Recap of PromoTeam AMA session with Co-Founder Manta Network, Kenny of Mantalore
Vlady Limes:Today we are having really interesting guest today, person who some of you already know, people who already familiar with Manta Network can say easily that this man is quite famous in Polkadot ecosystem. He is co-founder of Manta Network, Kenny of Mantalore. Hello Kenny!
Kenny of Mantalore: Hey there, thanks everyone for being here.
Vlady Limes: Ok, I’m going to stick with our tradition and let me ask the very first question from me personally. I noticed that the first batch of parachain auctions has finished and the second batch is coming. Could you please tell us what are Manta and Calamari networks considering about these auctions rounds?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah so, really great question. We are going to start with slot number six as soon as the auctions restart will be available for parachain loan offering and people will be able to start participating in parachain loan and one of things that we are focusing on is making sure that Calamari is very fair launch, making sure everyone can participate that there are no private rounds, no private investors, there is no people like having any sort of advantage taking token over. It’s a great advantage for participation because you truly will be one of the first token owners. On top of that we have a lot of incentives, one of the incentives is referral reward we’ll be able to give people bonuses for any sort of participants that they continue to refer. Also, we have early participation bonuses so the first five hundred people that signed up get an early bonus in the amount of Calamari that they receive for depositing their Kusama and then the first one thousand participants also get a bonus. Although, it’s a slightly lower bonus that the original five hundred participants.
Vlady Limes: Excellent, I’d like to say that PromoTeam has an outstanding product which is called Crowdloan bot and we will be grateful to cooperate together and spread the information about Manta Network parachain auction bonus program in future. Okay, so we will start with questions that we got from our community. What are the most interesting use cases related to your project that you can suggest to other developers? It’s something that you are proud of.
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, so. I think the biggest differentiating factor between what we are building out compare to a lot of other solutions is that I guess underlying on layer 1 it is all about privacy. So two of the products that we are building out using our privacy technology are Manta Pay and Manta DEX. Manta Pay is private transacting but it’s very different than Zcash because if you think about Zcash, if I wanted to send you 10 DOT how do I send that with Zcash? I can’t. I have to use Zcash to send you Zcash but with Manta Network you can send 10 DOT, you can send Acala tokens, you can send Plasm you can send Moonbeam, you can send Manta, you can send wrapped BTC or ETH all privately. We’re allowing you to bring your own token, privatize those token assets and send those in a private manner through a Zcash like system. So that we’re very different from Zcash, we don’t ask you to just use Manta tokens you can use any tokens you want. On the Decentralised exchange side is Manta swap, this is very different that decentralised exchanges on the market today because obviously the privacy reasons. You use Uniswap, Sushiswap etc all the large decentralised exchanges, all your transactions. Are on-chain, all your data is on-chain and nothing about your interaction with those chains are private but rather with Manta network your user identity will be entirely private all of your swaps and on top of that we are building in privacy features that are first of its kind in the industry. First of all is private liquidity pools being able to put in liquidity into a pool and remain a private participant in that pool. Second of all is we are working on anti-front-running using ZKP and being able to prevent front-running which is a huge problem in decentralised exchange transacting right now.
Vlady Limes: Thank you so much, let’s go with the next question. Could you tell us about minting private tokens? What are other tokens can be minted? What’s the difference between private DOT token and regular DOT?
Kenny of Mantalore: Good question. Any parachain assets can be minted, this means that you can use Acala, wrapped BTC, wrapped ETH, DOT etc. Essentially, any parachain project we can support and so this means that any parachain asset that comes to Manta network can become a private parachain asset. That’s the first part of your question. The second one, what’s the difference between DOT and private DOT? The main difference is that private DOT is the private version of the original DOT you send private DOT to someone then that transaction is untraceable and that is the only major difference between DOT and private DOT. We say this because private DOT is just a wrapped version of DOT and it is always one to one ration between DOT and private DOT. One private DOT always represents one real DOT.
Vlady Limes: Yeah, let’s go with another question from our community. Adding anonymity protects user from front-running attacks and sandwich attacks this is good and reduces some user’s risk but does the anonymity of Manta network introduce other risks such as potential vulnerability of Manta’s smart contracts or something similar?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, in terms of the risk to the technology using anonymity. I don’t believe that there are any major risks. In fact, one of the reasons why we are building on Polkadot is that we can control the full network. When you think about decentralised application like Ethereum it sits on top of Ethereum Virtual Machine, when you are using Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP technology) ZKP actually is very compute heavy which means that you need as much CPU as possible but if you’re running it on top of Ethereum than Ethereum’s EVM (the Ethereum Virtual Machine) runs all of the smart contracts on top of it so the EVM itself is already taking compute power and than on top of that all the other different applications on Ethereum are also taking that compute power. So at the end of the day, running ZKP contracts on Ethereum means that there is less power for ZKP contract which means less performance. We are building as a Layer 1, we have the entire network designed specifically for Zero-knowledge proofs transactions and generation which means that we are much more scalable and from that perspective I think there is no disadvantage in performance. In fact, there is an advantage in performance by being a Layer 1. I guess another thing is traceability can be a disadvantage for any type of government who wants to be surveilling or monitoring their users and it could be a disadvantage for any sort of unauthorised third parties who are trying to track and trace users by invading their privacy on-chain. I think from those perspectives there are disadvantages but from the user perspective it’s a lot more empowering because you have this level of privacy that you traditionally don’t have on-chain.
Vlady Limes: Thanks a lot. By the way, we received a lot of questions about testnet. How much time is it going to last? How many testers will be connected to the testnet? Is there any incentives program for testers?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, actually our private version of testnet is already available. The public testnet will be available in about one month from now. In terms of the incentives, we still working on the exact specifics there. I definitely want to make sure that we have all the details ready before I talk a little bit more specifically about it.
Vlady Limes: Excellent, excellent. Going on. The next question from our community. What is the difference between Manta network and other competitors?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that there is a lot of confusion in space around privacy. I want to dissect this in a few ways. The first way is that technology behind privacy. We are using Zero-knowledge proofs or ZKP a lot of competitors are using Trusted Execution Environments or TEE some of these notable competitors outside the Polkadot ecosystem include Oasis and Secret Network and inside of the Polkadot ecosystem there is Phala. Now the key difference here between ZKP and TEE is that TEE is about privacy and confidential computing on the data whereas ZKP is about privacy on-chain. So what is happening, the confusion leads people in the thinking that there is competition but in reality you should be combining ZKP with TEE together because now you have privacy on the data analysis side as well as the on-chain side. That is what refers us to the full stack privacy and this is something that we are actually working with Phala Network on to manifest full stack privacy into Polkadot. So that the one thing I want to clarify, another thing I have mentioned Zcash before right and the big differentiator there is the transaction user experience and then you have some ZKP based solutions that are on Ethereum and I had kind of mentioned the differences there. One is being in the scalability performance and gas fees. Two is the actual use case whereas we are specifically within Polkadot ecosystem we service parachain assets where in the Ethereum ecosystem so they service Ethereum based assets.
Vlady Limes: Thanks a lot. Another question from the community. What is the final point that you are trying to reach in cryptocurrency market? Obviously, the whole space will be huge and continue to grow in upcoming years. What role as a project would you like to play in this space?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, If we think about what role Manta network plays you really have to think about what sort of impact we can make in terms of the privacy. First of all, what we see in the network is that no one really is thinking about privacy this is something that everyone wants to have but no one wants to give up user experience for. As a result, privacy is always been something that people think of it afterthought once they have a user experience but with Manta network we are trying to build in the user experience as core feature for our entire technology stack whether its the products or the privacy technology itself. Our role here is to bring privacy mainstream on-chain. Privacy is already a huge problem on-chain because non of your transactions are private everything is public. The problem here is that you are not just interacting with smart-contracts and sending tokens to people, people are starting to interact with decentralised applications they are playing with things like Axie Infinity and all of these transactions on these decentralised applications are on-chain as well. That’s a huge problem because now all of a sudden you have people who can then look at all your data without your consent if you think about like Facebook and Google these are centralized platforms where Facebook has access to all your data or Google has access to all your data and customers are already uncomfortable with that. Now, all of a sudden when you look at the blockchain everyone has access to all your data and you have no control over who gets to see it, who gets to do what with it it can be used for blackmail or advertising, it can be used to build out different technologies that are not credited to your identity and various different use cases on the consumer and business level. So privacy is a huge problem it hasn’t been solved yet on-chain and this is something we want to solve starting with Polkadot. In five years or ten years, we see ourselves not as just a project with products but with utility and commodity much like electricity is used to power machines much like data is used to power the internet. Manta should be able to power the privacy on-chain.
Vlady Limes: Wow, thank you for such a detailed answer. Many sister’s networks in Kusama and Polkadot are linked to each other. Will Manta and Calamari be linked or related somehow to each other? If so how?
Kenny of Mantalore: Yeah, so. I think that’s a really good question and we are still in the early stages of the exactly figuring out all the details around this but what I can say is that it would be an amazing goal for us to bridge between Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems such that we can privatise and move private assets into one decentralised exchange. So this is something that we are still thinking about and how we work it on but imagine being in a private decentralised exchange and being able to trade Kusama and Polkadot tokens. I can’t get into too much details about it just because we are still trying to figure out all the specifics but it’s something that is on our list of goals and milestones to achieve.
Vlady Limes: Okay, let me ask you the last question. Manta network 2025, how do you imagine it at this year?
Kenny of Mantalore: Manta network in 2025, the way that I really would love to see Manta at this point. One, people may not about Manta network when they are on Polkadot or other chains but people will be using Manta network all the time. What I mean by this is we are trying to build Plug’n’Play privacy into all different decentralised applications so we would be that privacy technology for the different applications within the ecosystem. This means that people don’t have to know that Manta network exist but people will know that there is a privacy feature on their favourite decentralised app and so every time they use that privacy feature it actually goes to Manta network but people don’t necessarily have to know that and so that’s what is really beautiful about privacy system that we are building out.
Vlady Limes: Thank you, Kenny.
Kenny of Mantalore: Thank you guys, really appreciate your time and thank you for letting me being here.
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