We are thrilled to share with you the recent successes of our project, which has been steadily growing and gaining traction over the past year. We have achieved several important milestones. These successes have been made possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of our team, as well as the support and contributions of our community.
Product Development:
Launched two core products, MantaPay and NPO (NFT private offering platform)
The Manta Wallet, a newly developed browser extension that allows users to manage and transact their public and private assets, has received 60,000+ downloads over the first week of launch
In partnership with Binance we launched the first zkSBT application, zkBAB on NPO, with over 31,000 unique mints, meaning 31,000 unique KYC’ed Binance users!
SDK and documentations exposing our cryptography primitives such as zkAddresses, zkAssets and Proof Keys.
User and Ecosystem Growth:
User community has grown 200% since Q1, and Twitter followers have grown 80% to over 160,000 followers
Manta Ecosystem Grants Program was announced to support projects that help Manta with ecosystem growth and Web3 & Web2 user acquisition.
Furthermore we’re partnering with Arbitrum to provide privacy and compliance features in their blockchain ecosystem using zero-knowledge technology. Manta’s suite of privacy-preserving tools, including zkSBTs, zkNFTs, and NPO, will provide greater privacy while minimizing compliance risks for Arbitrum users. The partnership aims to make SocialFi/GameFi use cases more user-friendly and secure, accelerating the adoption of blockchain technology. The collaboration includes onboarding web2 users into the Arbitrum ecosystem, providing a seamless transition with verified and active users. Manta has launched privacy tools, such as zkAssets, zkAddresses, and Proof Keys accessible through our SDK.
Looking ahead, we have ambitious plans to continue developing and improving our project, including the development of further use cases of zkSBTs, the full launch of the Manta Network main-net on Polkadot and 40 new partnerships in the pipeline (soon to be announced). In order to achieve these goals, we need additional funding to support our team and enable us to invest in the necessary resources.
Therefore, we are petitioning the community to support referendum 47 to fund the development of our project. We believe that this is an important step in ensuring the long-term success and sustainability of our project, and we hope that you will join us in this effort. To breakdown the costs, we require:
200 million KMA to support the continual development and maintenance of the NPO platform
200 million KMA to support the continual development and maintenance of the Manta Wallet extension
400 million KMA to support the development efforts of partners building with our technology such as zkSBTs
Thank you for your ongoing support, and we look forward to working together to build a brighter future for our project and our community.
howdy community! I would like to share some thoughts about this proposal. Are you part of the comm? Please feel free to make any comments. I would like to hear your opinions:
We must appreciate and thank the great work and achievements that the team has done so far. These are huge tools that will be very useful in web3.
The growth of the community is undeniable. The boom that zk developments are having in the space, and the way the team is delivering world-class privacy solutions is finally catching on with the public. This commits us to maintain and improve a really useful incentive program to educate them and keep them active and engaged within the community, and also to welcome the growing wave of new users in an organized way.
The alliance with Arbitrum is part of the possible expansion of Privacy AAS to other networks or has to do with a potential future migration out of the Polkadot ecosystem? the Manta Parachain is about to go out… will the Relay chain remain the base of the whole Manta/p0x Labs infrastructure?
While the team deserves to continue to build such useful tools and receive support from the community, this request makes me ask about the status and health of the resources the team got from the funding rounds. What is the burn rate of the team? Does this mean that we are running out of funds?
What is the plan for these KMA’s sales to avoid a strong impact on prices and the community being affected by a large sell-off?
Could it be an option for the team to wait for the Manta token launch to not burden Calamari with this cost and raise funds by selling part of the team’s holdings in $MANTA?
Do you plan to communicate it more openly so that the majority of the community knows about it and decides, or will it only be kept on this forum for the few who find out about it? It could be a good opportunity to educate and encourage the community to be more active in the governance of their project.
“We will sell as much as 1.5mil USD-worth of KMA tokens, our dear community, and we will do it soon.
Sorry KMA holders, will will screw you, justifying it with nicely written text. We really never cared for the KMA token anyway. It’s just a means for us to funnel money from the unsuspecting retail buyers. LOL”
You guys are a disgrace. And yeah, I would not be amazed if this messages gets deleted under some made up pretext.
Stopping my collator very soon. It was good knowing you all…
Oh, and yeah, for those who are wondering, team does NOT care for the KMA tokens anyway, because the said team has team token allocations in MANTA (and not KMA!) native tokens. The team could not care less if they dump the already struggling price of KMA. Oh, and governance-wise? I bet the team is going to rig the result anyway. Look at the on chain vote - nobody is against this proposal thus far. What a JOKE.
You could also vote and voice your opinion in a more executable way. We need to start participating more as a community to ensure that decisions are made by consensus and avoid modifications or permissions that do not represent the will of the majority. But for that, you have to vote…
In my case, I await responses from the team on my comments and will make a decision accordingly…
I created a new account specifically comment on this initiative.
You raised very good points.
From my side, I do not believe that the KMA token can sustain this sell pressure. You cannot exit 500k of KMA without significant slippage and the proposal is to unlock a whopping 800m.
Go take a look at orderbook depths.
If the Manta projects wants to get additional funding they should open up an additional funding round and not obtain cash at the expense of KMA holders.
This is quite unfair, in my opinion.
Lastly it’s quite sus that the vote ends in less than 22 hours. How come did we only get less than two days to discuss such an important referendum?)
My friend and I just voted strongly against as well.
Would also recommend pose (the previous poster) to do an on chain vote and for others to support my initiative to vote against.
lets self fund manta polkadot parachain and than drain KMA to last drop.
amount you are wanted to sell is about same amount what is staked right now, this will drop price really crazy and could threaten security of network, i will vote against.
Thanks for your asking about the proposal. ghzlatarev is part of our core team. I would like to make it clear that the decision on this coming from our development team. The 400m KMA is from development fund allocation and another 400m KMA is from the ecosystem development part. For the development fund allocation, it makes sense to incentivize our wallet extension developers who build this product beyond the previous signer and polkadot’s terrible wallet(s). And the NPO is also beyond our previous roadmap which brings the onchain activity significant growth. We will not dump this KMA since Calamari is so tight with Manta. We have a huge interest in Manta and share the same vision with you guys, which is to launch the token and get a great performance and realize what we promise. We would like to get more KMA from the staking rewards, which is what we deserve as builders on this network. Also for the rest 400m from ecosystem incentives, there are lots of BD side incentives we need to offer to enable more projects build on Calamari, which is what the ecosystem fund should do. While I do agree we cannot offer the KMA token very aggressively to the ecosystem projects due to the less liquidity of KMA. We will try to set more vesting/milestones on the KMA for the projects built on Calamari. If any projects get grants and incentives as KMA, we will make the grant announcement to make things more transparent. About your financial concern, we are in a quite healthy situation, not needing to sell tokens to make us survive, there are more than 4 years of runway for now. Even though I do agree if the time comes we are in financial difficulties, we should sell the token which belongs to the team to make the project more sustainable. Thanks again for your concern, happy to answer any further questions.
Thanks for your reply, I don’t have too much comments on this hates post. If I don’t care calamari, we could build the npo on testnet and not even brother on calamari. We build and get what we should, once we have a token doesn’t means we dump it ok. Also the KMA price was dumped by stupid shit market maker 3AC. Its our worse decision to let them do market making and borrow them token, while we stop work with them before they fucked up. We will keep build and get fundamentals back with supporters appreciate our efforts. Thanks.
What you call “hate posts” is “constructive criticism” in my book.
Why don’t you take a part of Manta native token alloc and allocate it towards the initiatives that you describe? as [nettle] rightly pointed out, you guys saved a lot on self-funding the polkadot parachain and you did not have to allocate native tokens to crowdloan participants. Surely there are some Manta tokens that can be dedicated towards the aforementioned initiatives? (this was not a question, actually, but I digress…)
You can also have an additional raise to fund the proposed initiatives. Why is this not considered? You have not spoken to this at all in your response.
Your collators bought the KMA from the market and I would hate to see them get rekd. Collators rewards barely cover hardware costs there days and a declining price action on the KMA token would just make people off-board from collating…
I categorically disagree that such a large amount of KMA tokens should be unlocked. Have you seen the post by [itwill] as well? The liquidity is not there for KMA to sustain large selling.
I am urging all community members to read all the non-team posts in this thread and make their own decisions as to how they should be voting on chain.
By the way, the way the vote is currently going clearly indicates how the community thinks about the proposal, as it stands…
And what did I tell you in one of my first messages? The result is going to be rigged by the team anyway. A whale wallet with 30m KMA with 6x voting power just changed the result of this vote. I ask the community to forgive my sarcastic tone, but really, the illusion of on-chain governance for KMA is clearly a farce. The decision has probably been made a long time ago for this particular proposal off-chain, and the team just needs to finalize this inconvenient “formality with governance” that would unlock them the funds on chain.
yeah, i don’t like this at all, why notice was given only 36hours before referendum end, and none official on discord. Seems like quite important decision. Why won’t you give community more time to vote and express themselves. Why rush it?
Anyway i am an early program collator, you give us a choice to buy 4M KMA or to stop collating. I went and bought 4M, which i now regret. I am in red numbers from the beginning of this project. I get it, you need money for development, but this is such a heavy number that i now lost any hope for calamari. As stated by others, seems like manta is all you care on debit of calamari.
and as @pose3rhij293 stated, arguments about hate comments are just weak, there is no hate, only disappointment.
This is Sik from crifferent.de and I just spawned here because I was shocked when I saw this.
I’m not the most active participant in Manta and Calamari but I highly care about anything GOV going on.
My feedback needs to be clearly divided into two topics.
First of which is the content.
I, as a developer / node operator / parachain team member, am fully supporting the use-case of the funds.
The dev fund was established to fund extrnal builders that provide tooling / UIs or other useful stuff. But this doesn’t always happen. We’ve seen this in many other projects too.
The result is that the team needs to develop stuff on their own which they planned to outsource, stealing time from core dev tasks.
And believe me - putting these KMA tokens into the hands of the people that have their blood, sweat and tears all over the code is the better option than rewarding external contractors that off-ramp the tokens immediately.
Nobody who’d be beneficiary here would want to see KMA dumping or the project going to shit.
May it be that they are more focused on the DOT project - everybody is, but when you fuckup your canary twin it will stay sticky with your name and reputation.
BUT - and here comes the big butt
There is no way to plausibly state why the topic was handled like that.
no discussion beforehand
no information in any major channels (discord / telegram / twitter)
council-proposed to make it a superMajorityAgainst (which is like impossible to swing)
36 hours from first mention to execution
THIS goes against anything and everything decentralisation or governance in DotSama stand for!
I would have expected fair play from the team and I hereby officially ask the team to stop referendum 47 by self-voting against it and do the proper steps to launch this again!
I would like to see an AMA where these things are discussed and a fair discussion period prior to the voting itself.
Furthermore it should be a simpleMajority approval vote instead of a superMajorityAgainst.
I am locking my KMA token at max conviction to NAY this but at the same time I state that I’d AYE the same motion in a future proposal that’s brought up in a fair way for your community and token-holders.
Hey @Sik-crifferent.de , those are great points, which I fully agree with.
Also, for the requested amount, there is no liquidity at all and I would like to know how and in what time periods are those KMA will be sold? That concerns me a lot.
Just to remind, HydraDX had some similar-type request, to fund 2 more years of development, but that was way more better communicated, well ahead of time. This is how I would like to see these kind of steps explained/communicated.
For all the above reasons, Polkadotters vote NAY as well (at this moment)
Mind you fellas, only in Calamari network governance, despite everybody being bearish on the proposal, it is still passing on polkadot js governance. Ahahahaaa what a shame … what a farce.
by reading this topic it is clear for me too, that’s funding yourself at this point of time with the current price of KMA token is simply careless attitude to token holders (to avoid say it even harder). Let’s Node as an early collator and supporter can’t vote possitively for this initiative. So my vote 6x NAY.
You have to really prove the need to do this step. If you drop the price below this threshold, what ist the reason to keep collator alive, while only expenses for the Infra are covered (not a joke)?
P. S. SuperMajority against?.. Let it be on your conscience
I want to express my opinion about this referendum and also bring to your attention a serious vulnerability in the current governance system!
We are supporting the network with our collator and also helped in the past on discovering a slot assignment issue (Calamari bug on block assignment · Issue #845 · Manta-Network/Manta · GitHub). We want the best for the network!
So let’s start with Point 1: my opinion but Point 2 is much more important!
I will vote NAY to this referendum (also if my vote is only “symbolic” and useless due to reasons in Point 2) because:
As also other community members said, I’m NOT against the purpose of the proposal. I agree completely in funding the devs that are the core and engine of the projects. We all are devs, nodes, infrastructure, etc… and we deserve the right amount of payment for the work done and future.
I completely agree in spending treasury for devs funding and future development.
What I don’t agree is the way this referendum was proposed: no preliminary and offchain discussion with community (in order to find out more appropriate ways, amount of tokens, etc…), only 36 hours of time for voting, no official announcement in the usual channels. I think that the amount of tokens requested (800M KMA) deserved such actions and a more appropriate discussion and planning.
Point 2: SuperMajorityAgainst WTF?!
Looking at Subscan (Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer) but also on Polkadot JS you can see that the vote threshold is set as “SuperMajorityAgainst” (please note the “Against” part!). I didn’t believe to my eyes because never see SuperMajority with Against but always with Approve . Also the official Polka Wiki does not mention this kind of voting threshold. With such config a referendum is much harder to be rejected and much more easy to be approved! This is against all normal and standard governance behavior because usually a referendum will bring some modification so it must be much harder to be approved instead of rejected!
And this is the result:
Both referendum have more NAY votes that AYE votes, but they are still passing! I think that the team set this “SuperMajorityAgainst” by mistake and without really wanting this!
This is a very important vulnerability because every referendum that will be proposed by anyone will use “SuperMajorityAgainst” (Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer).
Governance is a very powerful tool and can be used to modifiy everything in a chain, so this type of threshold is bringing an important vulnerability in the hands of any attacker of the chain, remember that is very hard to have a referendum reject with a proper amount of AYE votes.
And now you understand why all the NAY votes have no sense with “SuperMajorityAgainst” and why our vote is only symbolic at the end.
Due to reasons above I ask the team to:
Cancel referendum #47 ASAP (otherwise it will pass for sure due to misconfiguration of voting threshold);
In case of passing, please consider to send back the funds to the treasury;
Fix asap with a runtime update the governance voting threshold from “SuperMajorityAgainst” to “SuperMajorityApprove” removing the vulnerability;
Implement all the offchain discussion phases and re-proposing of the referendum making aware the community in a proper way.
I hope this comment was helpful understanding our reasons but much more important to remove the governance vulnerability from the Calamari network!
Thank you for your attention and long life to Calamari!
The SuperMajorityAgainst is something completely normal, most-times refered to as “negative turnout bias” and always applies if the council came to a complete agreement.
Agree with yours and @Sik-crifferent.de 's posts. The approach taken could be improved, and we all want to see the ecosystem grow through development. Have some simple funding options been investigated like an OTC sale with lock-up period and monthly unlocks? Everyone knows that during the current market conditions that projects are looking to conserve and I hope the team works to ensure that the community feels this is happening so that we all have a brighter future. I know at CertHum we’ve been on a very tight budget right now, so we are using this advice ourselves.
Iceberg Nodes 
