Manta Network March 2021 Update
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The Manta Network team has been busy this past month, and we got a lot of great updates for the community! We’re on track for launching our testnet, and the progress has really ramped up thanks to our amazing technical team.
Product Updates
On March 29, we announced our completion of our first Web3 Foundation Open Grants milestone. Our team worked very hard to get the prototype of MantaPay up and running for this milestone. The feedback from the Web3 reviewers was very positive:
“[The Manta Network] team put a ton of effort in response to initial feedback. Clean code, well documented and good performance. All aspects of the delivery were improved, including overall code standards, functionality (hiding amounts in private transfers) and documentation… Testing was also expanded.” You can review our submission and read the feedback here.
As part of its milestone, we also has created the first prototype of MantaPay, the bring-your-own-token (BYOT) private transaction service. A video walkthrough demonstrating the setup and running of the application can be found on YouTube. The repository to download and run your private instance can be found here.
How MantaPay Works
As a simple example, imagine Bob has 10 DOT. He simply uses his 10 DOT to mint 10 Private DOT (pDOT), which resides on the Manta Network. Through MantaPay, Bob can then transfer that 10 pDOT, which retains the value of 10 DOT, to Alice. That transaction is conducted privately, so no outside parties are able to view it.
Berkeley Accelerator Program
Manta Network was also selected into the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator Program as part of the 2021 cohort. We’re very proud of this; over 200 projects applied to join, and we were part of the handful (21 total) that were selected. As part of this program, we have a great opportunity to meet other amazing projects and spark new ideas on collaborations and development for our privacy protocol.
Community Activities
Our community has been waiting for us to launch our testnet, and we appreciate everyone’s patience. To bring more interactivity to this waiting period, we launched a few fun activities this month. The first was our Manta Network Community Livestream. We did this because our community wanted to learn more about the core team behind the project. People also wanted to hear about updates to our roadmap, and get some of their questions answered. We took that opportunity to launch the livestream, which you can replay here.
The Meme Contest
Another fun activity we launched was the Manta Meme Contest. We wanted to give the community a fun event, which could bring some good laughs along with helping us spread the value proposition about Manta Network’s privacy protocol. We received hundreds of submissions, which you can look through on Twitter. At the end of the contest, we announced three winners. You can learn more about our contest here.
Aprils Fools Gag
For April Fool’s Day, we pulled a fun gag about bringing privacy to different planets in our solar system. Some people in the community took it literally, which indicates that our prank executed successfully! On a related note, we are also very honored that the members of the community believe that we could truly pull something like this off. You can read the full prank announcement here.
Team Growth
We’re so excited to see the growth of our development team. Anyone who’s worked in a startup knows that there’s never enough hands for the tasks that need to go around. To build our privacy protocol, and to build it quickly and securely, means that we need a dedicated and talented team to be actively involved. We have expanded our team to seven people, with additional offer letters and more onboarding happening each month. If you or a developer you know is interested in privacy, DeFi, and the Polkadot ecosystem, please send them our way for a life-changing career opportunity. Read about our job openings here.
Partnerships
We’ve made three partnership announcements this month: Polkaswitch, Clover Finance, and Dora Factory. While the Polkadot ecosystem is relatively new, the number of amazing projects building in this space is increasing. We’re excited to meet these projects, and find collaboration opportunities with them.
Thank you for an amazing March and end to the first quarter of 2021. Our investors, advisors, community, and partners have been very helpful in guiding us, motivating us, and giving us some great laughs along the way. We’re excited to enter into Q2, which will bring along with it the deployment of our testnet. Stay tuned for more updates!
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 include Harvard, MIT, and Algorand. Manta has previously closed a $1.1m seed round led by Polychain.
