Polkadot’s first on-chain privacy protection agreement, Manta Network, announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$5.5 million, led by top institutions Parafi and CoinFund, CMS Holdings, Divergence, Spartan Group, Longhash Ventures, Global Coin Ventures, SNZ, Zee Prime and More than 30 world-renowned institutions including SkyVision Capital participated in the investment.
Polkadot’s first on-chain privacy protection agreement, Manta Network, announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$5.5 million, led by top institutions Parafi and CoinFund, CMS Holdings, Divergence, Spartan Group, Longhash Ventures, Global Coin Ventures, SNZ, Zee Prime and More than 30 world-renowned institutions including SkyVision Capital participated in the investment.
Individual angel investors include Kevin Hu of 0xMaki, Santiago R Santos, Maple Leaf, Dragonfly, core members of Parity and Web3 Foundation, as well as DCG, Consensys, Polygon, Cream, Alpha, Perp, DoDo, Bitcoin.com from Grayscale parent company , Subquery, Bitcountry, Impossible Finance and other team members.
Kenny Li, a core contributor to Manta Network, said, "Manta is very honored to be recognized and supported by many industry leaders and investors. DeFi has developed so far and wants to further improve its scale, and privacy on the chain is essential. Manta's vision is to become a Web3 A privacy-preserving platform for blockchain applications in the world."
Austin Barack, head of investment at Coinfund, said, “Manta builds the core infrastructure for DeFi privacy protection. Based on Substrate, Manta can directly embed zkSNARK’s privacy protection architecture into the underlying layer1 network to solve the problem of current DeFi users conducting transactions or Asset management faces many problems such as lack of privacy and being robbed. With the help of the interoperability of Polkadot parachains, Manta can also provide chain privacy protection services for users of other Polkadot parachains. We are very happy to be able to use it as an investment to support what the Manta team is doing.”
Manta Network was founded in 2020 by several core members after experiencing the lack of on-chain privacy first-hand, and is committed to providing on-chain privacy for encrypted assets. Manta's core team has both industry veteran investors and developers with strong cryptography backgrounds, striving to develop a unique solution for privacy finance. Manta's "plug and play" product design is more efficient and convenient than other privacy products on the market. The team hopes to achieve broader ecological development through better user experience and product flexibility.
This round of financing will be used to focus on Manta’s Polkadot parachain auction. Once the Polkadot parachain slot is won, Manta will soon release its first product, MantaPay, to realize the privacy of all parachain assets.
Manta Network's leading network, Calamari Network, recently won the Kusama parachain slot with record-setting community support, and the number of KSM contributors exceeded 16,000.
About Parafi
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, ParaFi Capital is a venture capital firm focused on blockchain and decentralized financial markets. The founder of Parafi, Benjamin Forman, comes from private equity giant KKR (KKR & Co. LP). Recently, KKR Group announced investment in ParaFi Capital's flagship fund, which is the group's first foray into the blockchain field.
At present, most of ParaFi Capital invests in the leading projects or infrastructure of the DeFi track. The invested projects such as MakerDAO, Compound, Kyber Network, and Aave are all the head projects of various subdivided tracks in the DeFi field, covering loans, lending, Infrastructure for underlying protocols such as stablecoins and finance. In addition, ParaFi also participated in investing in The Graph, a blockchain data index project, and Coinbase, an encrypted exchange.
About CoinFund
In 2018, Venrock, the official venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, announced a partnership with CoinFund to support cryptocurrency and blockchain business innovation. Blockchain projects that CoinFund has invested in include CoinList, Acala Network, NuCypher, Moonbeam, etc.
About Manta Network
About Manta Network
Manta Network is Polkadot's first on-chain privacy protection project. It provides DeFi users with the highest security level of on-chain privacy protection through the cryptographic technology zkSNARK, aiming to become the privacy protection infrastructure of the entire decentralized finance. Manta’s early products include MantaPay, a private payment protocol, and MantaSwap, the first private DEX protocol in the Polkadot ecosystem. Based on the Substrate framework, Manta can provide plug-and-play privacy protection services for the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Manta's long-term vision is to become a privacy-preserving platform for blockchain applications.
Manta's founding team consists of several cryptocurrency veterans, professors, and academics whose experience includes Harvard, MIT, and Algorand. Manta’s advisors include Hypersphere Ventures co-founder Jack Platts, Polychain partner Tekin Salimi, former Web3 Foundation co-founder Ashley Tyson, Consensys’ Shuyao Kong.
