Linear Finance AMA Recap 04/11/2021

Kevin got to answer many great questions today during a Telegram AMA hosted by the Linear Exchange Community…

Ant (Host): Great! Thanks Kevin for hopping in and doing this long awaited much requested AMA.

Kevin: Hello everyone, great to be here today.!!

We have a number of questions from the community and will share updates and roadmap for Linear ahead

Ant: We’ve gathered a few questions from Twitter given by the community, you’ve said you got the gloves on… so you ready?

Kevin: Yeah, let’s do it.

Ant: Great! First question:

DAO implementation will be a huge success for LINEAR. A lot of investors in the chat rooms believe the first/most important order of business is to vote to burn a significant amount of LINA reserves. As CEO, what do you think about a token burn versus using the reserve for future opportunities to benefit the longterm success of LINA?

Kevin: This has been a topic that has been widely discussed since we did our IDO and it was always mentioned that the use of the reserve tokens within the foundation wallets would be determined by the DAO.

Hence, if the community votes to burn these tokens, then we will proceed to do so.

Personally, I would prefer to use our LINA tokens to build additional partnerships or even acquire other projects which ultimately I believe has greater long term gain for the project. There are many ways that we can structure deals so that the tokens are vested over a period of time or upon achieving targets…

Nevertheless, on this I will support the community’s decision on this. LOL it will likely be the first proposal put into the DAO

Ant: Thanks Kevin for the answer and thanks @Blqck for the question (that many have asked before)

Next up, roadmap! by @nhanhcrypto. Question: What is the roadmap in near and and long term? What is your direction and vision? Why have we prioritized the DAO, even though it does not provide ANY value to the product and the users now?

Kevin: When we first started Linear, our vision was to build a synthetic asset exchange that was cross-chain compatible, fast, and cost efficient for users. In addition, we wanted to allow the community to ultimately decide on what features they wanted in the exchange so that they will use it…. We feel that the DAO is quite important as it not only gives some control to Linear users but also provides us guidance on what else to build and there is extreme value in that…

Now… our ultimate vision has not changed and we will continue moving forward on our Moonbeam/Moonriver integrations (which will discuss later), continue adding features to the exchange, and expanding LINA and LUSD into the ecosystem on different chains.

Now to this last point, the team at Linear has to make a calculated bet on the choice of blockchain and ecosystem which is best for our users and the protocol in the long term. We have more than a year of experience under our belt on Binance Smart Chain and we now see its benefits and limitations. We really were the first synthetic asset exchange on BSC and we have gone through it all… We also notice the pain our users go through in the user experiences when BSC blocks aren’t updated……..

As such, as our protocol continues to grow we are looking at scaling solutions that will fit our needs and maintain the same levels of efficiency in terms of speed and cost for our users. Thus, a move to an L2 layer such as ZK Rollup will likely be in our paths as we will begin the work (with a dependency on ZK rollup for EVM support but we believe they are close). More details of this will be revealed as we go along as it requires substantial moves similar to when we migrated users over to BSC… But this will be mapped out for us….. Why ZK rollup? Because from a scaling and finality solution, its substantially superior than Optimism.

Ant: Thanks Kevin! I know the BSC pain all too well… We shall overcome! :D Looking forward to this upgrade.

Next question: Will linear still be launching on both Moonbeam and Moonriver? What are the remaining steps required before Moonriver launch?

Kevin: Yes of course… We will deliver versions of Linear on Moonbeam and Moonriver. The first one up is Moonriver.. For this the smart contracts are done and we are working on the branding and design of the protocol and how we implement

To expand upon this, users must understand that we are actually building another synthetic asset protocol on the Kusama network through Moonriver. The debt pools will be separated from our main Linear debt pool and we have to do this as there are substantial synchronization issues with two debt pools across two different blockchains with different speeds.

As such, there will be another token that will drive the protocol on Moonriver. This token will be fair launched and supported by Linear Foundation….And, we will ensure that the economics of the protocol are also accretive to Linear holders as well as the token distribution. We will release details on this shortly for our community. I also invite our community members to work with us on certain parameters on our Moonriver implementation as well as the assets to list.

Ant: new chain who dis. Exciting stuff on the horizon, closer than ever!

Kevin: Yeah, we are always looking at different chains, the dev team is very excited about the future implementations. We work closely with the Moonbeam team and they are providing further support….

Ant: Next up by Discord local @Hogberg:

Is there any marketing plans at near future?

I want to be a Linear Finance marketing manager for my local area, what should I do?

Kevin: ok marketing plans

Thank you for your interest in supporting our marketing efforts and to get more involved I would speak with our Linear Ambassadors and participate more in our Linear DAO process.

Now, for our external marketing efforts going forward, we have committed additional capital to bring on additional marketing resources that will be driving additional Linear marketing/educational content and social media presence. Also, note that there will be additional AMA roadshows over numerous TG groups starting soon. (We have a list of TG groups already but if there are any community groups that you would like us to hit, please let us know.). In addition, we will be running a number of promotions with the CEX’s/DEX’s where LINA is being traded.

Ant: Thanks! Hope to see Hogberg active in the DAO / Ambassadors soon!

And looking forward seeing you around in more AMAs!

Kevin: packing the bags and going….. cut through all the metaverse talk

Ant: exactly!

Next question!

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

As DeFi continues to gain attention, more projects will be built on different blockchains hence interoperability will become very important for the ecosystem to grow, can you tell us some of the steps you are currently taking as regards interoperability with other blockchains?

Kevin: Over the last few months, there has been an emergence of DeFi 2.0, with a focus on capital efficiency and we will be building this into our multi-collateral staking. We will be supporting a number of wrapped assets as well as LP tokens and for the latter certain elements of collateralization can be adjusted to improve capital efficiency for stakers. We are also exploring other options for our vaults to bring additional yield opportunities.

As for interoperability on different blockchains, we continue to reach out to build partnerships to push into different ecosystems. We can certainly utilize existing bridges in place to reach major L1 chains for LINA and our other Liquids to be used and utilized within the DeFi legos.

Ant: Nice to hear about the extra yield options. More yield more better!

Question number 6!

Can you tell us about the current process of Linear DAO and how to participate in community governance?

Kevin: For how our Linear DAO is going to work and the structure, you can refer to the following medium article. We have the forum already set up for users to go ahead and put in proposals. We take the proposals quite seriously so I would advise those that put in proposals to flush out their ideas so that we can discuss and push each proposal into the approval stages. I look forward to getting on community calls to discuss all good things to improve and build Linear.

https://medium.com/linear-finance/linear-governance-model-3fa81c3b3836

Ant: Thanks! Need to get on that DAO forum myself…

Now a question from long term member @Ryandeanposey!

How has switching to Chainlink’s Oracle improved Linear’s exposure to new assets?

Kevin: Yes, the move over the LINK has given us additional comfort in terms of security and customer service levels. For established and asset listed on numerous exchanges, LINK certainly has access to these.

For what you guys would deem to be “new” assets such as new tokens that are listed only on 1–2 CEX or Dex’s, these usually don’t meet LINK’s security requirements as this opens up the idea of manipulation, so it will be harder to list those on Linear. Nevertheless, if there are certain assets that we are dying to list, we will find alternate oracle provider (likely BAND) for the feed and ways to protect the traders from being affected by manipulation.

Ant: Great to know! Hope to see some sneaky listings

Next question:

Will there be a pursuit of NFT hype on the site, if so, how can we use them in the future?

Kevin: We are currently in the process of evaluation a number of NFT/Metaverse indices for our users to gain exposure on this growing trend. Internally, we have had discussions about whether WE as Linear wanted to participate by issuing our own generative NFT or build our own metaverse but ultimately decided against this as it takes away core resources from our main mission, vision, and goals.

But never say never as we as a Foundation are open to investing in other NFT/Metaverse projects and then finding ways to accrue value to Linear holders….maybe we can look at some proposals in the DAO.

Ant: Great! Metaverse always cool!

Next question:

One of the major roadblocks in Linear Finance’s success has been people not understanding how useful of a tool Linear Finance is and has stopped people from using the services provided by your platform. How do you plan to address this issue moving forward?

Kevin: Yes, our protocol is bit complex to understand so kudos to those who have been using our protocol. This is an issue that we need to tackle and I have told our new marketing team to put this as one of the key focuses for our content creation going forward. In addition, we will be doing a number of “learn and earn” opportunities at our listed CEX’s…

Ant: learn and earn, I like the sound of that!

Last question, by another local @JPRoche:

There’s been talk of an updated roadmap, what are the priorities now for this last bit of Q4/ And Q1 2022?

Kevin: Yes, we will issue a new roadmap soon that will cover the remainder of this year and next year. Right now, the team is finalizing a number of past due UI/UX improvements on the exchange and finishing the design of Moonriver so our users will see these near the end of the year along with the listing of a few additional assets. We are also working on expanding our Perp offerings with additional leverage and assets. We will give more frequent updates on progress through our Discord channel and the core team will spend more time answering questions. For the full Moonriver implementations which we expect to deploy in Q1 of next year.

Ant: That’s what we’d like to hear! Can’t wait to be able to share the new roadmap

Thank you Kevin for answering the questions!

Kevin: The roadmap is challenging but the team continues to build for our users.

We have some time left so let’s take some questions from the community

Don’t Give A Care Man: How many devs do you have? Is it true that some of them work on other projects too?

Kevin: No, all of our devs and team are 100% focused on Linear… There is no working on other projects…

There was a question above that talks about resourcing and whether this affects our roadmap. It’s a good question because resources in crypto are always tight. We have a core team of devs and are always looking to bring on additional resources and we obviously offer competitive packages. For immediate needs we also bring devs in on a contract basis for support… So rest assured that we have enough heads down working….

M.: When $Lina on Solana blockchain ?

Kevin: We are looking at this and we have the RUST devs to implement but the time to do this is long because it requires a complete code rewrite…..

Keks: integration with polkadot will be after moonbeam wins the auctions of parachains?

Kevin: Yes, and we expect that our partner Moonbeam will be able to secure the parachain

Great from: What is Project Eagle and why nobody talking about it?

Kevin: Project Eagle is Moonriver implementation…. More details to follow on this.

Ant: Thanks Kevin for answering these questions :D Hope to see you again soon!

Kevin: Thanks guys…. will see you guys on the Discord channel!!

Top 10 submitted questions will receive their $50 in LINA prize within the next few days.

About Linear Finance

Linear Finance is a cross-chain compatible, decentralized delta-one asset protocol that allows users to get synthetic exposure to various assets, including cryptocurrency, commodities, and market indices. Users can utilize our cross-chain swap functionality to instantly swap assets across leading blockchain environments and DeFi protocols with unlimited liquidity and zero slippage.

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