MANTRA DAO
Bringing Decentralized Finance to The Global Stage

A decentralised framework has been long touted as the final frontier in the financial services industry. And, despite all odds stacked against its widespread adoption, blockchain technology continues to remain the most promising candidate to not only achieve the aforementioned goal but also propel the economic world toward a more prosperous and inclusive future. Incidentally, the COVID-19 pandemic strengthened this hypothesis. It served as an ‘educational wake-up call’ to individuals and businesses alike, prompting them to explore the decentralised finance (DeFi) world to remain relevant and offer value to the people at large.

Consider procuring a loan, for instance – a process that is inherently complex and time-consuming. When the pandemic rose to detrimental levels, businesses were shut down, and people were relieved from their jobs, causing widespread financial turmoil. To make matters worse, obtaining financial aid through various money lending markets became all the more difficult due to the nature of procuring these services. The lack of a regular job or equivalent collateral, particularly in these difficult times, would often disqualify people from obtaining financial support; and the ones that do qualify are bound by the redundant, time-consuming loan processing operations. As complex as these procedures and protocols may seem, Will Corkin— Co-Founder of MANTRA DAO—says that decentralised finance can circumvent them. And, to understand how MANTRA DAO addresses this problem, it is essential to acknowledge and appreciate the ingenuity of blockchain technology and its broad spectrum of applicability made possible by the company.

In conversation with Startup City, Will Corkin takes a thought leadership approach to highlight the merits of blockchain technology, all the while shedding light on the role played by MANTRA DAO—a community-governed DeFi platform focusing on Staking, Lending, and Multi-Chain DeFi services—in streamlining the adoption of decentralised financial operations. “In addition to solving the conventional bottlenecks involved in money lending or borrowing markets, blockchain connects the traditional finance world with the emerging decentralised one,” begins Corkin.

A Consortium of Blockchain Aficionados

Before laying the cornerstone to MANTRA DAO, Will Corkin and fellow blockchain entrepreneur John Patrick Mullin moved to Hong Kong in 2018 to open up a crypto exchange and consulting firm, soon joining forces with Rodrigo Quan Miranda, who at that time was a block producer in the space. The trio envisioned developing an underlying framework for numerous blockchain applications, there by promoting decentralised finance to address multiple issues pertaining to the lack of access, transparency, efficiency, and processing agility.

“While blockchain as a technology has widespread use across all industries, blockchain for the financial sector is ripe for disruption” says Quan Miranda. Having witnessed the evolution of blockchain firsthand, the MANTRA DAO leadership team was always inclined toward the financial services and investment side of the business, helping both retail and crypto investors and traders alike access the necessary financial tools they would need within the industry.

With this evolution came the consequent introduction of projects like Compound, Cream and similar practical use cases for decentralised money markets.These applications subsequently gained significant traction over the last 18 months, validating the prowess of blockchain technology and paving the way for smaller, medium-sized businesses to adopt DeFi as an efficient and robust alternative to traditional, centralised financial infrastructures. Consequently, the above developments lead to the trio’s conception of MANTRA DAO and its engagements in building various DeFi services including their staking and money markets, enabling them to participate in DeFi networks while creating a user-friendly and intuitive platform for numerous blockchain applications.

The MANTRA DAO DeFi platform, developed and structured as a decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO), creates a community-governed, transparent, and decentralised ecosystem for web 3.0. Designed to be blockchain agnostic and offering multi-chain services, it is tailored to give the financial control back to the hands of the people, allowing them to store and maximise their wealth collectively. The platform was first built on Ethereum to utilize and support its ecosystem of financial products, and has since expanded to be a truly multi-chain ecosystem with it’s services also living on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon (formerly Matic), while being in the process of launching on Solana, HECO, Polkadot, Terra, and its own native MANTRA Chain.

More importantly, one of the most quintessential benefits of employing a decentralised, community-driven platform is the iteration nature of development. The decentralised architecture offered by MANTRA DAO is tried and tested multiple times with various iterations and is validated by the community as and when a new feature, function, or update is released. This value proposition ensures that the users of the platform are an integral part of the development process. For instance, traditional companies need focus groups to obtain market feedback and successively incorporate the user feedback provided before launching, which potentially takes months, but through MANTRA DAO’s community centric approach and constant state of improvement they can expedite the entire process when launching any new product with consistent feedback from their extensive community. Through these efforts, MANTRA DAO aspires to bridge the awareness gap among the masses and blockchain technology, helping people and businesses better understand the technology, its adoption, and its utility in the financial world.

The Proliferation of Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Finance

As blockchain grows in prominence, the amalgamation of decentralised finance, cryptocurrencies, and the tokenization of traditional financial securities is bound to reach a larger mainstream adoption. MANTRA DAO is well-poised to embrace this eventuality, fueled by the experience and expertise of its global team of entrepreneurs and professionals from numerous countries, industries, and backgrounds.

Through this broad consortium of expertise, combined with the utility of a community-driven DeFi platform, MANTRA DAO is enabled to grow side-by-side with the technology, effectively addressing the ambiguity surrounding blockchain technology at large. Case in point, regulations pertaining to DeFi are one of the highly critical areas that require attention and conformity, the lack of which could hurt businesses substantially in the long run. Discussing SOMA.finance, their recently announced venture with a licensed broker dealer in the United States, Mullin talks about the importance of regulations and compliance requirements in order to bridge DeFi with traditional finance (TradFi). “Leading up to this joint venture with Tritaurian Capital, over two years was spent engaging in a back-and-forth dialogue with the SEC and FINRA in an effort to lay the foundation to compliantly offer tokenized securities and crypto assets to retail and accredited stakeholders in the value chain, both in the US and worldwide,” he says. From the basic understanding of how blockchain works to the interaction of assets on the network and the corresponding KYC and AML processes, each milestone in this regulatory journey proved to be the building blocks for complete compliance on the crypto and tokenization sides of the collaboration. “There is no way around regulations, and with the transition toward a decentralised financial ecosystem, compliance will allow DeFi to be truly secure and borderless with endless possibilities.”

Advocates of Decentralised Finance

While there is a common misconception about the stability and adaptability of blockchain in the media, recent developments, use cases, and advantages achieved through the technology indicate a large-scale proliferation across a myriad of industries. For instance, Layer 2 solutions built on Ethereum have proven to allow faster transactions and lesser transactional fees; this advantage alone empowers the retail community to interact and transact over a broader spectrum. MANTRA DAO’s growth within the DeFi space has been through expanding their services onto these Layer 2 solutions, such as Polygon, in order to reach a larger audience and give an easier and more cost effective ecosystem to its community. The founding trio believes that more widespread adoption of blockchain is evident with intuitive interfaces, USD or FIAT-backed (stable) cryptocurrencies, and utilitarian use cases. The technology also opens the doors to newer investment avenues with tokenized and blockchain-based stocks, bonds, ETFs, futures, and more.

In the grand scheme of things, all of these developments would also increase the awareness pertaining to blockchain technology, enabling people to leverage the multitude of benefits offered through DeFi. Be it utilizing a high-interest savings account, procuring a per-to-per loan, investing in crypto assets, or completing retail transactions through cryptocurrencies, MANTRA DAO’s community-driven platform emerges as one of the best go-to solutions for staking, lending & borrowing, governance, and participating in initial offerings. Reflecting on the same, Corkin concludes by stating, “Our goal is to build the most inclusive, dynamic and secure ecosystem that allows our global community to take control of their financial freedom and access the necessary tools to do so.”