BlockTalks x Linear Finance AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Linear Finance, on October 14th, at 11.00 AM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Kevin Tai, Co-Founder at Linear Finance. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Kevin Tai — I’m Kevin Tai, one of the Co-Founders of Linear Finance. I started started my journey in crypto as a miner. I mined altcoins with GPUs, ASICs, and FPGA’s and was part of the community building bitstreams. But over the last 1.5 years I transitioned into investing into DeFi projects as I find it absolutely revolutionary and Finance is near and dear to my heart. Before this I was doing M&A in Silicon Valley during the first dot com boom at an investment bank helping companies like MSFT and ORCL acquired small tech companies. I then went to business school and afterwards spent 13+ years in Asia working on collateralized debt and structured products.
Introduction of Drey Ng (Co-Founder at Linear Finance)— Drey Ng, His background is unique. He did both banking in trade finance and on the trading floor doing FX and rates. Afterwards, he was leading the product side of one of the largest Security Token Offering companies in Asia called Liquefy tokenizing real estate. Drey has worked with some of the largest real estate families in Asia, hedge funds and semi-government bodies. Now he is the tech lead/genius at Linear and brings to the table a wealth of experience of banking and finance and creating institutional-ready products with interoperability on blockchains such as Ethereum, Quorum, and NEO, focusing on high throughput, security, and scalability. Drey is one of the smartest guys in the room and really hope that you can one day have the chance to meet him. He wishes to be here today but as we are preparing for testnet, he is cracking the whip a bit.
Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Linear Finance to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Our world in DeFi is extremely powerful, disruptive, and has the potential to revolutionize the entire financial industry. Global commodities market is ~20 Trillion USD and the global ETF market is 4–5 Trillion USD and growing. These markets are filled with middlemen and more often than not inaccessible to many investors. Linear is creating synthetic versions of commonly traded assets, allowing users all around the world to trade efficiently.
So what does this mean for you users in crypto or are in tune with digital assets? It means you can come to our Linear Finance protocol with our LINA tokens, stake them to build our stablecoin (LUSD) and use it to buy synthetic versions of digital assets, commodities, forex, and soon market indices all with unlimited liquidity and instantaneously….
In addition, we built Linear to be cross-chain compatible, so that means if you want, you can also get your LINA tokens and synthetic assets in both ETH and BEP-20 versions, and I know there are yield farmers here. so with Linear you can essentially continue to build your deFi legos across ecosystems. eth and BSC, Cross chain vaults? Possible through Lineaer, we are just the enablers in this aspect.
Q2. What are the advantages of Linear Finance to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — For Linear, we focus on what cross chain capabilities give to us.. By integrating other chains we get a complete scaling solution along with speed, particularly in data oracles and price discovery.. So when you are buying your synthetic assets you get prices quickly and the sooner the better so you don’t get front run… Removing this systemic risk in the system is very important for traders.
We integrate with BSC… why? Because we make a bet that Binance with its 470K accounts and 150+ fiat onramps and their millions of dollars in resources will catchup and build out their Defi ecosystem..and us at Linear with our optimized protocol with fast chains want to capitalize on this market opportunity and we will be ready for this by integrating oursleves with the right partners in BSC…. Food is at the bottom of the pyramid guys with new retail customers, not at the top of they pyramid building 1000x leveraged products.. (just my opinion)
Q3. What are the major milestones Linear Finance achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — Excellent question… So in just a few months, Drey and i were able to kickstart the project and begin the development of the protocol. In the meantime we have gone out to the market and raised USDT +2.4m from strategic investors such as Alameda research, NGC ventures, Hashed, CMS, Genesis Block and Kinetic Capital. This gives us a healthy runway to deliver our product and build Linear out.
We listed on Uniswap a few weeks ago and at that time started a pre-staking program for our early supporters. As of today, I believe we are at 211m LINA staked, representing over 60% of the total circulating supply. You can still stake LINA for rewards! In terms of tech development, our testnet will launch in a few days time which includes our Buildr app. Let me show you a screenshot.
I would like to invite all of you guys to come and test out this dapp and attempt to break it…. if you are interested, you can sign up on this Google Form https://forms.gle/mYpREnjNRvczj8TEA
Linear.Exchange is almost complete and that will be in store for mainnet launch in middle of November…. so exciting times for Linear as well as our market entries into markets such as China and S. Korea and SE Asia.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Kevin Tai!
Q1. Linear Finance launched 2 different tokens on its platform: LINA and LUSD,
Can you explain to us what is the relation between these 2 tokens?
What’s the functions and what role will these tokens play in the Linear Finance Ecosystem?
Ans — Oh good… Yes, our ERC-20 LINA token serves as the backbone of our protocol. It is used for staking to earn rewards, building LUSD, and governance. So with LINA you can build LUSD our stablecoin and with LUSD you can purchase the synthetic assets on our exchange. We will have both ERC-20 and BEP-20 versions of LINA and LUSD and you can take them off our protocol and use them in other DeFi protocols…
Q2. How will your team ensure that LinearFinance remains the top platform and keeps pace with your competitors, in the next 2.3 years and beyond? What are your views on DeFi Ecosystem? What are LinearFinance doing in order to facilitate development of DeFi?
Ans — I think the key for Linear is to have our token, LINA and LUSD be as integrated into the DeFi ecosystem and we are working on this right now. Once that happens, particularly with LUSD, it begins very accretive for LINA. So, the team has the task to make users want LUSD and we will make creative synthetic assets that users will want to buy AND integrate from a yield farming perspective….. DeFi right now is still a small fry compared to the old financial system and we have lots of issues to fix from an architecture perspective and also deal with regulatory pressures. We at Linear are always going to be supportive of any projects that push Defi forward and we will do what we can to support this, whether in the form of funding or resources.
Q3. Why did Linear Finance choose Binance Smart Chain to integrate with? Does BSC have the advantages and functionalities that will help the project to progress?
Ans — LOL, lets just say, BSC is fast, high TPS, and is really inexpensive.. Suggest people try it out
Q4. What kind of decisions can the DAO make? Will Linear be completely decentralized and governed by its users? Is it currently semi-centralized? When will it give full control to its users?
Ans — This is interesting.. Going forward, we will start the transition into a Dao structure and users in the LinearDAO will be be able to vote on things such as revenue split on exchange fees, types of synthetic assets, p-ratio, and types of assets to put into the debt pool… But, we will certainly expand the topics and push as many decisions we can to the DAO. So rest assured we will decentralize as much as we can whilst maintaining the protocol as a going concern.
Q5. What plans does Linear Finance have in partnering with major lending protocols such as Maker Dao or dYdX Debt Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP) to try to expand the liquidation protection feature of a user’s position?
Ans — Right now we don’t have a liquidation mechanism but this idea is being explored internally..Yet, you bring up Maker Dao which is interesting because they are working on bridging people with assets from the traditional world to the digital world. That’s big and i think over the next 12–18 months we will see the happen. Once done, if we can partner with Maker on this, we can certainly expand our user base.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Kevin !!
Q1. The most key part of any Synthetic protocol is a correct price feed. How do you solve this problem?
Ans — Yes, having updated pricing is one of the most important aspects of Linear Finance. In this sense we have decided to partner with both Tellor and another Oracle (TBA) to get price feeds for a large number of synthetic assets. Note that we will likely be running our oracles on BSC so the data feeds will be quick.
Q2. As a cross-chain, what are your expectations for the interoperability between blockchains? Which blockchains will you promote for LinearFinance?
Ans — As of now, we have already announced integrations with BSC and Nervos and we have another major one coming soon. For these its not only about the interoperability and speed of the public blockchain but also where we think the next round of TVL is going to be and where the users are going to be. For instance, with Nervos we loved their tech and they have a huge development following in China so we expect to get quite a number of Chinese users with Nervos.
Q3. As an investor, safety is always one of the biggest concerns. What kind of security protection do you provide for the Kinear platform? How to ensure the safety of customer assets?
Ans — Many investors ask about safety but keep in mind that the biggest risk here are the smart contract risks we utilize in our protocol and we would never release our mainnet out without having it fully audited.. As of today we have passed our Stage 2 of the audit with Slowmist and this will be fully completed before launch.
Q4. What do you think if Ethereum starts to choke, DeFi will move to a new platform? And what is Linear Finance strategy if that happens?
Ans — This is a very interesting questions. I think we already see what happens with Ethereum “Chokes”… Other blockchains pop up to eat its lunch and L2 solutions start coming into shape. I don’t think Linear will every fully move to another chain and that’s simply because the DeFi system on ETH is so entrenched that by moving to another chain we would lose a ton of the network effect of Defi.
Q5. How does the Linear Finance team assess the risks associated with market uncertainty and volatility? Is there a market risk hedging mechanism to ensure user safety?
Ans — From a hedging perspective, we obviously need to balance the collateralized debt pool so we will also incentivize users with extra rewards to take hedge positons with their synthetic assets… In addition, there will be a number of stabilizing pools likely on Uniswap or Balancer to help stabilize our LUSD.
Closing Statement By Kevin Tai!
I want to thank everyone for hosting me today. I always tell the communities that Drey and I are building out Linear for YOU all to use so please come join our TG and DIscord group and tell us what you think about our product and anything else you guys want to see from a protocol and synthetic asset perspective… Without you guys using it, we wouldn’t be here! Thanks!!
Here are some important links of Linear Finance👇
Official Website — https://linear.finance
Twitter — https://twitter.com/LinearFinance
Telegram Chat — https://t.me/linearfinanceofficial
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/linearfinance/
Medium — https://medium.com/@linear.finance
Discord —https://discord.com/invite/emFXWaq
