Mangata Finance, the decentralised exchange (DEX) on Kusama, has been valued at $13 million following the conclusion of a bootstrapping event. Of particular note is the timing, as the funding comes as the crypto market continues to trend sharply downward.
“The whole team is very proud of the result. Against all odds of the bear market, we have shown that hard work and relentless focus on capital efficiency and fairness pay off,” said Peter Kris, founder of Mangata Finance.
The goal
The goal is ambitious, but one that has thus far been elusive in the world of decentralised exchanges: to offer a solution where all chains are offered on a single platform. Bear markets are the time to build – many of the current blue-chip projects were assembled during the last bear run, and there is no reason to believe that this time will be different.
A downtrending market isn’t fun, but it does offer the benefit of being able to focus more on utility and a roadmap rather than price-watching, while only the formidable projects tend to stick around.
“We have laid the groundwork for a DEX that serves the whole Dotsama ecosystem. We will bring liquidity and token velocity to all Web3 projects on a single platform. The Mangata X community now has over 1,000 members. All of you are now co-owners of Mangata X,” Kris continued.
Details
More than 12,000 KSM have been contributed to Mangata X bootstrap, bringing the total value locked in the protocol to $1.25 million and $3.27 million in market cap.
The Mangata team estimates the initial liquidity mining rush to offer a 78% APR. This rate is expected to further increase to as high as 129% APR once the protocol turns on its “Stake Once, Earn Twice” Proof-of-Liquidity mechanism. Over the long term, tokenomics will emit 67.5% of the maximum supply to liquidity provision.
These are large numbers, and ones that investors will be warier of now given some of the death spirals experienced by various crypto projects over the last few months. While it is too early to give judgment on this project yet, the technicals are interesting, even if investors need to be cautious here.
As a next-generation DEX, Mangata is a Layer 1 app-chain building on Substrate, and it is not bound by legacy restrictions. Parity Technologies’ Substrate modular framework allows developers to select particular components that suit their application-specific chain best. This is why Mangata claim they can customize the rules of the chain to optimize the whole ecosystem, theoretically improving capital efficiency and fairness.
Miner-Extractable Value
Miner-Extractable Value (MEV) is a dynamic where blockchain miners extract profits at the expense of users by arbitrarily reordering, including, or excluding transactions within a block. Because miners can determine the order of transactions processed on the blockchain, this can obviously be exploited.
Many projects have been trying to solve this issue. Mangata, if successful, hopes the project can prevent MEV insider trading and inhibit this censoring or affecting the order of transactions by miners.
Additional Features
The project is also slated to open channels to parachains like Karura, Bifrost, Turing, Statemine, and many others.
Regarding the Mangata X community, they will be involved in all of these steps through user experience interviews and community calls that allow users to have a say in the prioritization of features, with genuine decentralisation as the aim.
Mangata is also striving to fill the gap as a cross-chain trading platform, enabling the trading of Ethereum ERC20 tokens with native Polkadot assets. Additionally, the project looks to improve efficiency by a rather novel consensus Proof of Liquidity.
Besides solving key insider trading problems, Mangata is focused on DEX adoption by mainstream and institutional finance, which requires reliable and transparent rules and brings open access to DeFi to the people.
A summary of the overarching goals can be seen in the ownership of the network. The distribution of 19% of MGX supply is far superior to the usual 1-2%, allowing the ecosystem to have a genuine stake in the Kusama DEX.