The second round of Kusama parachain auctions has started, and Calamari Network, the leading network of Manta Network, has given the biggest incentive for this round of auctions. Calamari said that up to 30% of the KMA tokens will be distributed to KSM contributors, and there will also be invitation rewards. At present, there are more than 8,000 pledgers on the entire network, and the number of pledged KSMs exceeds 100,000. It has reached the first hard cap three days in advance. Currently Crowdfunding rewards have been suspended.
As a privacy protocol in the Polkadot ecosystem, why does Manta give such generous incentives? On the evening of September 1, Victor Ji, a core contributor to Manta Network, visited Odaily's "Chaohua Community" to explain the incentive distribution mechanism and the new changes in this round of auction compared to the first round for users.
The following is the essence of AMA, enjoy~
Odaily: First of all, it is a great honor to invite Victor to participate in the super talk. Please make a brief self-introduction first, you can first review your previous working experience, and the main section you are currently responsible for in Manta Network. What background and experience do other core members of the team have?
Victor：Hello everyone, I am Victor, the core contributor of Manta/Calamari. I am mainly responsible for product, economic model and project governance design at Manta. I have been in contact with cryptocurrency since 15 years ago. I was an investment partner of an American cryptocurrency fund for 18 years. I went to Harvard University to study for a master's degree in economics and public administration. I am also the chairman of the Harvard Kennedy School Blockchain Association. It was during my study that I met the other two co-founders of Manta in Boston.
At that time, we were working on an inter-bank transfer blockchain system for the Central Bank of Singapore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and conducted in-depth research on privacy. Our mentor was Gary Gensler, the current chairman of the US Securities Regulatory Commission, who was at MIT at the time. I teach blockchain courses, and my other partner, Kenny Li, is his teaching assistant. We started to participate in the liquidity provision and trading of many DeFi projects in the "Summer of DeFi" last year, but every time we transfer money, we worry that our asset information will be exposed. Professor Shumo Chu co-founded Manta, hoping to solve a series of the most important privacy issues in DeFi.
Odaily: Can you briefly introduce Manta and Calamari? Including the core business of the two, development progress and the relationship between the two.
Victor：Manta Network is Polkadot's first on-chain privacy protection project. It provides DeFi users with the highest security level of on-chain privacy protection through the cryptographic technology zkSNARK, aiming to become the privacy protection infrastructure of the entire decentralized finance. Manta's early products include the privacy payment protocol - MantaPay, and the first privacy DEX protocol in the Polkadot ecosystem - MantaSwap, and future products include platforms that support NFT privacy transactions. Based on the Substrate framework, Manta can provide plug-and-play privacy protection services for the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Manta's long-term vision is to become a privacy-preserving platform for blockchain applications in the Web3 world.
Manta has previously completed a million-dollar seed round financing led by Polychain, with participation from DeFiance, Multicoin, Alameda, and Hypersphere. Manta is also a Grant recipient of the Polkadot Web3 Foundation, a member of the Substrate Builder Program, and a member of the Berkeley University Blockchain Accelerator.
Calamari Network, as the community-based pioneer network of Manta Network, is a plug-and-play privacy protection parachain on Kusama, aiming to provide privacy services for the entire Kusama DeFi network. Calamari Network is built on Kusama as a parallel chain to ensure cross-chain interoperability, and based on zkSNARK (zero-knowledge proof technology) to ensure privacy.
Calamari's early products include:
Privacy payment MariPay - MariPay supports private transactions of Kusama and its parachain assets, including the main encrypted assets supported on Kusama. Users can privatize mainstream assets such as encapsulated stablecoins and BTC, and Calamari provides the most secure on-chain privacy through zero-knowledge proof technology.
Privacy decentralized AMM trading platform MariSwap——MariSwap provides users with the transaction function of parachain assets with private addresses, and it also provides unprecedented new functions in the industry including private liquidity pools.
Calamari is the only platform that can satisfy users’ on-chain privacy needs and anti-censorship needs while ensuring the decentralization and interoperability of privacy tokens.
Calamari is delicious squid food. Squids are born with a natural ability to camouflage, which protects it from predators through skin color changes, ink jets, and more. In addition, compared with the long-tailed devil fish like Manta, squid has more tentacles, which represents the experimental spirit of Kusama Pioneer Network, and Calamari represents the innovative spirit of more attempts, and deploys the best product solutions to Manta .
So, to us, Calamari stands for privacy, interoperability, and innovation.
Odaily: Kusama's second batch of 5 parachain slot auctions will start on September 1st. What is the competitive situation and rules mechanism of this round of auction? What are the characteristics compared with the first round?
Victor：This round of auction is quite intense. Currently, 16 projects are crowdfunding and preparing to participate in the card slot auction. Among them, six projects have raised more than 10,000 KSM, and two projects have raised more than 100,000 KSM. Got Calamari. The rules have not changed from the previous round, but relatively speaking, after the first round of auctions, the market has seen the performance of the first round of projects and has stronger expectations, and the second round of projects is more professional. , such as Calamari focusing on privacy on the chain, Kilt doing DID,AltairMake physical assets on the chain,BasiliskDoing LBP pools, etc., each project can take advantage of the customized characteristics of the Polkadot parachain.
Odaily: Manta Network announced the parachain auction strategy of the leading network Calamari, and up to 30% of KMA will be distributed to Kusama users. Specifically how? For example, the start and end time of incentives, the ratio of distribution by different users, the lock-up status and unlocking rules after receiving coins, etc.
Victor：If Calamari’s rules can be summed up in three words, they would be fair distribution (no team, no private placement of tokens), anti-involution (triple hard cap), and early priority (early participants have extra rewards).
Calamari's token ($KMA) is the first community-led deflationary privacy functional token. According to the actual usage of the privacy protection network in its protocol and the growth in DeFi, users can incentivize dividends, redeem and pass operations such as certificate destruction. The total initial issuance of KMA is 10 billion. The distribution of KMA will be community oriented. Most of the KMA tokens will be held by community members and will be distributed to early participants in a fair way. Neither team members nor private equity investors will receive initial distribution. Up to 3,000,000,000 (3 billion) KMA will be distributed to KSM contributors, representing 30% of the total initial KMA supply. A fixed 10,000 KMA tokens will be rewarded for every 1 KSM token leased to the Calamari card slot auction. The advantage of this fixed ratio is that the user's KMA reward will not change with the total amount of KSM supporting Calamari. The first 1,000 contributors will receive additional rewards, plus a 5% invitation reward. When Calamari wins the parachain slot and starts to run, 34% of KMA will be released directly to crowd lending participants, and 66% of tokens will be released every 8 weeks, divided into 6 releases, each releasing 11%.
Odaily: What does the second round of auction mean to Manta and its users? Why give the biggest incentive so far?
Victor：Obtaining a parachain card slot is only the first step for Calamari’s future development. What’s more, through the Calamari privacy protocol, Kusama and Kusama’s real just-needed projects can develop together, which is the goal pursued in the future. Through the privacy function of Calamari, Kusama will become the first cross-chain ecosystem that can achieve complete end-to-end privacy in all blockchain worlds. The privacy environment on the chain is also the goal that Gavin Wood and all community members looking forward to Web3.0 have been pursuing, and we have been working hard in this direction.
Although Calamri gave the biggest incentive for this round of auctions, at the same time, the design of the economic model also prevents involution and is very rational with multiple hard caps. According to Calamari's crowd lending rules, 100,000 KSM is the first "ladder hard cap". When the number of pledged KSM reaches 100,000, we will suspend new pledges. Calamari will participate in the Kusama parachain auction with 100,000 KSM. If Calamari successfully obtains the parachain card slot, it will not enter the next hard cap, and the remaining KMA will be stored in the treasury for future card slot auctions.
Now that it has exceeded 100,000, new staking will not generate KMA rewards. We recommend that you do not continue staking for the time being, and please wait for further official announcements. If a higher bidder gets the card slot before Calamari, we will open the second hard cap in the next auction and accept KSM pledge again. During the second hard cap process, a maximum of 2 billion KMA will be distributed to KSM Contributors, raising up to 200,000 KSM. Calamari has three hard caps in this slot auction, the highest hard cap is 300,000 KSM, and a maximum of 30% of the total initial supply of KMA will be distributed to KSM contributors.
At the beginning of the design of the Calamari economic model, the irrational competition brought about by raising the cost of the parachain card slot among the bidding projects was considered. The "ladder hard cap" method ensures that there are enough KSMs to obtain the parachain while avoiding the need to Irrational competition at excessively high costs, while avoiding adverse effects on existing early KMA supporters as much as possible, can also make more KMA a reserve for future card slot auctions, which is conducive to the long-term healthy development of the project.
Odaily: In Polkadot's web3 vision, privacy is a topic that is often discussed and always new. As the first privacy protocol in the Polkadot ecosystem, what is Manta's mission and vision?
Victor：Manta is actually not the first privacy project in the Polkadot ecosystem. We and our partner Phala were also working on privacy protocols and products earlier. Manta can be said to be the first and only on-chain privacy protocol on Polkadot that applies zero-knowledge proof, because the underlying structure of Phala is TEE. In addition, Phala is more inclined to privacy computing in application scenarios, such as data processing. What Manta does is the on-chain privacy of cryptocurrencies, and the technical principle is more similar to Zcash. The cooperation between Manta and Phala can achieve full-stack end-to-end privacy.
From the perspective of technological development, we believe that the blockchain world is at a point where the various technologies required to build privacy-preserving DeFi are gradually mature and scalable. The Polkadot ecosystem presents us with a unique opportunity to bring scalable, fast, and interoperable private transactions to the market. Combined with zk-SNARK's scalable Groth-16 scheme, it means we can preserve fast and secure DeFi while increasing privacy, providing features and overall user experience that DeFi doesn't have today.
In addition to technology, we know that many DeFi users such as whales, traders, and institutional investors also have privacy needs, and they are paying more and more attention to their privacy. We did a privacy report early on in the project, and 70% of people agreed that they hesitated or avoided certain types of on-chain transactions due to privacy concerns. Even on a personal level, we feel barriers to transactions for privacy reasons - addresses may no longer be anonymous, once a transfer is made, people can look up your wallet info/transactions/holdings, historical activity is fully exposed, etc. We're excited to build and launch Manta to address the privacy concerns most blockchain/crypto users face in DeFi.
Odaily: In mid-August, Manta Network announced that it had successfully achieved cross-chain communication with Acala on the test network through XCM. This cooperation demonstrates the composability within the Polkadot ecosystem. Specifically, what combination possibilities does this cross-chain bring?
Victor：This is an important milestone for both parties. First of all, we would like to thank the Acala technical team for the long-term technical exchanges with us, which enabled us to better understand the characteristics of Substrate development. For Acala, Acala's ACA, aUSD and other assets will have the function of privacy on the chain in the future, which will be more attractive for users to hold. For Manta, our goal has always been to give priority to the privacy of high-quality assets. Compared with a separate privacy public chain, there is no need to issue stable coins on Manta's parallel chain, no need to migrate products, or even compatibility Smart contracts, as long as the parachain XCM is used, the stable currency on Acala and the assets on the contract can be private. In this way, the characteristics of Polkadot's interoperability and composability are fully utilized, making Manta a better landing than many privacy public chains. In addition, the future extensive privacy application scenarios on Manta can make assets such as Aca have wider application value.
Just like many zero-knowledge proof projects, the development of Manta requires a lot of customization requirements for zero-knowledge proofs. Development of Proof of Knowledge. In addition, from an ecological point of view, compared with parachains, layer2 and a separate privacy public chain require a lot of migration costs, and because the early consensus is not strong, there are also security risks. Compared with these options, Manta's access to parachains can use XCMP to make assets of any other parachains like Acala private, allowing access to a huge ecosystem in the early stages of the project.
Odaily: Which tokens are currently supported by Manta's DEX function? Will a custom pool be developed in the future to allow users to freely add token trading pairs? And is there any plan to issue tokens in the near future?
Victor：MantaSwap will support the main assets that can be paid privately on MantaPay at the beginning of its launch, and then it will gradually expand to new assets determined by community votes through the governance mechanism. When the product reaches a sufficient level of decentralization, MantaSwap will gradually transfer to non-licensed mode, developers are free to add trading pairs. The token plan should first look at the development of KMA. Manta will consider the progress of product development, the development of Calamari, and the Polkadot parachain auction cycle to disclose the token model and distribute tokens. Please look forward to it.
Odaily: What new product forms or incentives are recommended to users in the recent roadmap of Manta and Calamari?
Victor：In addition to the development of the Kusama parachain auction front-end of Calamari Network, Manta is cooperating with other parachain supporters such as zenlink and biforst. At the same time, the technical team is also fully preparing for the launch of the MantaPay testnet. The MantaPay testnet has also been upgraded. Manta-Signer Client development is well underway, and Manta's Windows and Mac daemons will be used for zero-knowledge proof generation. The MantaPay testnet with private transactions will also come out this month. At that time, users can also participate in the experience of MantaPay to have the opportunity to get incentives.
MantaPay's private payment products are very different from current products such as Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash is a decentralized application based on smart contracts built on Ethereum. Manta Network itself is a network layer. In terms of speed, cost and functionality, etc. Provides more flexibility. Among them, Manta has its own UTXO-based wallet address system, which means that users can store, transfer and exchange privacy tokens. For example, a user can send 10 and 2 privacy DOTs to different people respectively. On Tornado Cash, a private transaction can only be extracted as a public transfer and cannot be dispersed.
More importantly, Manta's fee structure is not limited by the ETH POW consensus. However, Tornado Cash will incur high fees because it needs to be executed within the smart contract. As a network layer specially established for private transactions, Manta can provide users with a lower-cost transfer experience.
Odaily: You are right"DeFi+Privacy"What are the predictions for the future development of the field? How does privacy empower DeFi?
Victor：Since the actual development of DeFi, it has already gained sufficient volume in application scenarios and market scale. The views of leading cryptocurrency institutions in Europe and the United States are that in the near future, DeFi products will enter the mainstream financial markets of various countries just like existing financial tools. But this premise is to ensure the privacy of these financial data, asCoindeskLike recent articles, to replace traditional finance, cryptoassets and the cryptographic protocols behind them must demonstrate that the decentralized infrastructure can support permissionless transactions and provide fungibility for all traditional financial instruments with the help of privacy-preserving protocols. In addition, it can also be seen that the addresses of current cryptocurrency trading institutions such as Sanjian and FTX are being tracked, which will lead institutions to seek DeFi products with stronger privacy. as recentlyForbes reportAs mentioned, the privacy DeFi developed by Manta is not the existing public chain dispute, but the key to the success of Web3 and DeFi, and the biggest opportunity in the next 5-10 years.
