1. LINK Ecosystem Principles
To provide the better understandings for the investors and supporters of LINK, LINK Team has decided to publish a series consists of three posts that can introduce the LINK Whitepaper 2.0 briefly. Before reviewing the LINK Whitepaper 2.0 any further, we would like to go over some failures that the crypto-asset projects by today showed in terms of the practicability.
| Problems with the Existing Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
1. Investors Before Users
When cryptocurrencies were booming, they attracted plenty of investors and emerged as a new funding channel for cryptocurrency projects. As a result, investors and developers both focused on securing fast financial gains instead of helping tokens mature and become a new kind of currency for everyday life. Today, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is dominated by investors. The companies and foundations behind cryptocurrency projects offer tokens in a way that ensures investors can maximize their gains, with a focus on raising as much investment as possible.
2. Unbalanced Token Economies
Many cryptocurrency projects start selling their tokens even before they are on the network. When doing so, they tend to inflate the scale of the economy with a focus on the price and trading volume by offering excessive bonuses to early miners or investors. This creates a huge imbalance in token distribution, harming the growth of the cryptocurrency’s ecosystem. Moreover, users need to have both platform coins and dApp tokens to use the ecosystem’s services, which many find too inconvenient and so stop using the ecosystem altogether.
3. User Experience (UX) Problems
Security is inherent to cryptocurrency as cryptocurrencies are technology literally built upon cryptography. However, along with security comes a related negative: user experience (UX) problems. In fact, most people find even creating a digital wallet to be so frustrating that they give up before they start using it. When the cryptocurrency industry was just beginning, it was mostly the domain of cypherpunks, so such technological barriers were not an issue; most users already were experts on cryptography, programming or computers in general. But more recently, as interest in cryptocurrencies has grown, the complexity of the technology is standing in the way of its wider adoption.
| LINK Ecosystem Principles
The LINK project was launched to create a blockchain platform and token economy that regular people around the world would actually like and use in their daily lives. But to achieve mainstream acceptance, we need to overcome those three abovementioned issues: investor-centered ecosystems, unbalanced token economies, and UX problems. That’s why LINK has defined the following three principles to resolve these issues and build a blockchain-based ecosystem that is accessible for all.
| LINK
LINK is the general-purpose base coin for the LINK ecosystem, and it represents the connection and cooperation between participants as well as the synergy created by them. The ticker symbol for LINK is “LN”, and its logo image is as follows:
| LINK dApp Ecosystem
DApps are the key to circulating and promoting the use of LINK in the LINK ecosystem, and their growth is a critical driver for the ecosystem in general. The LINK ecosystem utilizes the following system to attract more dApp projects and nourish the overall ecosystem.
1. LINK Alliance
The LINK Alliance is an association of dApps responsible for developing the LINK ecosystem by introducing functions within the service that use LINK, as well as allocating the LINK required for user rewards from the LINK Secretariat. LINK Alliance dApps can be either developed in- house by LINE or by third-parties and selected through a screening procedure. The LINK Secretariat is responsible for the overall selection of LINK Alliance dApps during the initial period of the ecosystem.
2. General dApp
General dApps refers to non-Alliance dApps that participate voluntarily in the LINK ecosystem, offering LINK-based services. In the LINK ecosystem, individual developers will be able to develop LINK-based dApps easily using a development toolkit to adopt blockchain features and develop dApps.
3. dApp Supporting Programs
To further expand the LINK dApp ecosystem, the LINK Secretariat plans to offer a wide range of support programs. It will select promising dApp developers that demonstrate great potential to contribute to the LINK platform and promote the use of LINK, providing them with comprehensive support for their deeper integration into the ecosystem. Support programs will include financial aid, technical support for the use of LINK Framework, and consultations regarding the token economy.
Thus far, we took a quick overview at the causes to the failures that the previous crypto-asset projects faced in terms of the usability, the principles of LINK Ecosystem, and LINK’s dApp Ecosystem.
As LINE’s crypto-asset project that has initiated to acknowledge and repay the user contributions, LINK is creating its ecosystem with a special attention to the usability so that we can serve even the users who are less familiar with blockchain.
For further details or questions on LINK’s policies, please refer to the LINK White Paper 2.0.
LINK, Blockchain Designed for Everyone.
LINK Team
