Our Accomplishments, Q3 Updates, and Looking Into the Future
We have cleaned up and updated our Manta and Calamari Network roadmap. Now, it is easier to follow along with all of our updates and progress. This roadmap is updated in live stream, so community members are aware of how far along we are with different tasks and milestones. If you have any suggestions for our roadmap, you can always contribute to the project discussion on our forum.
Recent Updates: Accomplishments in Q3
During this quarter, Manta Network has significantly ramped up its development. Normally, we would provide a summary at the end of the quarter or at the end of the second half of this year. Because our progress has been so significant in this amount of time, though, we wanted to summarize our recent accomplishments and highlight what is left to do to successfully close out a productive third quarter.
Product Development: Launch of the Incentivized Testnet (Dolphin v2)
The launch of Dolphin Testnet v2 (incentivized testnet) marked a major internal milestone for the project, proving that our team has the talent to not only innovate but also lead, in the ZKP space.
The prover speed improvements we have been able to achieve mark a 10x speed advantage over ZCash (Sapling). Our current prover is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, available provers in the world for a circuit of this complexity. From a user experience, what this translates into is a much faster user experience. In Dolphin Testnet v1, users could expect a 30-second ZKP generation speed. In Dolphin Testnet v2, that speed has been reduced to about 2–5 seconds.
Furthermore, we have taken the feedback from Dolphin Testnet v1 to create a much better user experience for v2. This includes a simpler and cleaner overall interface along with new features that have been implemented or will be pushed in future releases of v2. For one, we have implemented permanent private wallet addresses. In v1, every address could only be used once. In v2, you can send and receive an unlimited number of transactions with one private address.
Network Security & Decentralization: Collator Program Growth
Calamari’s Community Collator Program Moves Forward with the Community’s Support
Our collator program launched in mid-May. In under a few months, we have been able to expertly expand our collator program to 30 operators. The growth of this community collator program is essential for the security of our network; the more community collators we have on board, the more decentralized the network becomes. At this point, Manta Network can safely shut down its internal collators and the network will still remain running with no downtime. This marks a major milestone for our roadmap towards decentralization. With the launch of our Proof-of-Stake consensus coming up, we anticipate even more collators joining the program.
R&D: Launch of the ZPrize WASM Challenge
Accelerating Elliptic Curve Operations and Finite Field Arithmetic (WASM) | ZPrize
Some challenges require the help of an entire, global network of experienced cryptographers. The WASM prover speed issue is one of those challenges. Together with Polkadot, Aleo, Mina, and Aztec, we launched the ZPrize WASM challenge to help find a solution to a problem we are all facing with ZK scalability on the WASM side. By finding solutions to this problem, we will be able to remove dependence from the Manta Signer in the user experience, and ZKP generation can happen just as quickly without it. We clearly laid out the problem as the prize architects, and other projects are supporting to bring strong financial incentives for the right solutions.
R&D: OpenZL
Apart from all of the immediate tasks at Manta Network, we are also contributing a limited portion of our resources and time to the overall development of the ZK space. One of the first initiatives that we are working on is named Open ZK Lib, which we started in June 2022. Open ZK Lib, or OpenZL for short, is an initiative that will abstract away the complexity of integrating ZKPs into projects, applications, and other tools that are built by developers with limited or no cryptography experience. This aligns with our vision of bringing privacy as an accessible utility for all of web3.
Interoperability: Launch of the XCM Libraries
One of the core reasons we decided to launch on Polkadot was due to its interoperability with other parachains. By using XCM, we can bring other parachain assets into our network, and privatize those assets. As part of our efforts towards this interoperability, we built out an XCM library, which allows us to quickly connect with other parachains and start privatizing their assets.
Using the XCM library, we’ve completed integration with Karura and MoonRiver on Kusama. Within MoonRiver, we have also been able to integrate with SolarBeam to launch a farming pool for $KMA. We’re looking forward to integrating with other projects on Kusama as we prepare MantaPay for launch on Calamari Network.
Remaining Tasks in Q3
On-chain Staking
This is a massive project for us because the enablement of on-chain staking means a change in our entire network’s consensus protocol. Originally deployed as Proof-of-Authority (PoA), we are now shifting over to Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS), which has major implications on our network security, incentivization, and token economics. As we get closer to launching on-chain staking at the end of this quarter, we will release more information about the changes that the community can expect.
The Launch of MantaPay on Calamari: Auditing
As a necessary security measure, we must complete auditing for the product before launching MantaPay on Calamari. The audit will specifically focus around the privacy circuits that we have built out, as well as general security auditing around our frontend and dapp to catch vulnerabilities before we release to mainnet. With all of the recent hacks across applications and bridges, we want to make sure that our network and applications are secure before releasing them.
The Launch of MantaPay on Calamari: Trusted Setup
The trusted setup is a required step for deploying our ZKP circuits, which are Groth16. The trusted setup is necessary to generate a piece of data that will be used every time a ZK circuit is run and a subsequent proof is generated. Usually, the trusted setup is an event that encourages participation from the entire community. With our trusted setup, this is no exception. We will be inviting the community to participate alongside us in successfully executing the ceremony.
The Launch of MantaPay on Calamari: Additional Features
For those of you that have tried v1 and v2 of our testnet, you will have noticed the significant improvements in features, speed, and overall user experience in v2. All of these improvements, especially on the ZK prover speed, took a massive amount of effort and expertise to execute effectively. Before the launch of MantaPay on Calamari Network, though, we still have a few additional features to add in and launch on Dolphin Testnet, including the addition of account recovery and a better user experience for Windows operating systems.
Q4 and the Future
Q4 Updates
Our core team is excited about what’s coming in Q4 because there are many milestones, projects, and developments in our pipeline that we have not fully revealed to the public. Those developments have a strong implication on how Manta Network and our core team are evolving. Stay tuned, as more information will be released starting in mid-September.
Expanding the Team
As we continue to ramp up our development efforts, we need to also scale our team with talented developers and leaders. If you have a passion for privacy and want to work with one of the leading teams in the ZKP space for web3, take a look at our careers. We are hiring on both the engineering and business side, and look forward to speaking with you.
About Manta Network
Manta Network is committed to building a better Web3 world through privacy protection. Manta’s product design starts from first principles and provides end-to-end privacy protection for blockchain users through leading cryptography architectures such as zkSNARK. While ensuring privacy, Manta offers interoperability, convenience, high performance, and auditability, allowing users to conduct private transfers and transactions between any parallel chain of assets. Manta’s vision is to provide more convenient privacy protection services for the entire blockchain world.
Manta’s founding team is made up of several cryptocurrency veterans, professors, and academics with experience from Harvard University, MIT, and Algorand. Manta’s investors include Polychain, ParaFi, Binance Labs, Multicoin, CoinFund, Alameda, DeFiance, and Hypersphere. Manta is also an official Web3 Foundation grant recipient, a member of the Substrate Builder Program, and a member of Berkeley Blockchain Accelerator.
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