Manta January Rollup
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the Manta Monthly Rollup. We use this space to recap our biggest highlights of the month.
Let’s dive right into it!
🖥️ Launches/Product
Trusted Setup Conclusion
This past month we officially concluded our Trusted Setup. We had over 4,300 contributions across 177 countries, marking a new world record for the largest trusted setup in history. The Trusted Setup ran for 28 total days, and the diversity of participants around the world indicates a strong interest in the future of ZK and on-chain privacy.
Gavin Wood also had something to say about it:
“The widespread adoption of a self-sovereign web3 relies in large part on the innovation of trustless privacy-preserving mechanisms such as zero-knowledge proofs. I’m thrilled to see the forefront of that innovation happening in the Polkadot ecosystem,” stated Dr. Gavin Wood, Chief Architect at Parity Tech. “Manta Network’s recent record-breaking trusted setup and the upcoming launch of MantaPay showcase the tremendous innovation in this field.”
Read more about it in our blog post or this article by Cointelegraph. As a token of our appreciation, we have sent NFTs to Trusted Setup contributors who also provided their Calamari Network wallet addresses.
Testnet Update
Testnet v3 launched recently with new features to introduce asset bridging across XCM. By using XCM bridging, users are able to bring other assets in from different Substrate ecosystems. Initial support is for Kusama, Karura, and Moonriver. You can still join the incentivized testnet campaign here. As part of the incentivized testnet, we are collecting feedback from the community, and have been using the feedback to iterate and improve the workflow and user experience for MantaPay.
Collator Update: Minimum Bounty Increase
As was planned since the launch of DPoS on Calamari Network, we are updating the requirements to become a collator. Each collator must have at least 4 million KMA for the collator bond. Other requirements include hardware minimums and internet access (you can see all of what you need to become a collator here).
Regarding on-chain staking metrics, Calamari Network currently holds the record for the highest ratio of staked assets to circulating supply. Out of the 2.9 billion circulating supply, 1 billion is staked on-chain across collators. That’s approximately 34% of the entire circulating supply.
🧑🏫 Educational
We put in a lot of work this month to educate our users on ZK. if you want to catch up on how ZK tech works, how it applies to Manta, and why the crypto space is so excited about the tech this year, have a read through these:
#WhyZK threads 1–4
These threads provide an overview of the definition of ZK, including examples and real applications.
zkEVM
When ETH was first created, privacy wasn’t considered as much. zkEVMs are the answer to bringing that layer of privacy to the ETH ecosystem. Read about EVM and zkEVMs in this megathread.
Binance Academy: zkEdition
Kenny Li made a contribution piece to the Binance Academy that goes over the basics of ZK. Read through this piece and you’ll have a great understanding of zk in no time.
A thread on Polkadot and zk Wallets
Lastly, we made a thread that goes over the various wallets needed to access the ZK ecosystem within Polkadot.
💃 Events
Twitter space with Calamari
We hosted a Twitter space with one of Calamari’s collators, p2p. Learn about their journey and why they chose to collate on Calamari in this thread via space recording:
OpenZL Conference
In late December, we hosted the first OpenZL Conference. OpenZL is an initiative that started with core contributors at Manta Network to make it easier for devs who aren’t cryptography experts to build zero-knowledge proofs into their applications. We’re making it easier for everyone to use ZK.
For the conference itself, we invited a total of 11 ZK experts on the research side. Over 800 participants joined the conference.
Polkadot Community Call
We also gave a few updates on the Polkadot community call, listen in to hear what we had to say.
We’re looking forward to ETHDenver with several events we will be hosting, speaking, and creating another ZK Hacker house. Our ZK Hacker House was a success in Bogota during Devcon. We intend to bring that same success to ETH Denver, offering an environment where hackers can build and collaborate on ZK products! More details to follow.
