May is an exciting month because it marked some big milestones for the progress of Manta Network on both the engineering and community side. We’re excited about the progress we are making as we gear up for our public testnet launch.
Technical Developments
As we get closer to testnet launch, we have been running internal benchmarks to get a better sense of scalability and user experience. For MantaSwap, our private AMM exchange, we have completed the prototype and conducted some benchmarks, which demonstrate stellar performance.
Meanwhile, MantaPay, the first product we will be launching to testnet, has officially been integrated into the Polkadot.js web application. The backend development is completed, and we are currently working on finishing up the frontend to bring an easy user experience for our community. You can take a look at our preview below. For the time being, we have an initial prototype finished, and are simultaneously adding more features — alpha release is in sight!
On the more technical end, Manta (and our Kusama chain, Calamari)’s ss58 address format has been merged to Substrate. We have also recently gotten our first community contributor, which marks a simple but major milestone in our progress to become a community project!
Simplify some code by liuchengxu · Pull Request #53 · Manta-Network/pallet-manta-pay
The Ambassador Program
Earlier this week, we introduced Albiona Hoti, the most recent team member joining us full time. While we don’t make team introductions very publicly, Albiona is an exception due to the nature of her role in the project. She takes a unique position here, working on full-stack development as well as community management. Albiona will be leading our Ambassador Program. With her experience in software engineering, developer relations, and leadership communication, she will be bringing all the right talents to the table to maximize the experience of the ambassadors. Further down the road as MantaPay and MantaSwap hits mainnet, we will also be releasing more developer tools — Albiona will also take charge of developer relations at that time. She has already started building out the framework and tools for the Ambassadors to hit the ground running.
On the ambassador side, with Albiona’s leadership, we are also moving into the next phase of the program. Applicants have received emails from the Manta team about the next steps in joining as an ambassador. With the tremendous influx of people to our Discord channel, we can confidently say that the invitation letter has been well-received by the applicants! Internationally, we have been seeing a lot of support as well.
In the upcoming days, Kenny, Albiona, and the Mantalorian Regional Ambassadors will be working very hard to get the next steps functional and ready for the Mantalorian community. Stay tuned to our Discord for the latest news. We will be posting content to guide the Mantalorians around the rules of the ambassador program, and we’ll also schedule some AMAs to answer any questions people may have.
Join the Manta Network Discord Server!
Partnership Announcements
In May, we made two big partnership announcements. The first announcement we made was Phala Network, a Substrate-based project that delivers confidential computing for the Polkadot Ecosystem through the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs). Working together, our project and Phala will provide privacy and confidentiality to both the compute and transaction layers on Polkadot. Manta will provide the privacy DeFi functions such as minting, transacting, and swapping private tokens. Phala will provide functions like privacy swap, lending, and other functions in its privacy environment.
Our second partnership announcement was with Crust Network, which provides a decentralized storage network of Web3.0 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS, and exposes storage interfaces to the application layer. Crust’s technical stack is also capable of supporting a decentralized computing layer. It is designed to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership. Working together, Manta Network will be integrating with Crust’s decentralized storage network, providing it with Manta’s zero-knowledge proof network. Manta’s ZKP solution will enable private transactions throughout Crust Network. Those privacy features are passed on as added benefits to the users of Crust Network.
Furthermore, we joined the Polkadot Wasm Contract Ecosystem Alliance as a founding member, as well as the Polkadot DAO Alliance. The Polkadot WASM Contract Ecosystem Alliance’s goal is to promote the large-scale popularization of Wasm contract technology in the Polkadot ecosystem. Through widely cooperation with the Polkadot projects, media and investment institutions related to the Wasm contract, the Platform will jointly promote the construction of public infrastructure and the evolution of contract technology, and provide brand promotion and capital support, then creating a strong alliance for Wasm contract ecosystem.
With the ultimate goal of “Realizing real decentralization in Web3.0”, The Polkadot DAO Alliance actively promotes Polkadot and the wider ecological decentralized governance application and infrastructure construction and constantly explores new paths for DAO governance.
Community Activities
This month, we participated in two AMAs. The first one was organized by Oasis and PCIC, and also involved Findora and Phala. You can read more about that one here.
The second AMA was with Cao Yin of the Digital Renaissance Foundation, discussing new tax regulations and discussions around the topic of PriFi (privacy finance). Read up on the coverage of that session through the ChainNews article (Chinese).
In mid-May, one of our co-founders, Kenny Li, went to Austin, Texas to judge at a DoraHacks Hackathon. This event marks the first in-person event that Manta Network has attended inside the United States. Kenny judged approximately 20 teams and projects alongside judges from Coinbase, Hypersphere, Fundamental Labs, and others. Many teams built some amazing DeFi and NFT projects. The team that won the hackathon is Ethsign, a project that provides on-chain document signing.
Looking Forward
Next month will mark some additional milestones for the project’s progress:
- Our Ambassadors Program will be fully launched, with activities being tracked. We will have a web app for visually tracking progress within the community, and giving others an opportunity to see what their peers are doing.
- Our China Ambassadors Program will be launched as well, which will be managed separately.
- On the marketing side, we will also begin our industry conversations — stay tuned to see what that’s all about!
- We also want to earn a Kusama parachain, and will be releasing more information about our auction strategy.
- On the product side, we will be launching our public testnet and test program (with incentives and other perks — stay tuned!).
- As we get closer to mainnet launch of Manta Network, we will also begin releasing more details about our token.
About Manta Network
Follow Us: [Website] [Telegram] [Twitter] [Github] [Discord]
Manta Network is the plug-and-play privacy-preservation protocol built to service the entire DeFi stack. Built on Substrate to leverage interoperability and zkSNARKs to leverage scalable privacy, Manta Network offers a suite of products and services that enable privacy for blockchain projects include privacy payment MantaPay and privacy decentralized exchange MantaSwap. As part of its own suite of products, Manta Network offers private payment and private decentralized exchange, MantaSwap.
Manta’s founding team comprises many US cryptocurrency veterans, professors, and scholars whose experience includes Harvard, MIT, and Algorand. The advisors of Manta include Hypersphere Ventures co-founder Jack Platts, Polychain partner Tekin Salimi, former Web3 Foundation co-founder Ashley Tyson, and Consensys’ Shuyao Kong. Manta has previously completed a million-dollar seed round of financing led by Polychain and participated by Three Arrows Capital, Multicoin, Alameda, and Hypersphere. Manta is also a grant fund recipient of Polkadot’s official Web3 Foundation. Manta also is an outstanding member of the Substrate Builder Program and the Blockchain Accelerator of the University of Berkeley.
