George Zelov

What is Mango Markets (MNGO)?

Mango intends to merge the liquidity and usability of CeFi with the permissionless innovation of DeFi at a lower cost to the end user than both currently provide. Towards this goal, Mango offers margin trading, lending, and perpetual futures along with decentralized governance to decide the future evolution. In the long run, Mango’s permissionless ecosystem encourages spectacular, outlandish and unpredictable innovations possible of overtaking centralized finance. With lightning-speed trade execution and near-zero fees, Mango harnesses the power of Solana, a high-performance blockchain, as well as Serum DEX, a decentralized, permissionless, central limit order book for margin trading. The Mango Token is a governance token, first and foremost. Collectively, the token holders have the power to upgrade the protocol as they see fit, only constrained by the checks-and-balances of the DAO. This allows token holders to create incentives to reward participation and drive usage of the protocol.

Who Are the Founders of Mango?

Mango’s genesis began when Daffy Durairaj posted a video of a command line margin trading mechanism on Solana. Maximilian Schneider discovered the video, connected with Daffy on Discord and the two continued development and founded Mango Markets.

What Makes Mango Unique?

The key ingredients for this vision are low latency, low transaction cost and full decentralization. We believe all three ingredients are necessary for the project to be viable and all three ingredients are finally available on Solana. Ultimately, Mango intends to win the long game in financial services. Low latency makes our tools usable. Rock bottom fees makes Mango hard to compete against. Decentralization makes Mango hard to kill through centralized incompetence or malevolence. Open governance that allocates power and wealth liberally to builders, will attract the best people to build and govern the protocol. Finally, the permissionless nature will allow the millions of tiny experiments to take place that yield the life changing innovations. We're motivated and driven to build Mango according to this vision, and we hope you'll join us.

What Is JOE (JOE)?

The exchange has been growing rapidly, attracting over $4 billion in total value locked (TVL) since it was launched in June 2021. Trader Joe claims to take a community-first approach, and to prioritize innovation, speed and safety. It aims to provide a one-stop-shop DeFi experience and to integrate new products without compromising on security. To achieve this, Trader Joe has outlined an ambitious roadmap that focuses on token-holder growth. It plans to have improved staking, non-fungible-token (NFT) exchange listings, the collateralization of the JOE token, and leveraged trading –– all during 2021.

Who Are the Founders of JOE?

Trader Joe was founded by Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, two pseudonymous developers. Cryptofish is self-described as a full-stack and smart contract engineer, who was an early contributor to several Avalanche projects, such as Snowball and Sherpa Cash. S/he worked at Google and holds a Master's in Computer Science from a U.S. university. 0xMurloc is a full-stack developer with experience starting several startups. S/he was also a Senior Product Lead at Grab. The team is complemented by over a dozen other pseudonymous users working on software, marketing and community.

What Makes JOE Unique?

Trader Joe provides all the functionality of a modern DEX and offers a convenient user interface, combined with speedy and cheap transactions. Users can provide liquidity by participating in one of its yield farms and earn JOE (JOE) as a reward token, which can later be staked and used to vote in governance proposals. Its lending protocol Banker Joe, based on the Compound (COMP) protocol, allows users to borrow and lend funds in a non-custodial manner. Moreover, users can also open leveraged positions on their provided or borrowed funds.

To increase the utility and adoption of the JOE token, Trader Joe is working on introducing several new options, which are aimed at transforming the project into the main DeFi platform within the Avalanche ecosystem. First of all, users will be able to use JOE as collateral to borrow against. Moreover, Trader Joe also plans to facilitate limit orders, options and futures trading on its platform. Thanks to the speed of its innovation and strong comic book-like branding, Trader Joe has attracted strong backers from within the DeFi community, including from AAVE (AAVE) founder Stani Kulechov and Darren Lau.

How Many JOE (JOE) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of JOE (JOE) is 500 million. The token was launched without a pre-sale, private sale, or pre-listing allocations. The distribution of JOE is as follows:

50% – liquidity providers

20% – treasury

20% – team (three-month cliff)

10% – future investors (three-month cliff)

JOE is being emitted over a 30-month period and JOE stakers earn 0.05% of all trades. JOE also pays a share of fees from lending interest and liquidations into the staking pool. The emission rates of JOE steadily decrease over time and will come to an end at the beginning of January 2024.

How Is the JOE Network Secured?

Trader Joe is built upon Avalanche (AVAX), a blockchain with its own proprietary consensus mechanism, in which all nodes process and validate transactions by employing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocol.

The treasury is currently entrusted to its developers Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, although the Trader Joe community plans to establish a multi-signature governance mechanism in future. For now, token holders can vote on the development of the protocol via Snapshot.