July 1st, 2017 Lino Project Established
October 1st, 2017 Seed Investment from ZhenFund
December 1st, 2017 First Minimal Viable Product (MVP) Launched
January 2018 Private Sale Concluded
August 15th, 2018 Testnet Released
Source: https://medium.com/@linonetwork/lino-network-annual-report-87c0823a132c
They use Tendermint instead of DPoS which claims to be a better consensus algorithm. But my initial impressions haven't changed much. Tendermint vs DPoS is like a Knight's armor vs Samurai armor. It lacks the simplicity and elegance of DPoS and Tendermint has Practical BFT which is a sophisticaled way of saying not really BFT. Hashgraph is the only real BFT high performance network I know of. Others are just insert buzzword BFT.
LINO is based on Silicon Valley and the funding came from China and most of the team is East Asian. What's really going to make or break LINO is Proof of Content Value Algorithms, and Content Mining Algorithms. The only working non-stake based voting system that isn't a joke is @steemhunt voting system. Unless LINO produce something of that level of functionality, they will slow burn like Twitter, Snapchat, Uber......
If I had $10,000 to invest between LINO and https://www.thetatoken.org I'd put 100% on Theta.