BlockTalks x MANTRA DAO AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Mantra DAO, on October 13th, at 10.00 AM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Will Corkin, Council Member at MANTRA DAO. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Will Corkin —I am Will Corkin, co-founder and council member at MANTRA DAO. I am originally from Boston but have been out in Asia for the last 6+ years, first in Shanghai and now based full time in Hong Kong.
Have been a part of a handful of businesses in and around the blockchain/crypto space, most recently heading business development at a US licensed Broker-Dealer that was actually the first and currently only licensed firm under the SEC to be able to carry out private placements of tokenized securities. And now been crazy busy developing and growing MANTRA DAO since it’s TGE took place almost 2 months ago.
Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce MANTRA DAO to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — MANTRA DAO is a community-governed DeFi platform that focuses on Staking (savings) and Lending. We have a very ambitious roadmap over the next year to roll out an entire suite of services to our community. Our goal is to be able to bring basic financial service to anyone, anywhere with ease.
All you need is a smartphone / computer and a small amount of money to be able to participate. I think the big thing once people breakout from the crypto communities is getting people to associate Staking with Savings accounts, That will be the layman’s terms bridge.
Q2. What are the advantages of MANTRA DAO to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans —A lot of DeFi paltform in the space currently are Ethereum based and only can interact withint the Ethereum blockchain… we are building on Parity Substrate which will allow us to be a cross-blockchain and multi-asset platform. We will integrate open-sourced ethereum protocols into our platform (like compound and aave) but we will also be able to offering it for other assets and blockchains.
We have a lot of additional incentives for our community depending on the specific service… staking for example we offer increased rewards and incentives in OM on top of the staking assets. So if someone stakes DOT for example, they will get DOT rewards as well as OM, other platforms do not give additional incentives for their stakers/delegators.
and that screenshot shows just that… stake OM and get 88.88% APR. It’s not going to last forever, but even once that APR decreases, it will still be very very attractive.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Will Corkin!
Q1. MANTRA DAO claims to be community orientated, and owned by the community can you explain the roles of the community in MANTRA DAO what do they stand to gain, and what are the requirements for community members to participate in decision making process of this project?
Ans — MANTRA DAO being created as a Foundation and a DAO means that the owners of it are the people who hold our OM tokens. Anyone who holds and stakes OM is able to propose votes within the ecosystem and vote on other proposed changes, those OM also grant you access to a number of additional benefits like community wide airdrops, lower fees, higher rewards, etc.
in terms of how the governance process actually works, here is a longer answer — In order to submit a proposal and vote within the MANTRA DAO ecosystem, a member must first hold and stake OM. Each staked OM represents 1 vote within the MANTRA DAO system. In order to propose a topic for voting, users will need to deposit USD $100 worth of OM as collateral. If the proposal should fail, they will lose the OM, but if the proposal passes evaluation from the council, then the vote will proceed. If the proposal receives a simple majority (51%) of the votes from the valid voters (staking OM), then the depositor will receive their OM back as well as an additional amount of KARMA for helping the ecosystem.
The process for voting is as follows:
- 1 week for proposals
- 1 week for evaluation of proposals
- 1 week for the voting of proposals
- 1 week for the implementation of proposals
so it total the proposal and voting process is a month long.
The MANTRA DAO Council is currently comprised of 5 Council Members. The Council Members serve 2-year terms and will help guide the proposal, evaluation, voting, and implementation process for MANTRA DAO. Every two years, there will be a vote for the next MANTRA DAO Council Members, with the maximum number of Council Members being set at 9. The Council will always maintain an odd number of councilors to never allow for a tie during the evaluation of proposals. The maximum number of consecutive council terms by any Council Member is set at 5.
Comrade (BlockTalks) — So the people who holds OM are those who runs it indirectly. No centralized authority makes changes.
Will Corkin — That’s exactly right, while i am a council member right now and help to guide the Foundation in the right direction and make sure that we are successful, my role as a council member is 2 years long, after those 2 years it will go to a community vote on if i get re-elected or if someone else is a better fit. In total the council members can only hold that position for 10 year or 5 terms. So it truly is fully decntralized and community-run.
Q2. Am I correct in understanding that you want to combine the functionality of Compound + Maker DAO and Pool Together into one MANTRA DAO project? Why did you choose this?
Ans — So we definitely took inspiration from a number of products currently on the market and looked to see how they could be made more effiicent and wide reaching. Maker DAO was the original DeFi project before DeFi was even a thing and really set precidence for DAOs…
Compound has had an amazing last few months and is someone we plan on working with and integrating within MANTRA DAO so that our members will be able to access their Ethereum lending protocol.
We’ll just build on top of that so we can offer those services for any number of blockchains and assets. Our entire mission and ethos on the industry side is to work with, partner, and support as many other in the space as possible, of course ones that also benefit what we are building and our community
So if we can work with other amazing teams and projects to integrate their services into MANTRA DAO and offer them to our community then that’s the best possible outcome.
taking them all and putting it under one easy to use, cross-chain, multi-asset roof.
Q3. Regarding LOANS, what crypto-currencies does Mantra Dao accept as collateral? So you can get instant access to Stablecoin’s loans.
Ans — We will have a multi-phased lending product that includes both a proprietary lending protocol similar to Maker, but with cross-chain multi-asset collateral, and undercollateralized lending through the Karma Protocol, as well as other lending protocol integrations.
because we will have cross-chain interoperability, that means we will be able to accept a number of different blockhains’ assets as collateral for loans.
Q4. If we decide to unstake our $OM token, do we have to pay a fee? Is there a minimum or maximum duration required to staking our $OM token?
Ans —Our staking platform is non-custodial and decentralized, this means that MANTRA DAO never touches your OM tokens and they do not leave your control. There are no deposit or withdrawal fees, There are no minimum or maximum duration… members can stake for as long as they chose without any lockups. They can stake with as little as 1 OM, the only fee that anyone pays is network transaction fees.
Q5. How does the mechanism of reputation work with Karma? In what way can it increase and what happens in case of having a very low karma? Are the functions within the platform limited?
Ans — KARMA Protocal is similar to a traditional credit score where people are rewarded in KARMA for helping grow and support the MANTRA DAO ecosystem, there are no limitations for people that don't have KARMA, they are still able to access the entire platform and suite of services as anyone else.
BUT
People that obtain higher levels of KARMA will have access incentives within our ecosystem, things like lower interest rates, under-collateralized loans, free entries into our MANTRA POOL, etc etc.
Users gain KARMA by supporting the ecosystem through:
• Staking OM tokens
• Taking out & paying back loans
• Submitting & voting on proposals
• Joining the MANTRA POOL savings game
• Referring friends to grow the community
• Receiving grants
Users with higher KARMA gain access to various benefits, such as:
• Increased OM staking rewards
• Decreased staking fees
• Free access to MANTRA POOL!
• Lower loan interest rates
• Loyalty Rewards, such as SWAG and community recognition
and this will all tie into our Ambassador program that we will be launching in the next few days, so people can earn KARMA, as well as OM, for helping to grow MANTRA DAO and share our vision.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Will Corkin!!
Q1. What region in the world is MANTRA DAO focusing on right now, like Asia or Africa? Or are you a global project that anybody in the world can use without restrictions?
Ans — We are definitely a global project that is focusing really across the board. Our team for instance is comprised of people from more than 10+ countries and from all continents.
We have almost 20 different country and language communities currently so that we can work better to have a global footprint and help people from all corners of the world.
Q2. Do you have any new partnership recently? And what advantage of this partnership to the project?
Ans — We just recently announced a new partnership with BONDLY and today we listed on TOMOdex which is run from another partner of ours TomoChain… we put a lot of emphasis on partnerships as they will help us to grow our community and reach our goals… we have a number of partners that we’ve annouced over the last month and a lot of them you can find the write up on our Medium page:
https://medium.com/mantra-dao
some other partners are:
Bondly, TomoChain, KardiaChain, Kava, Terra, BAND, Polkastarter
Q3. What are some of the major achievements that the MANTRA DAO protocol has achieved and what milestones are planned in the upcoming months/years?
Ans — Since our token generating event 2 months ago, we have managed to:
- get our staking platform live
- we have been accepted into the Substrate Builders Program
- we entered the Kusama 1000 Validator Program
- launched a number of currently running validator nodes
- and made over a dozen parternships with incredible teams and projects in the space.
We have been building and growing non-stop and we dont have any plan to slow down!
Q4. On the petition you made the other day, about beside $OM what coins we want to stake on your platform, there many people who choose $DOT,
So how ?
next, will MantraDao create a staking pool for $DOT?
Ans — Currently we offer staking of OM and RFUEL on the platform, but soon we will also launch delegation for DOT and KSM and a nunber of other blockchains… DOT and KSM for example we already run a validator node for both, we are just finalizing the implementation into our app for people to be able to do the same.
Q5. -How does the Sherpa competition work, can anyone participate? How does Staking work on Mantra Dao, do you have any guidelines?
Ans — our current #sherpascommunitymonth that is going on is open to anyone and everyone to participate… every week there will be a new focus and goal. currently we have a MEME and GIF competition taking place where anyone can make them and post them in twitter with that hashtag. for staking on MANTRA DAO, anyone can access that as long as they have OM to stake!
Here are some important links of Mantra DAO👇
Official Website — https://mantradao.com
Facebook — https://facebook.com/mantradao
Twitter — https://twitter.com/MANTRADAO
Telegram Chat — https://t.me/MANTRADAO
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/mantradao/
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mantradaoofficial/
Medium — https://medium.com/mantra-dao
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZVnH1eLWshhfrDVTeDgCdg
