wait 7 days to withdraw their tokens from L2. This simply destroys the user experience and incurs opportunity costs.
- Investable assets we will have on the exchange will be wide in breadth but also creative ranging from your standard spot crypto, commodities, currencies, Digital Indices, and once our DAO is done, we will have access to stocks global markets. AND, at Linear, the prices for our assets are always true and updated to market as we have Band Protocol retrieving prices for us from the exchanges unlike some of our other competitors which have asset prices that are also determined by AMM curves. Keep in mind that we are selective in what we put on the exchange and we will only put up assets/indices which are built well and in many cases are sophisticated in their construction.
- Lastly, our team has spent an inordinate time on the UI/UX for our protocol so that users can find it easy to use and navigate…I consider this to be very tangible for the users and is the first key issue we addressed. This is further backed by our aftermarket support. Come to our Discord 24/7 and there will be trained staff there to deal with questions or issues. Just another way for Linear to complete the user experience.
Now, could you tell us about your accomplishments so far, and in the history of the Linear.Finance. Please tell us what milestones you are most proud of?
We started Linear in Q2 of last year and officially announced the project in Q3. Some of our biggest accomplishments to date are:
- Linear raised over +2m USD from core strategic investors such as #Hashed, CMS, NGC, Alameda Research, Genesis Block Ventures and Huobi Global.
- Upon the public release of our token, we successfully ran a pre-staking program with a 65% staking rate.
- In terms of our main product launches, we successfully launched our Buildr and Exchange in January 2021 on Binance Smart Chain and are currently live for staking and the trading of synthetic assets. The data stats on our Buildr and Exchange can be found on https://dashboard.linear.finance
We are most proud of the user acceptance of our protocol.
- General headline stats are as follows:
- Total TVL Locked of ~150m USD
- Total LINA Staked: 1.11bn LINA (88% LINA stakers, 12% Foundation)
- As of today, we have ~24K LINA holders
- Current exchange has a total of 11 spot crypto pair, 2 crypto indices, 2 commodities, 2 currencies
- Total exchange volume ranges from ~8M — 80M USD per day depending upon market conditions.
- LINA stakers are earning a combined APY of ~90% broken down into LINA staking rewards and LUSD from exchange fees.
- From a community standpoint, we have established vibrant communities in Europe, North America, China, Korea, Vietnam, Russia and Turkey and have over 10K users spread out over our social media channels such as Telegram, Discord, Twitter, and WeChat.
Now, give us a quick rundown of the future of the project. For example, what new things are you seeking to bring to life and what will it mean for Linear.Finance?
We expect a number of exciting developments for Linear over the next few months.
- Build partnerships with other deFi protocols within BSC in order to increase the use cases of LUSD. We have a number of partners within the lending/borrowing and stableswap protocol space. One team we plan on integrating with, BeltFi are an open non-anonymous team with a proven track record with Orbit Chain and Klayswap. As we add Linear’s liquid assets to Belt’s stableswap, they are given more utility as they are pegged to the real asset AND liquid assets users will be getting solid yields through Belt’s yield optimizing algos, especially as more strategies are added. In addition, we will look to become the provider of cross-asset swaps for other protocols as being able to quickly build synthetic assets is quite powerful, particularly in currencies other than USD.
- LinearDAO is being developed and flushed out. A Linear Council will soon be established which will consist of influential Linear community members who will be responsible for broader wide protocol decisions such as our P-Ratio (500%), Liquidation Ratio, fee splits, and others and then another mechanism to vote on which assets to list on our exchange in which each LINA staker can have a direct vote. We will then have offerings which you won’t be able to find on other synthetic asset protocols or even CEX’s!
- Multi Collateral Staking. We are working on allowing users to stake other popular ERC-20 tokens into our Buildr app and collateralize these to build LUSD to be further used in trading on our exchange or other yield farming initiatives around the BSC or ETH ecosystems.
- Linear on Polkadot. Given that we are a cross-chain compatible synthetic asset protocol, we have started development of Linear DOT through one of our core partners Moonbeam. With Moonbeam, we are able to efficiently deploy on DOT with our existing code base. Testnets versions are being worked on and previews of these will be available for public testing soon.
Tell us about your team. Who’re the people behind the screens?
For myself, I actually come from a traditional finance background but started my journey in crypto as an FPGA miner. I was heavily involved in the community building mining bitstreams. But over the last 1.5 years, I have been investing in DeFi coins and using DeFi dapps as I see the true value and how revolutionary it is in terms of being able to disintermediate financial markets and it’s middlemen. My finance career started in Silicon Valley doing M&A for enterprise/mobile software companies, went to business school and then spent the last +13 years doing collateralized debt and structured products for bulge bracket banks in Asia.
My co-founder Drey, has a background that includes both banking in trade finance and on the trading floor doing FX and rates. He led the product side of one of the largest Security Token Offering companies in Asia called Liquefy and led multiple tokenization projects with one of the largest real estate families in Asia, hedge funds and semi-government bodies. His vision ever since his transition from banking to blockchain/crypto has been to disrupt the traditional banking system and offer permissionless financial asset access for the mass public. Now he leads the product development at Linear and brings to the table a wealth of financial experience and creating institutional-ready products with interoperability on blockchains such as Ethereum, Quorum, and NEO, focusing on high throughput, security, and scalability.
Which partnerships have Linear.Finance engaged in so far, and which ones are the most impactful?
Our partners play such important roles for Linear that without them, we certainly would have a hard time functioning properly. Band Protocol is one of our key partners which helps provide constant and accurate updated price feeds to our exchange so that users can trade. In addition, our first index provider Xangle has been extremely helpful in setting up our crypto large cap indices. These indices are constructed well and weightings are backed by their research team who spend countless hours to determine the right tokens to include and requisite weightings. Please check them out at https://xangle.io/
If people would like to follow you on your social media pages, visit your website or read your important documents like your white paper, what are the links they need to visit? Please list them below.
Website: https://linear.finance/
- Buildr — https://buildr.linear.finance/
- Exchange — https://exchange.linear.finance/
- Whitepaper: https://linear.finance/defi/Linear_Whitepaper_EN.pdf
- Discord: https://discord.gg/EeSqsV8ZCv
- Twitter: @LinearFinance
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/linearfinance
Thank you so much for your time! Do you have anything to add before we finish?
Thank you so much for this opportunity to share Linear with your readers. I encourage those who are interested to come join us on our Discord channel so that we can further share our knowledge on Linear, synthetic asset trading, and answer any questions. We look forward to having you with our Linear family on our road forward!
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