Victor Ji, co-founder of zero-knowledge application Manta Network, published an open letter on the X platform. The content is summarized as follows:
Hello everyone, in the four months after TGE, I would like to share with you our progress from the perspective of a founder. For us, users and community are everything. We hope that through voice, text and various forms of communication, everyone can see the continued development of Manta and collect more feedback.
First of all, let’s talk about the TVL that everyone is most concerned about. There has been a significant drop from 2b to around 800m now. We believe this is related to the excessive return rate given by various L2 and restaking projects in the current market. Everyone is learning from Manta’s New paradigm. , turning this staking and airdrop paradigm into the basic operation of every L2 (even no matter how long it takes to go to the mainnet). Although Manta continues to develop the renew paradigm to allow projects in the ecosystem to have better opportunities to develop, we found that many Users do not care about ecological projects, but only expect the benefits of the chain, which makes us either give an amazing amount of manta to maintain tvl, or choose the loss of tvl. But when we found that the ecological projects in the renew paradigm were not attractive enough, we chose another direction.
1) With the launch of Manta CeDefi today, we have brought the income of funding rates, which is the highest income in this market neutrality, to BTC, ETH and stablecoins on the chain. All assets can rely on CeDeFi products to obtain relatively high native income. This is more lasting and more stable than the manta token subsidy. As the market value becomes smaller and smaller with the launch of various L2s, we can find that the era of giving native token incentives to TVL is basically over. In addition to the current CeDeFi, Manta is also very concerned about the construction of the RWA direction ecosystem. We first cooperated with the most compliant native income stablecoin USDM in the United States. Everyone will also see further development after this cooperation. In Asia, we have joined Hong Kong Cyberport, which will further promote the behavior of financial institutions on the chain.
2) We will further develop the ecosystem of Manta. Our ecosystem projects have increased to 200+, and there are more than 50 DeFi projects in Defilama. This shows that Manta has a comprehensive ecosystem without obvious missing pieces, but Manta also needs to truly commit to builders who continue to build better products in the ecosystem. Now Manta’s problem is the same as Ethereum and all EVMs. There are many builders, but there are not enough to form cooperation in the ecosystem and insist on iterating products in the ecosystem. We have seen some potential in the ZK App Accelerator, such as Nimble and Gull, which are very distinctive projects in Manta Native. In addition, various problems occurred in the coordination of ecological projects in the previous Renew Paradigm, such as Zerolend’s airdrop was not issued in time, Stakestone did not get Eigenlayer points, etc., but the products and technologies of ecological projects will have some limitations and cannot be iterated in time. We also apologize to the community for this. We will also learn lessons and promote the implementation of related benefits earlier. In short, Manta has a very good underlying foundation, with very low gas fees, direct ETH deposits and withdrawals on Binance, and a very open ecological environment. But at the same time, we will also hold further hackathons, further open up the governance system and grant application mechanism, and work with the community to promote truly large-scale applications.
3) In terms of infrastructure development, we are also integrating type 1 prover, and working hard to promote manta to become the first L2 in opstack to implement multiprover. At the bottom layer of zk applications, we are also working hard to promote product integration with rwa-related scenarios. In addition, we are also exploring more decentralization in aspects such as decentralized sequencer.
Manta is in a very difficult period now, but it is far less difficult than it will be in early 2023. Manta still has a strong global community. When we walked in New York, Bali, Hong Kong and South Korea, people saw the Manta logo and came to communicate with us. Manta's founders moved to Asia this year, and further cooperation with enterprises and promotion of large-scale implementation have also begun to bear fruit. We continue to build, just like we have in the past four years. We may not be the first in all fields, but we continue to deliver products to make community users and builders more interesting to participate. We continue to hold events with ecological partners and even competitors that never charge admission, and build a positive and open brand. Just like we did the first modular L2 and the first native income L2 to be launched on the mainnet before, we have been iterating quickly and launching new products quickly. There are many L2s, but just like we are participating in the new paradigm of NFT, the tier1 backer is the least valuable, but the first modular L2 only has Manta, which comes from our team's continuous hard work and development and the community's support. I look forward to the manta ecosystem and I look forward to seeing more of you in the ecosystem.
Best, Victor Ji Co-founder of Manta Network
