Manta Network Proves Its Democratic Credentials by Dropping Calamari Network IDO Plan

It was last month that Calamari officially became the 8th parachain on Kusama Network, an experimental version of Polkadot that exists as an independent network that intends to act as a sandbox for developers to deploy and test pre-release their projects.

Once the project has these parachains, they will launch the Manta Network, shared Kenni Li, co-founder of Manta Network in an interview.

What is Manta Network?

The Manta Network is built to bolster privacy in decentralized finance (DeFi) by obfuscating wallet addresses. And Calamari is Manta Network’s canary-net that is built to service the Kusama DeFi world.

The network uses zkSNARKs — a cryptographic technique that allows two entities to verify information with each other without sharing the underlying related data — to bring on-chain privacy to transactions and swaps.

The first project the team has in line is a privacy-preserving automated market maker (AMM) DEX called MantaSwap, for which it closed a $1.1 million funding round, led by Polychain Capital. The Manta Network previously has also been a Web 3.0 Foundation Grant winner.

The second one is MariPay, which supports the private transfer of Kusama and its Parachain assets — a private DEX.

Unify the community

Recently, the Calamari Network announced an IDO on MISO that was to happen late in September but has since been put on pause to focus on the much larger priority which is to unify the community. Working towards what they believed to be the best interest of the community, the Calamari Network had made the IDO announcement. But during conversations with the community through Telegram, Discord, and Live Q&A Sessions, the team received mixed reactions.

The subsequent voting for transparency showed that the community was divided on an IDO, explained Manta’s core contributor in a YouTube video.

“While we believe the IDO would be a positive step for the community, for the project the community isn't all on board with this,”

as a result the Calamari team dropped its original plan to have an IDO.

“Whether or not we decide to continue with it in the future, that's a decision that we'll make together as a team as a community,”

he added. However, this also helped the team realize that they need to do a “better job” in laying down the facts and get ahead of the speculation so that confusion doesn’t arise to negatively affect the community and the project.

The good thing that came out of this unpleasant situation is to refocus on the community to make sure it is not divided. As a first step towards this, the team is hosting ‘What’s Up Wednesdays’ to discuss the weekly progress in Manta and Calamari.

What are the Manta Network’s Plans now?

While the IDO isn’t happening, the Manta team is still thinking about the marketing allocation. One of the ways this could be done is airdrops to the early community people to reward those who believed in the project and supported it from the beginning including ambassadors and community moderators, according to the video.

Airdrops are a popular means in the crypto industry to recognize the early adopters as done in the case of Uniswap (UNI) and most recently dYdX (DYDX) which came to worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Despite the IDO not happening, Calamari crowdloaners for the Manta token sale will still be whitelisted. But “there are no tokens that will be released for Calamari before the first distribution of the rewards for crowdloaners.”