Manta Network: privacy-preserving layer for Polkadot!
Manta Network is a Substrate based protocol that offers a plug-and-play privacy solution for all the DeFi stack within the Polkadot ecosystem. Besides minting private variants of traditional crypto assets such as DOT, ACA or KSM, Manta brings private its own DEX called MantaSwap!
Why we need privacy and private protocols?
Usually, privacy doesn’t matter, until it does! It's as simple as that. Many individuals start realizing that they need a higher level of privacy or confidentiality. But once they realize it, it's already too late to hide their financial history. Especially on the internet, or even in decentralized applications, where data are stored publicly on different blockchains.
But privacy problems can’t be solved while there is still a lack of interoperability or usability between various DeFi protocols that take care of your funds. So here comes Manta Network, a brand-new parachain on the Polkadot network that can bring private transactions (in a similar fashion to Monero) and private DEX for trading any anonymized asset by the protocol.
What is Manta Network
Manta Network is a set of easy-to-use and secure protocols based on the Substrate framework that itself will enable Manta to take advantage of the whole Polkadot ecosystem. Manta Network uses zk-SNARKs technology to bring complete end-to-end privacy.
By becoming a parachain That results in the highest possible level of interoperability within the Polkadot ecosystem. Once bridges to other networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cardano will be set up, also cross-chain. Manta Network also benefits from its architecture while securing high throughput.
Manta Network includes a Decentralized Anonymous Payment (DAP) protocol called MantaPay, a Decentralized Anonymous Exchange (DAX) protocol called MantaSwap, and in the future, there will be developed also a Decentralized Anonymous Lending and Synthetic Asset Protocol.
MantaPay
MantaPay offers an on-chain private transaction for any Polkadot ecosystem asset that can be transferred cross-chain. This includes private sending of cryptocurrencies such as DOT, KSM, ACA, wrapped BTC or wrapped ETH to any wallet address on Manta Network.
The Decentralized Anonymous Payment (DAP) protocol is based on zk-SNARKs. By using MantaPay, users can swap Polkadot/Kusama and other parachain or parathread tokens with corresponding anonymous tokens such as Anonymous DOT. These anonymous tokens can be used in the entire ecosystem with users having an option to redeem those tokens for a “real” underlying asset at any time.
MantaSwap
MantaSwap is a decentralized anonymous exchange where users can trade various major crypto assets in the Polkadot ecosystem
The Decentralized Anonymous Exchange (DAX) protocol is an AMM-based DEX that is using zk-SNARKs privacy-preserving technology. On MantaSwap, private versions of various tokens can be traded with each other, while the price is set in a decentralized fashion by using Automated Market Makers (AMM), which you probably know from other decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, Balancer or Karura DEX. By swapping different coins, part of transactions fees goes to the Manta token holders and the rest to the liquidity providers. The development team is planning to build products such as synthetic asset private stablecoins based on Manta Network.
Team
The founding team of Manta consists of professionals from blockchain space and respected universities such as Harvard or MIT. CEO of Manta is Shumo Chu, who used to work as a system researcher at another blockchain project Algorand that is founded by Silvio Micali — one of the co-founders of zk-SNARKs privacy technology.
Some other members are Kenny Li, Chief Operations Officer and co-founder of Manta Network, who is also a co-founder of Boston based consulting company focused on the cloud computing industry called Cloud Spectator International. The Chief Strategy Officer of Manta is Victor Ji who is ex Research Assistant at Harvard University.
One of the things that prove the team's hard work is that Manta received a grant from the Web3 Foundation in Q4 2020.
Partnerships
Manta Network offers a privacy layer for the whole Polkadot ecosystem. Manta Network has already partnerships with some of the projects that would like to increase the level of usability by adding a private layer for the users.
The vital partnership is the one with Phala Network, a project that delivers confidential computing through the use of TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments). Phala’s confidential computing network offers a Turing-complete ecosystem for confidentially running smart contracts. Stand together, Manta & Phala provide privacy and confidentiality for both transactions (minting, transacting and swapping private tokens) and compute layers (privacy swap, lending and other functions based on smart contracts).
Besides that, Manta established partnerships with Equilibrium, Crust Network, ChainX, Reef Finance and Tidal Finance.
Tokens
Manta Network will have its own native token MANTA with a total amount of 1,000,000,000 tokens.
MANTA will be the first deflationary utility token where rebate rewards, redemption, and token burns are generated from actual privacy-preserving network usage and growth in DeFi.
The sources of income will be fees from users for
- minting private coins,
- redeeming base coins from private coins (0.1%),
- private coin payment fee and exchange fee between different private coins (0.3% — variable).
Canary network: Calamari
Manta will have its own canary network called Calamari that wants to become a Kusama parachain with its upcoming KSM crowdloan.
Manta will start the Calamari Parachain Loan Offering very soon, so you can use your KSM to participate in the auction once ready. Details will be released in the coming days, but get in mind that Calamari is going for Kusama parachain slots 6–10.
Conclusion
Manta Network will be a privacy-protective platform for payments and decentralized token exchange in the current Polkadot ecosystem. And because privacy matters, especially where the value is, Manta will have a great use case for privacy protection users. And this becomes even more important in times when Chainanalysis and other companies can track down cryptocurrency users and sell these data to government institutions.
Once established in the Polkadot ecosystem and when bridges to other networks will provide their full utility, Manta will serve the whole cryptocurrency world by providing privacy to the traders, investors and cryptocurrency users — because privacy is the biggest value of all!
If you like this article, consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
Stay tuned for further information about the Polkadot ecosystem projects here on Medium, our Twitter channel Polkadotters as well as in our Facebook Group Polkadot unofficial! If you are feeling really generous, you can send some DOTs to our donate address 🙂
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