Thank you to the NanoNews Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Mantra DAO on July 28, 2020. This guest star JP Mullin, Co-Founder & Council Member at Mantra DAO. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 36th AMA recap!
We are glad to meet here
JP Mullin, Co-Founder & Council Member at Mantra DAO
For taking your time out from busy schedule for the AMA!
Introduction Session
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Mantra DAO?
Sure thing, happy to share a bit more about myself and the project. I’m originally from the US, but spent nearly the last 10+ years abroad having done my undergraduate studies in Spain, my first masters in Germany, and my second in Shanghai.
After that I worked in traditional finance doing research on FinTech and blockchain for one of largest Chinese investment banks, Guotai Junan Securities. I joined the crypto space fulltime in 2017, but was active since 2015 and bought my first bitcoin (unforutunately just a few) in 2013.
I moved to Hong Kong in 2018 and helped set up a crypto exchange and advisory firm, before launching the HK offices of a US licensed brokerage business that has the only SEC license for distributing digital securities. After that I joined the Rio DeFi team as an advisor, and most recently have been focused on building and launching MANTRA DAO. A DeFi DAO focused on Staking, Lending, and Governance. 🙂
So i’ve traveled all over the world, and been very active in both traditional and crypto/decentralized finance for a while!
Have certainly seen my ups and downs in the crypto space, but I loved (almost) every minute of it!
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Mantra DAO? and what makes Mantra DAO different from other competitors?
Sure – MANTRA DAO is a fully integrated ecosystem of decentralized financial services built on interoperable technologies and controlled by its users collectively. Its governance mechanism is predicated upon a digital token called OM that allows its holders to participate in decisions affecting the parameters of the system. OM token is distributed as a reward for contributions made to the platform and provides access to a variety of economic incentives. In addition to OM token, MANTRA DAO supports the Karma Protocol, a reputation mechanism that assesses participants’ behavior within the system and keeps track of OM holders’ performance metrics.
The MANTRA DAO platform is composed of the following features:
- A savings and lending platform whereby depositors can earn interests on their pooled digital assets.
- A governance token called OM which confers its holders’ voting power over certain economic parameters such as interest rate, inflation and deflation levels.
- A reputation protocol called KARMA which A) weighs the voting power of OM token holders proportionally to certain measurable metrics. increases the chances of OM token holders benefiting from various financial incentive schemes.
MANTRA is a mix of many DeFi products – Staking, Lending, and DAO governance
haha well we aren’t necessarily comparing ourselves to Binance hah
but they do offer staking-as-a-service, like many exchanges do, ours however has an enhanced interest model, and is truly transparent and open with our on-chain non-custodial staking, additionally MANTRA DAO has cross-chain multi-asset support.
Q4: What technology stands behind and What are its advantages?
We have built MANTRA DAO on Rio Chain, which is built by one of our partners, Rio DeFi
Rio Chain is a substrate-based chain focused on DeFi Dapps for the Polkadot ecosystem
Rio Chain will seek to become a parachain for Polkadot when the Web 3 Foundations opens the parachain auction later this year as expected
Q5: What are the major milestones Mantra DAO achieved so far & what are in future pipeline?
I’m glad you asked – let me show our roadmap first so you can see
and then I can touch on our most recent achievements
we recently partnered with a Hong Kong licensed trust company and custodian, Hex Trust, to be the custodian for our assets during our IMO token generation event, which will offer an enhanced level of security and trust to our community that their assets will be safe and secure
We also recently secured investment from LD Capital, a multi-strategy blockchain and FinTech VC and are expecting to announce several more institutional investors in the near future
And finally, we are proud to say that our Pre-Intitial Membership Offering (Pre-IMO) is more than 12x oversubcribed, and interest in our project is growing by the day!
We can barely keep up with the amount of inbound interest! A REALLY good problem to have
Q6: what is your opinion about DeFi? and do you think this DeFi user will always go up every time?
if you head over to our TG channel – https://t.me/MANTRADAO tonight we will be announcing our first exchange listing!
So.. I think DeFI is obviously the hottest topic now in the crypto space, and it’s great to see all the interest it’s generating. Obviously this will lead to speculation, and we see some similarities with what happened in 2017 and 2018 happening again..
That being said, I do feel it’s different
the substance and teams behind the projects has increased exponentially.. the technical standards have been raised, and there are a lot fo really solid, value-adding projects being built now
I think for DeFi to truly grow it needs to have more outside capital flow into the space.. and that means we need to have fiat money enter DeFi
DeFi needs to be accessible to the masses to truly grow, and we need easy to use interfaces with simple fiat on/off ramps
Twitter Session
Q1: MANTRA DAO focuses on deposits and loans to give financial control to people to develop wealth together … I want to know what kind of currency deposits and deposits? What do you guys do to make sure you don’t lose money when you lend it to people?
Our staking will be non-custodial, so users won’t even need to deposit their assets with us if they wish to stake on our platform. All they need to do is delegate / nomiate our nodes and take part in our staking services to earn staking rewards in your native token and in OM. If you want to make a liquid version of your staked assets however, you will have to “bond” your assets with us.
Security is of the utmost importance to us, as we need to make sure we take care of our clients and the DAO’s assets
We will make sure to follow rigurous cybersecurity and penetration testing and try and minimize this risk as much as possible
We actually won’t be touching or custodying a lot of the clients assets, as DPoS chains allow for delegated or nominated staking
so as they say “not your keys, not your coins” we firmly believe this
Q2: I really like earning money saving tokens, how does your savings system work and what percentage of interest do they offer for users like me?
Then you will really like MANTRA DAO, as our OM token offers an enhanced interest model that can possibly double your native staking assets rewards!
Depending on the KARMA level of the user ( I will epxlain KARMA in just a second) they can get the interest in the native token as well as the OM token
KARMA Protocol is a reputation mechanism that aims at rewarding members for their contributions to the MANTRA DAO ecosystem. MANTRA DAO’s overarching goal of bringing peace-of-mind to peoples’ control of their financial future cannot happen without the support and participation of its members. The more members participate, the more decentralized and autonomous MANTRA DAO becomes. KARMA Protocol is a reputation system that plays a crucial part in the MANTRA DAO ecosystem by rewarding and incentivizing its members for performing positive actions within the organization.
Members who carry out different actions within MANTRA DAO are rewarded in KARMA. The more KARMA a member has, the more benefits that member will receive within the ecosystem. There are 10 tiers within the KARMA Protocol that unlock different incentivization offerings that ultimately allow our members additional opportunities to increase their OM holdings, decrease fees, earn rewards, and more. Besides the amount of KARMA each user earns, users must also hit specific requirements of staked OM in order to receive all of the rewards in that specific tier.
Users gain KARMA by supporting the ecosystem through:
- Staking OM tokens
- Taking out & paying back loans
- Submitting & voting on proposals
- Joining the MANTRA POOL savings game
- Referring friends to grow the community
- Receiving grants
Users with higher karma gain access to various benefits, such as:
- Increased OM staking rewards
- Decreased staking fees
- Free access to MANTRA POOL
- Lower loan interest rates
- Loyalty Rewards, such as SWAG and community recognition
Q3: MANTRA DAO has become part of the Polkadot Ecosystem. Do you want to tell us how important Polkadot is to MANTRA DAO and how to make this ecosystem meaningful in your network operation?
Well first and foremost I’m very proud to be a Polkadot ambassador, and I’m also happy to say within the next few weeks DOT will be transferable. I can’t wait for this
Polkadot’s imminent launch is great for us.. our timing couldn’t be better!
The hottest chain launch, and DeFi being so hot! But.. that’s not the only thing that matters
MANTRA DAO is built on a separate chain, called Rio Chain, which is a substrate-based chain, that doesn’t rely on Polkadot blockchain for anything (technical wise). We are a believer in Polkadot and Kusama, and are excited to become one of the fasting growing projects in their ecosystem, but we will also be integrating many other blockchain protocols.
Rio Chain allows for cross-chain interoperability through a generic asset bridge we’ve been developing, and will give us the functionality to integrate any public chain we deem necessary. This is a key feature of both our staking and lending is the muti-asset staking and multi-asset collateral.
Q4: What is the transparency mechanism to validate the points obtained by a user in Karma? Will there be any kind of audit in this sense, because the higher the Karma, the more chances the user can have in the Mantra Pool?
Yes, that’s a great point to bring up, and something we will be tracking very closely. We will have an integrated KARMA leaderboard on our platform, which will share all of this data and ideally will be updated as close to real time as possible!
Very good question! I liked that one particularly
Q5: Community support is by far one of the biggest factors for the success of a project. What has the team #MANTRA DAO has planned on increasing the user experience? And how we as community can help #MANTRA DAO project?
Another good one – so as I mentioned previously, UI/UX is super super important for us to bring about more mass adoption of DeFi. We have been studying and testing other DeFi products and found what we like/don’t like and are listing to our community to hear their greatest needs in a DeFi product
One way that the community can help, is to take part in our governance, be active in the community, and share with us your feedback on how to improve our platform and products!
Live AMA
Q1: Do you consider Compound and KAVA to be your competitors? What are the benefits of MantraDAO in terms of functionality and security?
I will start with this one! Good question!
So we definitely dont consider COMP to be a competitor, in fact we will be integrating the Compound lending protocol to bring eth-based asset lending/borrowing to our platform.
KAVA is more similar, but they are built on COSMOS, so a differnt blockchain ecosystem. We think KAVA is a great project, and in fact one of my friends, Aaron works there!
We have a lot of respect for them!
Q2: Which area does Mantra DAO focus on at the moment? (DeFi, Dapps,..) and which products/projects are you developing to support it?
MANTRA DAO is focusing on building a staking and lending Dapp with DAO-based governance. All of this is built on the Rio Chain, which is a highly scalable, secure blockchain for cross-chain DeFi products!
Q3: What is the advantage of holding OM Token for a long term? can we expect that to boom in the future? What Exchange are you eyeing for Mantra Dao Om Token to be listed?
Great question. Guess what just came out?
https://medium.com/mantra-dao/mantra-dao-joins-as-the-latest-hoo-labs-defi-project-d3fadaf371ee Our first official exchange listing!
We will be part of the Hoo Labs program, which is the same as what $AVAX just took part in
Thank you, we think so too! We will be doing a really cool staking program with them and have several other cool ideas coming soon!
Q4 To enter in a Mantra pool the user need to burn OM to be inside, so How works the Burning model of Mantra Dao, How many percentage of the total supply will be destined to be burned? How much INFLATION you have per year?
Good question – so currently 1 burned OM = 1 entry into the pool.. of course if the price skyrockets, we can reassess this. We will also have burning for opening and closing CDPs, but there is no official daily or quarterly burning in our model. We have a 2% annual inflation, which will be used to reward our stakers and in the early days with added financial OM incentives, we believe we could have an APY between 15-30% or more
Q5:What is the structure of the company, is it a decentralised, open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?
MANTRA DAO is a foundation where the beneficiaries are the OM token holders. We have a council who have some governance power, but in the end we are a DAO and our community will be governing the platform. Of course decentralization is always on a spectrum, and we will be aim to grow more and more decentralized as time goes on!
Telegram Group: https://t.me/MANTRADAO
Telegram announcements: https://t.me/mantradaonews
Telegram Group Indonesia: https://t.me/MANTRADAO_ID
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MANTRADAO
Medium: https://medium.com/@mantradao
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mantradao
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/mantradao/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mantradaoofficial/
Github: https://github.com/Mantradao
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZVnH1eLWshhfrDVTeDgCdg
Official Website: https://mantradao.com/
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