Privacy Protocol Manta Network Closes $5.5 Million Funding Round Ahead of Polkadot Parachain Auctions

Blockchain privacy solution Manta Network has successfully raised $5.5 million in funding led by Coinfund and Parafi Capital.

A ton of other big names from the cryptocurrency industry also participated in the funding including CMS Holdings, Divergence, Spartan Group, Longhash Ventures, Global Coin Ventures, SNZ, Zee Prime, and SkyVision Capital.

Angel investors that joined in include SushiSwap co-founder and advisor 0xMaki, Maple Leaf, Kevin Hu from Dragonfly, Santiago R Santos, key members from Parity and the Web3 Foundation, and members from Grayscale Investments’ parent company Digital Currency Group, Consensys, Polygon, Cream, Alpha, Perp, DoDo, Bitcoin.com, Subquery, Bitcountry, and Impossible Finance.

“We’re excited and proud to be joined by the most reputable thought leaders, investors, and angels in the space on our mission to privatize all crypto assets,”

said Kenny Li, core contributor to Manta Network

“Together, we recognize the importance of privacy in Web3, which is required to scale DeFi use cases.”

What’s Been Developing at Manta Network?

Founded last year, Manta Network aims to enable privacy for any parachain asset and every crypto asset. The goal of the project is to ensure ease of use and adaptability to encourage widespread ecosystem growth.

Recently, Manta Network’s canary network on Kusama, Calamari Network won a parachain slot and became the most popular parachain project based on contribution count.

Last week, Polkadot also announced that its much-anticipated parachain auction process where projects are allocated slots for building on its network is kicking off next month, on Nov. 11. The ongoing Kusama parachain auctions have already seen 2.4 million KSM contributed to crowdloans by more than 49,000 unique addresses.

“The Polkadot treasury currently has 18,936,300 DOT in it ready to spend on *your* ideas for building, improving, educating and indeed, anything else that the Polkadot governance believes valuable,”

wrote Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot, Ethereum, Parity, and Web3 Foundation, on Twitter.

As of writing, DOT is trading at $40.85 — down more than 17% from its ATH — putting Polkadot’s treasury funds at over $773.5 million.

Manta Network & Polkadot

After winning the parachain slot on Kusama Network, Manta will be turning its focus on winning a parachain auction on Polkadot as well, especially now that it has raised the funds.

“Manta Network is building one of the core primitives for privacy preservation within DeFi,”

said Austin Barack, Principal at CoinFund.

Barack further noted that by building upon Substrate, which allows for purpose-built layer 1 networks, Manta can build ZKSnark privacy-preserving architecture directly into the base layer. Through this, Manta can solve a number of existing problems such as front running and lack of privacy when making transfers or managing a portfolio.

“Leveraging relaychain interoperability, Manta will also be able to provide users across all Polkadot parachains with these services. We are thrilled to support this incredible team as they build much needed DeFi tooling,”

Barack added.

Once Manta establishes the parachain slot, the team will release its very first product MantaPay. It will enable its users to privately send wrapped BTC, ETH, DOT, and other crypto-assets as parachain assets to any wallet address on Manta Network.