KuCoin AMA With Linear Finance (LINA) — A Cross-Chain Compatible, Decentralized Delta-One Asset Protocol

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: December 27, 2021, 11:00-12:07 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Kevin Tai, co-founder and project lead of Linear Finance, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Linear Finance is the first cross-chain compatible, decentralized synthetic asset protocol to create, trade, and manage synthetic assets (Liquids) and acts as a faster, cheaper, safer, and easier to use alternative compared to other synthetic asset protocols. Linear Finance’s protocol is supported by a native ERC-20 Linear Token (LINA). The utility of this token within the ecosystem is used for — staking in the collateral pool, liquidity mining, governance, and investing in synthetic “Liquids” on investment assets with infinite liquidity and minimal to no slippage. They created this platform because they wanted to give users a synthetic asset trading experience that was seamless and efficient to use and not be subject to high ETH gas fees while also being able to use their Liquid assets in the ecosystem. This is why they operate their protocol on Binance Smart Chain and have integrated with a number of players in the ecosystem.

Official Website: https://linear.finance

White Paper: https://linear.finance/defi/Linear_Whitepaper_EN.pdf

Follow Linear Finance on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

Kevin Tai — Co-Founder & Project Lead of Linear Finance

Kevin graduated from U.C. Berkeley and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Kevin began his career in Silicon Valley, where he worked in M&A for software companies at Jefferies’ Broadview, a technology-based investment bank. For the next 13 years, Kevin worked in Asia for financial institutions including Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, and Mirae Asset Global Investments. At the same time, he was also mining crypto and then soon invested in a few DeFi projects, which led him to eventually start Linear Finance.

Q: Can you tell us more about your token, $LINA? Its use cases, distribution, and where to buy/get it?

Kevin: As you guys mentioned in the introduction, LINA is our utility token which can be used as collateral in our Buildr dApp to mint LUSD, our stablecoin. Users can then use LUSD on Linear Exchange to trade for Liquids, synthetic versions of LBTC, LETH, indices, commodities and many others.

Users who stake LINA and mint LUSD earn rewards, which come in the form of inflationary rewards and a portion of the trading fees from the exchange, these are claimable weekly. While rewards are locked for 1 year from distribution, they can still be used as collateral to mint additional LUSD. In terms of distribution, our maximum supply is 10 billion, of which around 3 billion (30%) is currently in circulation.

When it comes to buying LINA, you will find it on any of the major centralized exchanges, we recommend you get it from the latest one that just listed us, KuCoin! You can also find LINA on decentralized exchanges such as PancakeSwap and we are in the process of adding more liquidity on other DEXs!

Q: Your team recently announced you would soon be launching Chaotic, Linear Finance integration on the Kusama network via Moonriver. Can you tell us more about this?

Kevin: Given Linear’s cross-chain nature, ever since we started working on the project, we knew that we eventually wanted to build on Polkadot. Since Kusama is intended to work as a testing ground (under real economic conditions) for projects who want to launch on Polkadot, it was a no-brainer for us.

When it came to choosing which parachain to partner with, we chose our friends over at Moonriver/Moonbeam. They offer Ethereum compatibility, which is really important to us since our utility token $LINA and our Liquids (synthetic assets) are both ERC-20 and BEP-20 tokens. On top of this, Moonriver/Moonbeam are some of the most active ecosystems on their respective relay chains (Kusama/Polkadot), and the team at Linear is very happy to have partnered up with them.

If you guys want to learn more about this announcement, be sure to check out this Medium post: https://medium.com/linear-finance/introducing-chaotic-c63d71d37125

So for MoonRiver/Kusama, we have the Chaotic implementation and we will launch this and integrate it into the Kusama DeFi ecosystem. Yet, we cross our fingers that DOT launches in the 1Q of 2022 and then we can proceed on our Moonbeam implementation, which basically means Linear on Polkadot and access to another ecosystem!

Q: How is the Linear DAO coming along? Do you have any updates on this?

Kevin: We are happy to say that we are at the very final stages of launching the Linear DAO. We are just waiting for Snapshot to integrate our voting strategy and we will be good to go. It really is just any day now; once complete, we will make another announcement telling users that proposals can be made. The first thing we will be doing is to vote on the Linear Council members, you can check out the candidates here: https://medium.com/linear-finance/linear-council-candidates-ready-a9abf9535037

Here’s a general overview of how the Linear DAO will work and how $LINA holders can submit a proposition and help us shape the future of Linear Finance:

Q: Once the Linear DAO goes live, how will this affect future Liquids (synthetic assets) listings on Linear Exchange?

Kevin: Once the Linear DAO goes live, $LINA holders will be able to submit Listing Proposals and the community will vote if they want to see that asset listed on Linear Exchange. Steps will be very similar to the Improvement Propositions outlined earlier. Here’s a summary of the Listing Proposition procedure:

- Submit Linear Preliminary Listing Proposition on the Linear DAO Forum (https://forum.linear.finance) and gauge the sentiment of the community, see if it’s worth going on to the next stage.

- Once a ℓPLP receives enough feedback, it can move on to the Linear Listing Proposition (ℓLP) phase on our Snapshot Space where the community will be able to vote for or against such listing.

New listing propositions will need to follow a predefined format so members of our community can make an informed decision. In order to find more details on the Linear DAO, please check the following Medium article: https://medium.com/linear-finance/linear-governance-model-3fa81c3b3836

Q: Your proposal on PieDAO to list a new synthetic Metaverse NFT Index on Linear Exchange was just approved last week, congratulations! What were the motivations behind this initiative? Can we expect more listings like this in the future?

Kevin: Thank you! You see, when we started our working relationship with PieDAO, the idea was to list more than one of their indices on Linear Exchange, and with the massive success the LDEFI Index has had, it was only a matter of time before we decided to explore a second listing.

And what a listing this is, NFTs and the Metaverse have had a phenomenal year. We’re extremely happy to be able to offer exposure to the top Metaverse tokens out there to our users at Linear. We’d also like to give a special shout-out to our partners at PieDAO for helping us make this possible.

For sure! Our community can totally expect more listings like this one. We believe that one of our protocol’s key differentiators is being able to offer Linear’s users access to synthetic versions of their favorite indices in the DeFi space.

Q: In recent weeks, Linear has started/extended partnerships with other popular DeFi protocols in the space. Can you further explain these collaborations and any interesting use cases for LINA?

Kevin: Sure thing. So just a few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with OpenDAO, which enabled Linear users to stake their LINA tokens on OmniVaults. This enables our users to not only earn LINA rewards but to also mint USDO at the same time! We believe this is a great use case for LINA, where users can get very creative with their DeFi Legos! This is just the beginning of our partnership with OpenDAO, we have some very cool stuff coming very soon, expect more on this shortly as we continue to expand LINA into the DeFi ecosystem.

We also recently announced our partnership with Sifchain, which was great! We’re thrilled to be a part of Sif’s Expansion Liquidity Mining Program. Currently, users who add liquidity to the $ROWAN/$LINA pool earn 100% APR! And that’s not all of it, every 4 weeks, users get to vote on the 5 “Pools of the People'' that get 300% APR. We’ll be encouraging our users to vote so LINA stakers can earn that juicy APR!

Q: What does 2022 hold for Linear Finance?

Kevin: 2022 will be a busy year for us, we have quite a few projects on our agenda. We recently released our updated roadmap with our major milestones for 2022, and of course, there will also be other new announcements along the way.

We’re in the final stages of launching our DAO and Chaotic, our integration on the Kusama network via Moonriver, which has proven to be quite the task. Once we have fully launched on Moonriver, we’ll be looking to make it onto Polkadot through our partners at Moonbeam. Further down the line, we are looking into building not only additional indices, listings, multicollateral, and exchange functionalities but also an L2 solution so our users can take advantage of ZKRollup technology. So expect plenty of news from the Linear team in 2022!

Q: Where can we find out more about Linear on social media?

Kevin: I’m glad you asked this, we have a wonderful community at Linear, we are grateful to each and every one of them for their support over the last year. And we’d like to welcome all of you to join and be a part of our community!

In Discord, users will find a casual chat along with 24/7 support on any questions relating to the protocol. There’s also the Linear Exchange Community on Telegram, which is more focused on exchange-related topics, such as discussions around listed liquids, etc.

I’ll drop the links to our socials below, so be sure to join/follow us to keep up on our latest developments and marketing campaigns!

Discord: https://discord.gg/4AM2QsAT

Telegram Community: https://t.me/LinearExchangeCommunity

Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/linearfinanceannoucements

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LinearFinance

Q: Could you tell us more about staking $LINA? What is the main advantage of Buildr?

Kevin: By staking $LINA in our Buildr, you can build LUSD to trade our synthetic assets on our Linear Exchange. You also act as a counterparty to the traders on the exchange, and in return, you earn $LINA and a portion of the trading fees from the exchange!

Q: Linear Finance has 2 different tokens on its platform: LINA and LUSD. Can you explain to us what the relationship between these 2 tokens is? What are the functions and roles of these tokens in the Linear ecosystem? Why create two tokens on the same platform at the same time?

Kevin: LUSD serves as our Linear stablecoin and is backed/collateralized by the LINA that you stake into our system. As mentioned in the previous question, you can use LUSD to trade on our exchange but ALSO take LUSD (along with our other synthetic assets) outside of our Linear protocol and use them to continue building your DeFi legos at other protocols!

Q: I read that Linear will be under LinearDAO's management of platform parameters and design. What kind of decisions can DAO make? Will Linear be completely decentralized and managed by its users? Is it currently selling focused? When will it give full control to the user?

Kevin: The LinearDAO will allow users to vote and change a number of the protocol parameters such as collateral ratio, exchange fee splits, asset listings. The DAO just started, but ultimately, we want to give as much control as we can to the Linear holders.

Q: PieDAO to list a new synthetic Metaverse NFT Index on Linear Exchange was just approved last week?

Kevin: Yes, this was approved just last week and represents another great indice from PieDao that we can leverage and offer to our users. We should be able to get this up within the next month or so. PieDao is a great partner but another one of our indice providers is Xangle and they have a number of indice offerings that we are currently exploring. All this means that users will have more choices to trade.

Q: With DeFi 2.0 and 3,3 being hot topics lately, I was wondering - is Linear considering working with other 3,3 projects or perhaps exploring how to implement the protocol in some way?

Kevin: We continue to look for opportunities in this regard, particularly on the 3,3 side. We are currently in discussions with one protocol in particular on how we can implement LINA tokens in this structure.

Q: What is the significant difference between Linear Improvement Propositions (ℓIP) and Linear Listing Propositions (ℓLPs)?

Kevin: The Linear Improvement Propositions will be focused on protocol parameters as well as other additions or modifications, while the Linear Listing Propositions will solely be focused on adding or removing assets to be listed on our synthetic exchange.

KuCoin and Linear Finance have prepared a total of 50,000 LINA to give away to AMA participants.

1. Red envelope giveaways: 16,000 LINA

2. Free-ask section: 1,500 LINA

3. AMA activity: 32,500 LINA

Activity 1 — Quiz: 25,000 LINA

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 7,500 LINA

. . .

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