Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our MANTRA DAO AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you.
Introduction!
Mayank – @rquanm Welcome to CryptoNationIN 🥳
Rodrigo – Hello everyone, this is Rodrigo Quan, one of the 5 Council Members at MANTRA DAO. I’m looking forward to this AMA!
Mayank -Before we start, I request you to tell about Mantra Dao project.
Rodrigo – Yes, I’d be happy to do so! For those who are not aware yet, MANTRA DAO is a community-governed DeFi platform focusing on staking, lending, and governance. MANTRA DAO leverages permissionless blockchain technology to create a community-governed, transparent, and decentralized ecosystem for web 3.0. Built on Parity Substrate for the Polkadot ecosystem, MANTRA DAO focuses on staking and lending to give financial control back to the people to save and grow wealth together!
Mayank – Could you please tell about the roadmap for the Q4 of Mantra Dao, what is the next step of the project towards its success?
Rodrigo – Yes, so we recently launched the MANTRA DAO platform last week, closing our Q3 roadmap goals, and are excited to continue expanding on that this Q4. With this initial launch, we rolled out the very first staking pool for the OM erc-20 asset, and in addition we are expecting to roll out several other pools in the coming weeks. Don’t want to spoil the fun, so you’ll have to keep an eye out on our announcements for when these get rolled out. In addition to that, we will be rolling out a delegation rewards program within the MANTRA DAO web app, with the purpose of rewarding OM to those that nominate the MANTRA DAO validators on various PoS blockchains. We will be looking to kick off this program with DOT, but will expand to other blockchains in due course.
In addition to that, we are gearing up for the launch of MANTRA Pool, through which we’ll integrate even further our staking pool operation. The ultimate goal being to integrate the various PoS communities as participants within the MANTRA DAO ecosystem
Mayank – Amazing 🥳
Twitter Questions
Q1. Could you tell us how do holders of the OM token benefit in the ecosystem & what power within the governance model do individuals hold? Why is it so attractive and what are the basic requirements to participate?
Rodrigo – The OM token is at its core meant to be the governance token that will help guide decision making of MANTRA DAO’s various protocols. Through decentralized and liquid governance, the OM token will essentially ensure MANTRA DAO develops into a permissionless suite of DeFi protocols that evolve to fill the needs of the OM token holders and MANTRA DAO community. We are at the early stages of our development, and while currently OM is an erc-20 with no governance capability, we will look to implement a full governance model once we launch in the Polkadot Network. With that in mind, ultimately MANTRA DAO will be governed by the OM tokens holders, and thus the value of the network will rest in their hands.
Q2. Please tell us how your DAO uniquely benefits open finance in today and tomorrow’s economy?
Rodrigo – Up until today, DeFi has mostly been catered to whales with the time and capital to extract most of the value from the protocols. We are building and rolling out products that, on the contrary are catered to serve the broader community and not just a small subset of whales. Part of the way we are delivering on this vision was through a very broad token distribution with investment caps, so that no small group of players could amass all the tokens and retain control from day one. We are following up on this vision with products that are catered to the every day individual, from both a financial to a UI/UX perspective. With this in mind, we believe MANTRA DAO benefits both the traditional financial system as well as the developing DeFi system by providing a permissionless set of financial tools for anyone to access, ensuring that the community can enjoy the same financial benefits that the wealthy have generally enjoyed in the traditional system.
Q3. What is your plan for global expansion? At present, which market does MANTRA DAO focus on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users and partners?
Rodrigo – Up until today, we have naturally gravitated towards India and Southeast Asia, as that is were a large portion of our community has organically emerged. To an extent, we believe this is natural, as those regions exhibit some of the largest growth rates in terms of middle-class population growth and demand for more complex financial products. These are generally tech savvy individuals that have not necessarily had access to the traditional financial world (unbanked), but that are thriving with decentralized finance protocols. With that in mind, we continue to place heavy emphasis on serving those communities, and at the same time continue to grow our reach to other areas by way of cultivating local language telegram communities and participating in AMA’s that have a wide reach across the global crypto landscape. In addition, we leverage all our partners communities to expand the reach of our project, and are always looking to collaborate with these so as to spread awareness of DeFi and the product offering that MANTRA DAO brings.
Q4. How can your project ensure to investors and your community that your project is truly legitimate and can continue to innovate with the times?
Rodrigo – We do this by doing two main things: First of all, we remain actively engaged with all members of our community, via tons of AMA’s that the Council Members are constantly leading, and by way of always being present to answer questions from our community in our official telegram channel. The second way is, we continue to work hard on our technological development, and deliver the products and roadmap that we set ourselves to deliver. We do this while also remaining flexible to both hearing our the opinion of our community, and the direction of the broader DeFi market, to adjust our product rollout so as to cater to both of these ever evolving conditions.
Q5. Can MANTRA DAO tell us about Defi’s current strengths and weaknesses that you think are remarkable? Does MANTRA DAO prepare anything for the upcoming boom in the DEfi market?
Rodrigo – DeFi’s greates strength is that it is permissionless and composable by nature. This means that anyone with an internet connection can access it, both as a user as well as a creater, by way of leveraging DeFi “lego blocks” to build complex financial products. Yet on the other hand, up until today, most of DeFi is happening on Ethereum, were gas fees and blockchain architecture make it so that most of the financial gains and benefits are extracted by the players with the deepest pockets. What we are doing at MANTRA DAO, is building those building blocks in an ecosystem where expensive acceess to protocols and front running can be mitigated. We hope that once solutions such as ours built on scalable ecosystems such as Polkadot emerge, the playing field will be leveled so that the community can thrive as a whole.
Q6. MANTRADAO focus is on Staking, Lending & Governance.Could you tell us some of the steps you are currently taking that will ensure that $OM are still improving and continuing the growth of the project?
Rodrigo – Yes, we are constantly building and designing products and programs that ultimately accrue value to the OM token holder. To begin with, OM will be the core of our various protocol’s governance once these launch in full force on Rio Chain in the Polkadot network. In the meantime, we will be rolling out programs that will benefit the OM token holder directly… I can’t reveal too much at the moment, but the community can expect that there will be incentives for holding and staking OM, other than OM token rewards. In addition, with the launch of MANTRA POOL, we will be introducting a deflationary mechanism by which OM will get burned, becoming more scarce and inherently increasing in value. We are still in the very early days of our journey, and every single member of the team is aligned with the long term success of both our protocols and the OM token, so the community can rest assured that we are here to stay for the long term, to build an ecosystem with value that will accrue to all of those that stick with us across our journey!
Q7. What is the mutual development between MANTRADAO and RioDeFi? Will you share users or business value?
Rodrigo – RioDeFi is a DeFi ecosystem being built around Rio Chain, a Substrate-based blockchain and parachain candidate in the Polkadot network. MANTRA DAO is a suite of DeFi products and protocols being built on Rio Chain, and that will interact with the broader polkadot network and the cross-chain universe of blockchains. Users of MANTRA DAO will naturally be users of Rio Chain, as our protocol will sit in that blockchain, and we plan to roll out extensive collaboration programs alongside with them for the flourishing and development of both ecosystems!
Q8. You expect the OM token to have an annualized reward of 88.88%. By what mechanism do you expect to achieve this? Can this percentage be adjusted by you?
Rodrigo – Up until this point, users have been able to get access to 88.88% annualized rewards from centralized exchange programs on BitMax and Bithumb Global. In addition, just last week we have rolled out our first platform product offering, which is an on-chain OM staking pool, which also delivers 88.88% annualized rewards to stakers. All of these staking programs are being funded through the Staking Rewards bucket from our token emission schedule, and are expected to continue to be funded from there for the foreseeable future. That being said, 88.88% annualized return is a short term offering, and the community can expect this number to decrease slowly as our product offering continues to grow and rewards get allocated across a broader product offering.
Q9. Can you explain more about Mantra Pool? How does it works? What are the basic qualifications and requirements to participate in the pool? What are the pros and cons?
Rodrigo – The basic rational for MANTRA POOL is to provide for an avenue for OM burning, while still rewarding OM holders that decide to participate in such burning. This is a product that will be rolled out this Q4 2020, so please expect further details in the short term. But essentially, OM token holders will be able to offer up their OM tokens in weekly burns, in exchange for a chance to win a weekly pool that will be funded directly from the earnings of our validator operations. This to an extent is a gamification of a burning mechanism that will further entrench our validator operations across our OM token holder community.
Q10. As far as I know, you have organized many AMAs before with lots of rewards for the community. Through AMA, what do you get from the community?
Rodrigo – Yes, AMAs is one of the key ways in which we expand our reach and maintain direct communications live with our community. We are not shy to reward our AMA participants as it is one of the primary engines that helps us grow and maintain a thriving community.
Q11. Please tell us more about MANTRADAO Staking.
Rodrigo -Staking at MANTRA comes in several flavors. We just rolled out our initial staking pool last week, which is a simple single asset staking pool: that is, users lock up their OM for a certain period of time and earn rewards for doing so. In time, we will begin rolling out other staking pools and products, and eventually plan to integrate PoS delegation, which in of itself will be yet another flavor of “MANTRA DAO Staking”. You can read more about this roadmap in the following blog post: https://medium.com/mantra-dao/mantra-dao-staking-platform-goes-live-6800b753a82d?source=collection_home—4——1———————–
Q12. You recently mentioned that your community is growing insanely every day. What do you think are the reasons for this rapid growth?
Rodrigo – We place emphasis in maintaining our grassroots movement by always staying involved and active in our official telegram channel, as well as through active participation on AMA’s such as this one. In addition to that, we maintain active telegram communities across a wide range of languages, to ensure anyone with an interest in our project can get the questions they need answered in one place. We believe that our deep community involvement has been one of the key engines in this rapid growth that we continue to experience.
Q13. Regarding staking on Mantra DAO, is there a minimum amount required? Is the token required to be locked for a while? What are the steps we have to follow to do staking?
Rodrigo – For the current OM staking pool, the minimum staking amount required is 1 OM. There is no minimum amount of time that the token needs to be locked for, however there is an 8 day unstaking period that users have to go through in order to regain full liquidity of their staked assets. You can learn more about our staking pool’s requirements and rules in this post: https://medium.com/mantra-dao/mantra-dao-staking-platform-goes-live-6800b753a82d?source=collection_home—4——1———————–
Q14. Please, could you please give a clearer insight on the supposed fud that $OM has no code?
Rodrigo – First of all, this argument is clearly broken by the fact that we have already launched a first iteration of the MANTRA DAO platform, and our very first staking pool. I can assure you, there’s a hefty amount of developer hours and lines of code backing up that product release! There’s plenty more product roll-outs coming out over the following weeks, as well as a greater over-arching mainnet launch expected once Rio Chain becomes live, which will continue to disprove any doubt that “$OM has no code”.
Q15. What is the most ambitious goal of the project? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any upcoming updates? What should the community look for?
Rodrigo – I would say the most ambitious aspect of the project is the Karma protocol, as it is one of the key aspects that bridges the gap between Deentralized Finance and centralized product offering. One of the biggest challenges with DeFi is that, since everything on-chain is anonymous, it is hard to keep users accountable when they have no value at stake. The Karma protocol aims to bridge that gap by introducing a reputation system into the MANTRA DAO ecosystem. I don’t have a full update to share with you currently, but I can share that it is a work in progress and we hope to bring an early iteration of it live as early as this year (tho I am not making any promises here)
Telegram Questions
Q16. Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
Rodrigo – Great question. In short, yes, we will be implementing a token burn mechanism through MANTRA Pool… OM token holders will be incentivezed to burn their OM tokens in exchange for getting a chance to win a weekly pool of our validator rewards. As the validator operations develop and become more profitable, the rewards pool will grow and the incentinve to burn OM will grow with it. In addition to this we are researching and experimenting with a few other burning mechanisms, and will roll these out should we find any of these can become a good fit with our ecosystem.
Q17. Most DeFis are built on Ethereum, what advantages does RioChain offer for MantraDAO to run on this plataform?
Rodrigo – RioChain is a substrate based blockchain that leverages the network security of the Polkadot blockchain. It is designed from the grown up for much greater transaction throughput and lower transaction cost, without compromising on network security. Most DeFi built on Ethereum struggle with transction fees, to the point that only whales with deep pockets find economic sense in participating in the ecosystem. We aim to fix these problems by building on RioChain.
Q18. At the moment , where you are focusing right now ? building and developing product or getting customers and users, or partnerships ? Could you share it?
Rodrigo – The truth is, we are focusing on all of it! We just released our very first product last week, just 1 month and a half since our token launch, and we will continue to release products fairly frequently for the foreseeable future. In addition, we are in no way slowing down on our community outreach, user acquisiton and partnership development: we continue to hold countless AMA’s, remain actively engaged on telegram, and continue to develop partnerships and launch close collaborations with all the major players in the DeFi space.
Q19. Tell us about your plans for 2021, what are you currently working on, and are you going to expand the list of big exchanges?
Rodrigo – While 2020 is the year of Ethereum DeFi, we expect 2021 to be the year of PolkaDeFi! We expect our full suite of product offerings and protocols to come live on the Polkadot network throughout 2021, including a MANTRA DAO stablecoin, lending and borrowing native protocols, and a governance module that will allow all of these tow evolve in tandem with our community’s needs and guidance.
Q20. Since your barter system in your wallet is based on Erc-20, is it limited to only supporting Erc-20 tokens? Do you plan to include other tokens or other blockchain-based coins?
Rodrigo – You are right that currently the OM token is an erc-20 token, and our first product roll out was targeted towards this erc-20 asset. That being said, we expect to roll out integration to several other blockchains and their respective wallets in the very near term, as we continue our journey to bring every asset into a single interface. In addition, we will leverage the RioChain’s generic asset gateway to bridge value from across all blockchains into our ecosystem, so that our barter system will eventually support assets from all across the blockchain space.
Thank you everyone for your attention today! I’m glad I was able to answer some very good questions from these community! For any further questions you might have, please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of our Community Managers or Council Members directly on our official telegram channel: https://t.me/MANTRADAO.
Thank you to Rodrigo Quan, and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day
