Dan Filatov

With decades of experience from Jane StreetJane Street, OptiverOptiver, SusquehannaSusquehanna, FacebookMeta, and GoogleGoogle, Alameda Research built sophisticated trading systems in the crypto world and quote extremely tight OTC spreads.

In 2021, $155 million worth of WBNBWBNB was put into Alameda Research, putting the value of the company at $10.4 Billion in cryptocurrency. The company's highest investment at the time was $3.17 billion in the AKRO cryptocurrency. The company also invested $4 million in Coin98 FinanceCoin98 Finance, a particular DeFi ecosystem from Southeast Asia. Alameda Research holds about 40 different cryptocurrencies and some of them as well as the company's total investment include:

Manta Network is focused on building a better Web 3.0Web 3.0 with privacy guarantees designed from the first principle: applying cutting-edge cryptographic constructions such as zkSNARKszkSNARKs to deliver end-to-end privacy guarantees for blockchain applications. The project delivers this guarantee while prioritizing interoperability, ease-of-use, high performance and auditability. What this translates into for the user is on-chain privacy in transacting and swapping any parachain assets. This means that users are able to privatize parachain assets like DOTDOT into private DOT, and privately swap for other parachain assets or privately send to other wallet addresses.

The Manta token ($MANTA) is a utility token that rewards the token holders with a redeem mechanism on the Manta PayMantaPay and Manta SwapMantaSwap usage fees. Beside facilitating the consensus mechanism that underpins Manta ParachainParachain Chain by staking, $MANTA has a burn functionburn function. Moreover, $MANTA also has a governance function and extended function.

The problem we see today is that blockchain lacks privacy, interoperability, and usability, which leads to many other problems. That's why we are building the Manta NetworkManta Network, a private protocol for the DeFiDeFi stack, with decentralized exchange that preserves privacy, as our first use case. We are building it as a Tier 1 solution, which means that privacy will exist in the underlying architecture, not as a feature on top of another blockchain. By using SubstrateSubstrate, we can take advantage of the functional ecosystem that PolkadotPolkadot offers.

"We believe that one of the biggest problems that needs to be solved exists in decentralized exchangesdecentralized exchanges," said Shumo Chu, CEO and co-founder of Manta Network, in an email.

"Volume on decentralized exchanges is high and growing, but DEXsDEXs are also a hotbed of advanced opportunities because of the transparent nature of blockchain. Someone can see your transaction before it's recorded and validated, and make the same transaction with a higher fee to get priority and pass that transaction before you do."

Privacy in DeFi

The Manta Network.

The Manta Network aims ???? to strengthen privacy in DeFi, partly by obfuscating wallet addresses, but with the overall goal of allowing users to make transactions and share privacy. Parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem , Manta Network's first major project is a privacy-preserving automated market maker (AMMAMM) DEXDEX called MantaSwapMantaSwap.

The Manta Network is working on implementing ZkSNARKZkSNARK at the blockchain level. ZkSNARKZkSNARK is a cryptographic method that allows two objects to verify information with each other without having to share the underlying data associated with it.

Using Manta ZkSNARKSZkSNARKS can ensure the privacy of your transactions and identity.

Funding and the future

The Manta Network, which was previously the winner of a Web 3.0 FoundationWeb 3.0 Foundation grant, closed a $1.1 million funding round led by Polychain Capital to create MantaSwap.

$KMA is the first community-driven deflationary utility token where rebate rewards, redemption rewards, and token burns are generated from the Calamari privacy-preserving network usage. The Initial Distribution of KMA is up to 10 billion tokens. There will be no new token generation unless KMAs for the crowdloancrowdloan are consumed.

The Calamari token ($KMA) is a utility token that rewards token holders with a rebate and redeem mechanism on MariPay and MariSwap usage fees. $KMA has a burn functionburn function for redemption. Moreover, $KMA also has governance and other extended functions.

There is no team allocation; furthermore, there are no private roundsprivate rounds or private investors. The token’s distribution will be a fair launchfair launch and favorable to early participants.

Calamari, Manta Network’s canary-net (the canary-net is an early, highly experimental version of Manta Network, where all new features will be released and tested first), is the plug-and-play privacy-preservation parachain built to service the Kusama DeFi world. It combines Kusama and zk-SNARK to bring on-chain privacy to transactions and swaps. As part of its own suite of products, Calamari Network offers:

MariPay, its token-agnostic private payment service. MariPay supports the private transfer of Kusama and its Parachain assets, including major crypto assets supported on Kusama. Users can transact popular assets like stablecoins and wrapped BTC while simultaneously reaping the benefits of on-chain privacy through ZKP.

MariSwap, its private AMM-based DEX. MariSwap offers users the capability of swaps between parachain assets while preserving the privacy of the user addresses. It also provides never-before-seen features in the industry such as private liquidity pools.

Calamari will be the only platform on Kusama that can meet user on-chain privacy needs, boost anti-surveillance, and ensure private tokens’ decentralization and interoperability.

Calamari Network is the plug-and-play privacy-preservation protocol built to service the entire DeFi stack on Kusama (and Manta Network on Polkadot).

Built on Substrate to leverage interoperability and zkSNARKs to leverage scalable privacy, Calamari Network offers a suite of products and services that enable privacy for blockchain projects. As part of its own suite of products, Calamari 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.

ZK-SNARKzk-SNARK stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge.

ZK-SNARKzk-SNARK is the technology behind Zcash and Manta. It is a new form of “zero-knowledge cryptography” that makes all the transactions in Zcash fully encrypted on the blockchain and to ensure that the confidentiality of transaction metadata is fully preserved. It allows Zcash users to prove possession of certain information like having a secret keysecret key, without the need to reveal that information, and without any interaction between the prover and verifier.