Setting the bar for decentralised, autonomous and interoperable DeFi services
With big improvements made in the design and management of decentralised autonomous organisations since the 2016 DAO incident, 2020 may well have been the year of the DAO. The interest in creating DAOs as an alternative organisational structure has clearly grown considerably, with the number of active DAOs up 660% from 2019.
Decentralised autonomous organisations tackle the issue of governance within traditional ‘top down’ structures, that give individuals the power to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity in the organisation. This is often referred to as the “principal-agent dilemma”.
Driving the adoption of open finance
MANTRA DAO stands out as a project that can open the gates to cross-chain, multi-asset DeFi services for the wider population, raising the standard for DAOs moving into 2021 and beyond. Built on Parity Substrate for the Polkadot ecosystem, MANTRA DAO is a community-governed, transparent, and completely decentralised organisation with holism at it’s very core.
The MANTRA DAO Foundation is composed of blockchain and business experts, as well as Polkadot ambassadors, with their mission statement being to “bootstrap the growth of the MANTRA DAO ecosystem and drive the organization toward complete decentralisation”.
“One of the elements that I find most intriguing about a DAO is the ability. to engage with a community, and ascertain where community consensus lays. Being able to directly interact and discuss with our community in order to make strategic decisions about the direction of the project, really do give us an advantage as founders.” – John Patrick Mullin, Council Member
MANTRA DAO leverages the wisdom of the crowd and, since the launch of their Soft Governance, the project has begun carrying out on-chain voting and proposals with the first being how the Foundation chooses to use 50,000 POLS tokens that they hold. The community can vote if they want POLS tokens to be airdropped or sold to buy OM on the open market, amongst other actions.
A Comprehensive ecosystem of DeFi services
MANTRA DAO makes the benefits of decentralized finance available to a mainstream audience, with staking, borrowing and lending available to traders and investors.
By staking one of a variety of assets with MANTRA DAO including the native OM token, users also referred to as “Sherpas” can receive OM staking rewards that give them voting power over various economic parameters such as interest rates, level of inflation and ecosystem grant allocations.
Another notable feature of MANTRA DAO is the introduction of the KARMA protocol; a reputation mechanism aimed at rewarding users for contributions to the ecosystem. The KARMA protocol also plays the role of a pseudonymous credit rating protocol that allows Sherpas to access under collateralized lending options within the MANTRA DAO platform.
“DAOs are at the forefront of DeFi protocols’ evolution. Participants who don’t know each other, who don’t need to trust each other can securely obtain loans, generate interest off their digital assets and participate in the supervision of a global, constantly evolving financial ecosystem.” – Rodrigo Quan, Council Member
Building a decentralised future
Following their hugely successful raise and after joining the Substrate Builders Program in August along with other pioneering projects such as Acala, Phala, Moonbeam and Darwinia, MANTRA DAO recently partnered with Polkastarter to develop a “decentralised future” empowered by blockchain. Other partners include Kira Network, Kava, Terra Money, Matic and BAND protocol.
MANTRA DAO represents the evolution of decentralised autonomous organisations, offering a fully integrated ecosystem of decentralized financial services, with plans to migrate to substrate-based RioChain in the future to become a fully functioning DAO with on-chain governance.
With the stage set to look bright for DAOs in coming years, MANTRA DAO leads the charge into a future of democratised access to digital assets.
