Dear Linear Community,
The year 2022 is coming to an end, and what a year it has been. We’ve seen unprecedented turbulence in the markets and are once again seeing many write off the blockchain and crypto currencies space. It is fair to say that we’ve been in a bear market for the past year. In spite of the current sentiment, Linear Finance has continued to push through with new protocol updates, partnerships and the launch of both Chaotic and Athos Finance.
As the saying goes — “great projects are built during bear markets”
Now, let’s end 2022 on a positive note and look back at the year, what’s been accomplished and what’s to come!
Ambitions of going multichain…
For anyone that’s been with us through the years, it comes as no surprise that our focus during the past year (2022) has been to become a multichain protocol. Going cross-chain and expanding on to new chains was always our intention and part of our roadmap. We’ve always believed that an expansion on to new chains would prove beneficial for Linear Finance to gain more exposure and to open up Linear to a wider audience and new users. It further enables users to get the best of each chain, such as the composability of Ethereum, the lower gas fees on BNB Chain and the interoperability of the MoonRiver and Moonbeam networks. Given our ambition, a lot of thought and consideration went into building proof of concepts for shared debt pools across chains. After countless hours, days and weeks the product team understood the limitations and security concerns and came up with the most elegant solution launching on new chains with a separate token. With this in mind, the brainchild that came to be Chaotic Finance was born.
In February 2022 our ambitions paid off and we were thrilled to announce Chaotic Finance — the first community-driven delta-one asset protocol deployed on Moonriver, allowing users to trade long and short positions of their favorite tokens with up to four times leverage. To ensure Linear’s long term supporters and users of Linear dApps such as Linear Buildr were rewarded, 25% of the $CHAOS tokens were allocated to Linear Finance users who had created debt via Buildr, with distribution based on a historically time-weighted average of the debt held in Buildr.
Chaotic Finance, built on MoonRiver, laid the groundwork for what later was to become Athos Finance, our integration on Polkadot via the MoonBeam network. Fast forward a few months to August and Athos Finance was launched. The approach and launch of Athos Finance very much followed the route of Chaotic Finance, with a few amendments made to the community distribution allocation (skewed more towards recently active users of Linear and Chaotic Buildr) and to ensure resources were not spread to thin, Athos launched with their own dedicated project lead, Kelvin Lam, and development team. All under the umbrella of Linear Finance.
To sum it all up, we trust that our cross-chain strategy not only allows users to trade on their preferred chains but also allows us as a project to take advantage of the unique benefits that each specific chain can bring to the table.
The Linear DAO
Another long standing goal that we were thrilled to achieve during 2022, was the transition of Linear Finance into a DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Decentralization has always been a key aspect of why we built Linear Finance in the first place and having launched the Linear DAO, spearheaded by the Linear Council is yet another step towards further decentralization.
The Linear governance model was set up with the following goals in mind:
Allow the community to propose and drive changes to the protocol
Enable the community to influence and shape the future of the protocol
Ensure the health and long term growth of the protocol
The Linear DAO consists of Community Participants ($LINA holders), the Linear Council who vets proposals and oversee the health of the protocol and the Protocol DAO who are in control of the flow of funds and responsible for implementing ℓIPs/ℓLPs.
Further reading on the different participants, the scope of the Linear DAO, how to submit an ℓIP or ℓLP, etc. can be found here and make sure to drop by the Linear DAO Forum — they’re always open to ideas and love a great discussion.
Partnerships and CEX listings
On the partnership front we’ve seen progress being made as well, let us highlight a few that we find rather exciting.
We’ve extended our work with PieDAO by introducing the ℓPLAY index, curated by one of the best index providers in the space. ℓPLAY allows Linear Finance users to get exposure to some of the most in-demand sectors in the Metaverse, including entertainment projects, blockchain gaming, and infrastructure.
Our partnership with Bridge Mutual, a decentralized risk coverage platform, allows users to explore the Linear ecosystem without worrying about external factors that sometimes tarnish the DeFi space. Users can interact with our dApps and have confidence they are covered.
Finally, one of our more recent partnerships with Work X — the Internet of Jobs — will allow us to scout and hire qualified candidates to join our team. We look forward to posting current and future vacancies on the Work X platform.
In terms of new listings on centralized exchanges, we’re happy to see further exchanges having picked up on our project and their decision to list our token, $LINA. Amongst the new listings of 2022 you will find Bybit, WazirX, Bitrue, Bitpanda, and Ascendex (leveraged trading of $LINA). With existing listings on Binance, Huobi and Kucoin amongst others we believe that liquidity is well distributed catering to various regions.
Continuous refinements of UI/UX…
Refinements were made to our suite of dApps, all of which we hope and expect will enable easier usage of the platform and encourage further growth.
A few of the items that have been updated over the past year are:
Dark mode going live on Linear Buildr, Linear Exchange and Linear Vault.
Updates to Linear Vault to further improve ℓUSD liquidity. Single sided pool was closed.
Addition of pending unlocks history and manual settlement button
Adjustments to the P-ratio were made, lowered from 500 to 450.
We also saw the release of a brand new dApp, the Linear Debt Terminator.
While our liquidation contracts have always been permissionless, allowing users to interact directly with the contract, the launch of the Debt Terminator provides users with an intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface). The Debt Terminator makes it easy for any user to help safeguard the protocol and its resistance to adverse market conditions by participating in liquidations. Users who liquidate accounts receive a 10% penalty fee as a reward, paid via the liquidated account.
Further reading on the Debt Terminator can be found here and just last week we further refined the dApp by adding a history page to the Debt Terminator.
Looking forward, what’s to come…
Looking at the past and enjoying previous achievements is always a pleasant thing to do, but we all know that the majority of people are more interested in the future outlook of their favorite companies and projects.
With that in mind, let’s take a brief look at what 2023 has in store for Linear Finance, its users and supporters.
First out will be the migration of our subgraphs, to a decentralized highly performant network — one of the major players in the field (more to come on this via a standalone announcement). Second out will be the long awaited implementation of multi-collateral assets, both on Linear and Athos Finance. We trust that the implementation of multi-collateral will bring a slew of new users, improve the liquidity of ℓUSD and its peg as well as bring new utility to the LINA token (eventually allowed as collateral on Athos Finance).
Looking forward, past the introduction of multi-collateral we are excited to announce that work has begun into the research, exploration and development of ZK Rollups and Layer 2 Linear Finance integrations.
“2023 will be an exciting year of development expanding on Linear Finance existing and new offerings”
A message from our Project Lead, Kevin Tai
Firstly, I want to wish everyone a Happy Holiday and a Wonderful New Year and to truly thank those that remain with us with their continued support. Over the past year we have seen a decline in volume and locked value across DeFi. Coupled with the perfect storm of LUNA, 3AC, and FTX brought substantial volatility to the crypto markets and have dampened the spirits of investors and potential new entrants to our crypto ecosystem. Yet, what has happened is a true testament to the need for decentralization, particularly in DeFi. As such, we continue to build (no matter the market conditions) and as many of you have seen, continue to improve and decentralize our dApp. Our team still has a lot in store and much to build so stay tuned on what is coming next for Linear Finance.
A message from our CMO, Aedreon Marshall
I’d like to wish the Linear community and the wider Crypto community a Merry Xmas and prosperous New Year. 2022 has not been without its challenges across the industry yet the majority are still here with full belief that what we strive to change by developing in the blockchain space will lead to positive change for ourselves and those that follow. During 2022 we at Linear made a few decisions to ensure that regardless of market conditions we remained in good stead to build into the future. We remain well capitalized and we were unaffected by recent events. We made decisions to adopt a more conservative marketing approach throughout 2022 reserving what is now ready to be deployed capital for our upcoming developments. I firmly believe that our growth throughout 2023 will positively impact the scale and popularity of Linear Finance and as we continue to build out our vision we will see better utilization, better engagement, better stability and a better product overall. 2023 will be an exciting year, stay tuned.
Kind regards,
Linear Finance Team
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.
