Coin Review: Linda

Intro

Lindacoin is a DASH clone (PoW/PoS hybrid, private payments, and Masternodes), with key differences being:

• Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of X11
• 30,000,000,000 LINDA vs 18,900,000 DASH max coin supply

General Thoughts

The website verbiage portrays the coin primarily as an investment (and speculation) vehicle, with prominent call-outs to earning potential, investment, and ROI. The lack of a true whitepaper is somewhat eyebrow-raising; instead there are some high-level descriptions of features and a road-map that's heavy on the marketing and awareness but light on the technical details.

Let's get the name out of the way first. Quite frankly it sucks and try as I might, I can't see a future world where we are spending Lindas. At best it's an unprofessional name which lacks proper gravitas, at worst the founder named it after his girlfriend or something.

As a community-driven coin, /r/Lindacoin currently has 1,880 members and, as a quick gauge of how active the community is, the last post on the front page was 20 days old (compared to 1 hour for /r/bitcoin and 1 day for /r/ethereum). I lurked the Discord channel for some time and while there was a distinct lack of technical discussion, the community was friendly and welcoming.

The community went through a bit of controversy in early 2018 when the founder was rumored to be dumping coins but since being replaced by (current) CEO Jonah Glasgow things seem have to have quieted down.

When Moon?

Ultimately I see two reasons to invest in Linda. The first is if you missed the DASH rocket and, for some reason, think some residual hype will trickle down to Linda, driving it to outperform.

The second is if you want to operate a masternode. While operating a DASH masternode is out of reach of most people, a Linda masternode can be stood up "on the cheap" with a 44K USD investment (30,000,000 LINDA * 0.001462 USD) at the time of this writing.

The fact that there are no compelling technical milestones on the road-map is concerning. In lieu of technical developments the team seems to be wholly focused on marketing, merchant adoption, and getting listed on exchanges. Having just one developer on a software project is a yellow (if not red) flag.

Conclusion

Will a rising crypto tide lift Linda prices? Sure, but nothing about Linda stands out from the sea of other me-too clones, and thus there's little fundamental reason to believe it will outperform. There are crypto projects out there that are doing exceptional technical work but suffer from lack of marketing effort. Linda on the other hand lives at the opposite end of the spectrum with all marketing, and a more-or-less static product. With a single developer on a team of 9, any development progress will be slow (if at all).

The sole compelling reason to invest in Linda is if you want to operate a masternode. The website states a 70-99% ROI per year, which is fantastic if sustainable. That said I have to wonder how long a software project without technical progress can last, even one with strong marketing. Given how inactive the Reddit forum is, I also question how effective the current marketing campaign is.