On April 5, Manta Network cooperated with Polka Warriors to hold an AMA to introduce and answer questions about issues relating to anonymous technology and interactive solutions for Defi.
Manta Network is the first privacy-preserving decentralized stack. It is built on Substrate to leverage the interoperability of Polkadot, as well as scalability and speed to deliver an incomparable user experience.
The AMA session was held in PolkaWarriors' Telegram channel, with the participation of Kenny Li - COO & Co-founder Manta Network. The AMA was very successful, many interesting questions about topics such as: project’s roadmap, progress and upcoming strategies were answered by Kenny Li.
Below is a summary of the outstanding questions and answers from the AMA session.
1. How is the swapping of (private coin -> public coin -> private coin) on Manta Network going to affect the average transaction time, as there are two swaps involved overall?
Kenny Li:
So to clarify first: the transacting/swapping is done in three parts:
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Minting (changing a public token to a private token)
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Transacting/Swapping (send private tokens, or swap for other private tokens)
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Redeeming (changing from a private token to a public token)
This pattern is public > private > public, instead of private > public > private
This means that users can mint from public into private tokens and continue to transact in private tokens. For example, if a user Ana has 10 DOT, she can first privatize the 10 DOT into 10 private DOT (pDOT). Ana can then send 8 pDOT to Bill, and keep 2 pDOT for later. Bill now has 8 pDOT, but does not have to immediately withdraw back into DOT. Instead, he can keep the 8 pDOT, and in the future he can, for example, pay Sally 3 pDOT, and then swap 5 pDOT for 0.5 pBTC.
We don’t see many instances where users will immediately redeem back into a public coin. So the transaction time itself is not affected by the minting or redeeming process, because users can keep the private versions of the token and continue to use that.
In other words, we don't see two steps involved, we will mainly just see one: users will change from public to private token. And then they can use the private token to transact or swap, without needing to change back to the public token.
2. Do you have mechanisms such as buyback and burning to regulate the demand and supply of $MA, so as to increase its intrinsic monetary values?
Kenny Li:
Manta Network intends to have a deflationary model that has a burning mechanism. There is a total of 1 billion Manta Token -- that’s the maximum supply. When a user mints or redeems tokens, Manta Network charges a 0.1% fee, and that 0.1% fee goes into a Redemption Pool. Every Manta Token holder has access to a specific allocation of the Redemption Pool, based on their Manta holdings. To collect the fees, the user must burn the Manta Token.
3. What are the next updates? What is the most ambitious goal of the project? Is it big sales or do people love the project ?? What can the community look for at Manta Network?
Kenny Li:
The most ambitious goal of the project is to become a plug-and-play privacy protocol for blockchain and the DeFi stack. The idea is simple: for example, when someone wants to sell T-shirts online, the value proposition they have is selling T-shirts. They do not have the experience in building a website. So instead of learning HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, they can just use website-building tools that can help them get up and running quickly: Shopify, Wix, SquareSpace, etc. We want to do the same thing, but for privacy.
Blockchain projects shouldn’t all need an in-house cryptography team to offer on-chain privacy. They just need to use Manta Network, the plug into and transact tokens in private.
In regards to updates, we have them on a monthly basis. Our next major milestone is to get our testnet up and running on Rococo. We anticipate this will happen in about a month. We already finished our prototype and submitted it as our first milestone of the Web3 Foundation Grant. The feedback was extremely positive.
4. Cooperation and partnership is one of the most important issues to help develop a project. Can you tell us about your existing partnerships, the partnership plans, and what people can gain from these partnerships?
Kenny Li:
You can find a list of all of our partnership announcements on our blog: mantanetwork.medium.com . We are looking for two categories of partnerships:
Ecosystem partners. Because Polkadot is a nascent ecosystem, there are a lot of decisions to be made as a collective group, to steer the future of Polkadot in a way that maximizes its benefits for the users and projects. We are looking for partners who can help us with steering that conversation. We are working with many of them on things like interoperability, composability, and token standards.
Direct-value partners. These are partners that can bring immediate value to our user base. As part of our mission, we are also offering a suite of products and services, such as MantaSwap--our privacy-preserving AMM-powered DEX. As part of this, we are partnering with Tidal to offer insurance products to our liquidity providers, which provides a lot of value to them.
5. What is your next 5 to 10 year future plan?
Kenny Li:
We believe that privacy needs to be scalable and simple to implement in order to scale up blockchain usability and use cases. Privacy is a problem that everyone faces on-chain, and we know that people are concerned. When we did a study of 400 respondents in the crypto space (influencers, funds, traders, etc.) about 75% of them said they either hesitated or altogether avoided making a transaction in the past due to privacy concerns. With the emergence of more use cases, those privacy concerns will only become bigger problems.
Right now, Tesla is starting to accept car payments in Bitcoin. In the future, we anticipate this type of transaction will happen with many other companies, and even B2B transactions will emerge. But without a privacy layer in this, then all of the transactions are publicly traceable without consent. On a B2B level, this implies that transactions have a risk of exposing trade secrets. We believe that a simple-to-use privacy solution that can be universally adopted across all blockchain projects, therefore, is a necessity. And that’s why we’re building Manta Network.
In the live questions sections, Kenny Li did answer several short questions from the Polka Warriors community.
1. In your opinion. do you think DEFI is a bubble? If it was a bubble, how would Manta Network avoid its explosion?
Kenny Li:
I don't know if DeFi is a bubble, but Manta Network is, at its core, a privacy project that helps power DeFi projects through scalable, plug-and-play privacy. Privacy is a huge issue in the blockchain space that extends beyond DeFi — we did a survey of 400 respondents, and 75% of them said they either hesitated or avoided making a transaction in the past due to privacy concerns. So whether it's DeFi, NFTs, or governance, privacy is a lingering issue. Therefore, Manta Network is not a project that is dependent on the wave of DeFi—it is a project that will be dependent on the adoption of blockchain.
2. While you build your project, Do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?What’s role play community on Your project?
Kenny Li:
Community feedback is a critical piece of our project. Our token enables governance as well. Things like fee structure, new tokens and token pairs, will all be decided by the community.
3. How do you keep your platform safe for Investors and is your platform protected from hackers? And how do you manage if there's an attack on your platform, including the personal data of your platform's users? Is your platform ready for this?
Kenny Li:
That's a really good question, and not an easy one to answer. Protecting against hacks is like a game of soccer, where the project is the single goalie, and every hacker is a player on the opposite team. The goalie's job is very hard: block every ball. The hacker's job is very easy: keep kicking balls until one makes it in.
We've seen lots of DeFi projects get attacked recently. The liquidity pools are lucrative targets for hackers, and projects—regardless of their size, reputation, or development stage—have been targeted and some have been successfully exploited.
We are planning mitigation to this. Security is our top priority before Main Net launch. Apart from bug bounties, we are also going to be conducting security auditing through professional services. We are also working with partners like Tidal to offer insurance products to our liquidity pools, to cover for events in case something ever happens (hopefully never).
4. Ambassadors play a very important role in every project, Do you have an ambassador program? If yes, how can I be one ?
Kenny Li:
We don't have an ambassador program yet, but we will soon — stay tuned to our Telegram channel @MantaNetworkOfficial to hear about it first!
5. Why did you choose Polkadot network? What are the benefits to your project? Are you planning to launch your mainet or switch to other blockchains in the future?
Kenny Li:
I actually just answered this in a reddit question...
As a smart-contract based chain (e.g., ETH), there is the compute overhead. For example, on Ethereum, all decentralized applications are built on Solidity, which rests on top of the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). The EVM itself takes up compute load, and shares it across other dapps as well. It becomes very taxing, especially in a PoW system, to share that TPS across multiple applications. It's like having one computer running multiple video games: even with the highest-end GPU, you're going to start experiencing lag if you have RDR2, Cyberpunk, GTA5, and Assassin's Creed running simultaneously in 4K resolution and ultra graphics. Even with PoS and a smart-contract layer on top, it just means there's more TPS (analogously, a more powerful graphics card), but at the end of the day, the TPS is still shared across an entire ecosystem. So, theoretically, whether you have 10 TPS or 10,000 TPS, as long as successful applications continue to be built, they will contend for blocks.
I think the Polkadot recognized this and instead took the route of Parachains. They gave us the Substrate framework to work with--Polkadot itself is built on Substrate. The idea here is that, instead of building as a smart contract on top of a chain that has limited TPS (however high it may be), projects can just be their own chains and plug into the Polkadot ecosystem for interoperability. So there's still that communication (using things like Polkadot's XCMP), but each project can build its own network, and each network can have its own validators and act as its own independent chain. Switching back to the gaming analogy, now every game can run on its own GPU, and is connected via the Internet so that you can communicate with each other (e.g., through Discord).
Yes, in case you're wondering, a Substrate-based project can be its own blockchain without even plugging into the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem. But you lose the benefits of easy interoperability.
We plan to launch our main net in Q4, and also get a Kusama parachain. No plans for other chains at the moment.
