Manta Network April 2021 Update

Manta Network
5 min readMay 11, 2021

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Manta Network has been very focused on product this past month. With our testnet making tremendous progress, we have also started ramping up our community activities. Take a look at what we accomplished this past month.

Product Updates

We have been hard at work on our product. In March, we had announced that our prototype was ready. At that time, people could instantiate a private version of our chain using our GitHub repo folders. Using that private chain, they could mint a private token from a public token, transact that private token, and redeem the original public token from the private token.

This month, we have taken it a step further by moving to push it onto testnet. We have recently completed that task and have an internal testnet available. Our final task will be to implement our UI/frontend this month, before we push it out to a public testnet for our community. We’re excited to have you all try it out!

Activities

Manta Network interview with Altcoin Buzz’s Layah Heilpern. Watch the interview here.

This month has also been filled with lots of activities. With our product progressing as planned, our team has also started to more actively involve ourselves in the community.

  • April 5, Manta Network COO Kenny Li answered questions in an AMA session hosted by Polkawarriors.
  • April 6, Manta Network CSO Victor Ji joined an AMA hosted by MXC with Yuzhu Liu at Acala and Lurpis at Bifrost to share about Kusama Parachain auction (Chinese).
  • April 7, Manta Network COO Kenny Li joined Layah Heilpern to talk about Manta Network’s privacy protocol hosted by Altcoin Buzz. Watch the full interview here.
  • April 8, Manta Network CSO Victor Ji joined an AMA hosted by Cointelegraph China with Yuzhu Liu at Acala, Imran Ashfaq at Polkalokr, Jacob at Apron, Richard Parris at Saito and Steve Ngok at DoraFactory to discuss the development of Polkadot ecosystem (Chinese Livestream).
  • April 10, Manta Network COO Kenny Li joined Blockchain Brad to discuss Manta Network and the future of on-chain privacy. Watch the full interview here.
  • April 14, Manta Network CSO Victor Ji joined an AMA hosted by Tuoluocaijing.cn to discuss the Polkadot ecosystem and Parachain Auction (Chinese).
  • April 19, Manta as one of the founding members initiated the first Privacy Computing Alliance (PCIC) with Findora, Oasis, Certik, Phala, Cabin VC and Candaq to empower the privacy computing ecosystem development (Chinese).
  • April 28, Manta Network CSO Victor Ji joined Blockchain Ecosystem Industrial Cloud Summit hosted Odaily as a panelist with Yuzhu at Acala, Derek at Moonbeam, Eric Ma at Deeper and Erer at TrustBase to discuss the Web3.0 Ecosystem (Chinese).
  • April 28, Manta Network COO Kenny Li answered questions during an AMA session hosted by CryptoDiffer.
  • April 29, Manta Network CEO Shumo Chu spoke at Privacy on Polkadot’s first inaugural event hosted by Zero Knowledge Validator. He was joined by Marvin Tong of Phala Network, Lipeng Yue of Patract, Deli Gong of Automata Network, and others.
  • May 4, the Manta Network team joined Polkahaus on Clubhouse to talk about Manta Network’s privacy in a chatroom titled Privatize All the Tokens.
  • May 6, the Manta Network team joined the Moonbeam team on Clubhouse to host the Boston Blockchain Week afterparty with Polkahaus.

The Ambassador Program

Santiago, General Partner at ParaFi Capital, as a Mantalorian

We launched our Ambassador Program, which was successfully broadcast through the Twitter community thanks to cooperation from many of our investors. Throughout the week, we posted several tweets about the current Mantalorian Family, which included some of our key investors. To see the full list of Mantalorians that we posted about, you can visit the Twitter hashtag #MeettheMantalorians.

We have received over 1,300 applications to the Ambassador Program so far, and we are going through each of the applications thoroughly to find the best fit for the program. Applications will be decided on a rolling basis, although the first week of applications has collected so much interest that it may take a while for the team to finalize its first decisions. Stay tuned, and we thank you for your patience as we work through all of this!

Partnerships and Team

We announced our partnership with ChainX to work on building a private wrapped BTC. ChainX is committed to Layer 2 expansion and asset gateway research of Bitcoin, well-positioned to provide high-performance transaction trusteeship and interoperability among chains in asset transfer.

Our team continues to expand, and we are excited to see that happening at a rapid pace while committing to our standards for hiring bright, passionate, and motivated individuals who care about the future of on-chain privacy. At our current rate, we anticipate the team to grow to approximately 12 to 15 people by mid June 2021. If you are interested in applying for a full-time role, please send us your resume to jobs@manta.network. In the body of your email, please also write what sort of position you are applying for, what skills you bring to the table, and why you are passionate about Manta Network and on-chain privacy!

About Manta Network

Manta Network is the plug-and-play privacy-preservation protocol built to service the entire DeFi stack. Built on Substrate to leverage interoperability and zkSNARKs to leverage scalable privacy, Manta Network offers a suite of products and services that enable privacy for blockchain projects. As part of its own suite of products, Manta Network offers private payment and a private decentralized exchange, MantaSwap. Manta’s founding team comprises many US cryptocurrency veterans, professors, and scholars whose experience includes Harvard, MIT, and Algorand. Manta has previously closed a $1.1m seed round led by Polychain.

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