Unpacking a Mammoth Month for MANTRA DAO

Published in

MANTRA

6 min readOct 14, 2020

At MANTRA DAO, it is our belief that the future of crypto is dependent on creating cross-chain ecosystems. Mainstream adoption will never occur unless interoperability is achieved. Since our community-governed platform is one of the first DeFi projects being built on Parity Substrate for the next-generation Polkadot ecosystem, we’re proud to say that we’re doing our part.

The past 2 months have been incredibly busy at MANTRA — but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Each and every week, we have reached another milestone or forged an exciting alliance that brings us one step closer to the inclusive, decentralized financial ecosystem we envisioned when we first got the ball rolling. On top of that, I got married and had knee surgery. It’s been a crazy 8-weeks, to say the least. It is enormously gratifying to be in this position, and I wanted to set down some thoughts about our recent progress to bring you all up to speed.

OM Exchanges

As I’m sure many of you already know, the OM token is MANTRA DAO’s native currency, the cost of admission for those seeking to become members, and positively influence the organization. OM tokens yield governance and voting rights (on interest rates and grant allocations, for example) as well as access to collateralized loans, compounded interest, and MANTRA POOL’s savings games. Because we want to involve as many people as we can, it’s been a goal of ours to make OM easier to acquire and trade. To this end, we have been pleased to see OM listed on a number of tier one and two cryptocurrency exchanges, not least OKEx, Poloniex, Bithumb Global, and BitMax. In fact, in a little over a month and a half since our TGE, the OM token has been listed on 15 CEX. The team is actively working on adding additional CEX exchange partners, and are in talks with several at the moment. This includes additional tier ones and other more local exchanges for our localized Sherpa communities.

Time to Stake

It was of course essential that we made OM more widely available prior to launching our new decentralized staking platform, a vital trident alongside our lending and governance products. At present, OM holders (of whom there are currently 11,272 not including those who hold their stake on one of our many CEX — there are over 3,300 stakers on BitMax for example) can connect their web wallet and stake with an 88.88% APR, with the pool dispensing rewards to token holders automatically while they retain full custody of their funds. Rates and rewards will be adjusted monthly by the MANTRA DAO Council, and users can unstake at any time. We currently have around 28 million OM staked on our native platform, with an additional 18 million on Bithumb Global, and over 25 million staked on BitMax. That’s over 71 million OM tokens staked today!

These numbers are truly staggering. We really appreciate the support, especially from our early stakers on our native platform. Last week, we launched the RFUEL staking pool on app.mantradao.com and have seen over 15.5 million RFUEL staked in under a week as well. In the coming weeks, we will be launching more pools including rewards for staking our OM/ETH UNI-V2 liquidity pool token, as well as for the RFUEL/ETH Uniswap-V2. More details can be found here. We are constantly looking at adding additional functionalities to the platform and are constantly working on additional staking pool and airdrop opportunities for our community. We are also seeking to add 15 top-notch network validators to our portfolio. I am proud to say that we are quickly closing in on this once seemingly unattainable stretch goal. It’s been a busy and rewarding month-plus since our TGE, but I can assure you the months ahead will be even more exciting.

In terms of validator nodes, we have been diligently setting up nodes, and are looking forward to opening them up to accept delegation from the Sherpa community. Initially, we will launch the nodes without the additional $OM incentives, but we will add this functionality in due time in order to enhance the growth of our AUD (Assets Under Delegation). As I’ve mentioned in the Telegram channel, our goal is to reach $100M AUD by the end of the year.

We recently became the latest validator on Matic Network, and have a growing list of MANTRA DAO validators you can soon delegate to, including

Polkadot (DOT)
Kusama (KSM)
Cosmos (ATOM)
Kava (KAVA)
BandChain (BAND)
Terra (LUNA)
TomoChain (TOMO)
Etc.

And many more to come…

Growing the Team

Building a project as ambitious as ours requires talent and lots of it. We’ve been aggressively expanding our team in a few various areas including engineering and operations. We’ve made several key hires, including an operations & strategy manager here in Hong Kong who we’ll be introducing shortly, as well as several additional devs. The dev team now consists of 6 full-time team members, and we are looking to hire additional talent.

Some of the positions we are looking to hire include:

Full-stack Engineer (Remote possible)
Blockchain Engineer (APAC-based)
System Architect (APAC-based)
Marketing Manager (Hong Kong-based)

We are looking forward to sharing more about the makeup of our team, and the team culture that we are building. We’ll be emphasizing this important aspect of our startup, especially as we grow and move forward through the rest of the year.

For those interested in receiving more information on any of the roles above, please shoot an email to careers@mantradao.com or drop me a message on Telegram @JPMullin.

Expanding Our Partner Network

You can’t go it alone, in crypto as in life, which is why we have been busy expanding our partner network. One of our most recent additions is Bondly, a portable swap protocol that develops DeFi tools for over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges and digital marketplaces. Like us, the firm is fiercely committed to interoperability and hard at work developing products for the expanding Polkadot ecosystem.

On the back of this strategic partnership, Bondly is generously offering an exclusive pool of 1,000,000 of its native asset ($BOND) to those who stake on our new platform. These rewards are, of course, over and above the 88% APY denominated in OM that I referenced above, with rewards due to be distributed to Sherpas throughout the month of November. Needless to say, we’re thrilled to join forces with another ambitious startup in the DeFi arena.

As far as link-ups go, they’ve been coming thick and fast of late: in September we signed an agreement with Kira Network, an interchain exchange protocol that enables market access to various digital assets. Initially, we will serve as a validator for Kira Network, although we’re already actively exploring other potential integration opportunities to further our ambitions.

In addition to Kira, we’ve inked ecosystem partnerships with the likes of TomoChain, Polkastarter, KardiaChain, Kava, Band Protocol, Matic, and Terra. As you may have noticed, we have certainly inked a lot of high profile partnerships, and I can assure you there are many more in the pipeline! The team and I are looking forward to sharing more with you all in the near future!

Looking to the Future

With over 11,000 OM token holders (again not including the thousands who stake on BitMax or Bithumb or trade on our many exchanges), a new staking platform, support from some of the world’s best-known exchange platforms, and an incredible DeFi partner network, our goal of leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to democratize financial control and access is coming into clearer focus. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s coming down the pipe: the launch of MANTRA POOL, further staking platform enhancements and pools, and the debut of our lending products. Bit by bit, we are building a game-changing cross-chain ecosystem to take DeFi to the next level. I sincerely appreciate the tremendous support thus far, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the Sherpas for the rest of the year.

OMMMMMMM,
JPM 🕉

About MANTRA DAO

MANTRA DAO is a community-governed DeFi platform focusing on Staking, Lending, and Governance. MANTRA DAO leverages the crowd’s wisdom to creates a community-governed, transparent, and decentralized ecosystem for web 3.0. Built on Parity Substrate for the Polkadot ecosystem, MANTRA DAO gives financial control back to the people to store and grow wealth together.