What is MANTRA (OM): an overview of one of the leading RWA ecosystems
As the regulatory environment evolves, blockchain projects like MANTRA are looking to expand the list of available financial cryptocurrencies and services for investors interested in RWA in a decentralized environment.
What is MANTRA?
MANTRA is a blockchain platform for creating and running decentralized applications (DApps) focused on the real-world assets (RWA) sector, which, according to many experts and significant investment funds, is already one of the main trends in the crypto industry.
In October 2020, the project team founded the MANTRA DAO organization, with RioDeFi, the company behind the development of RioChain, as an advisor. Later, in August 2022, the MANTRA DAO team rebranded and renamed the organization MANTRA and formed the new OMiverse ecosystem.
OMiverse ecosystem
OMiverse consists of four main stacks encompassing Mantra's clients' financial products and services. These four stacks include:
- MANTRA Finance;
- MANTRA Chain;
- MANTRA Nodes;
- MANTRA DAO.
MANTRA Finance is a decentralized trading platform that provides financial services to institutional and private investors. Its peculiarity is that it combines two separate sectors: traditional (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), providing access to real-world assets (RWA) through its own blockchain ecosystem.
The MANTRA Finance platform solves two main problems: providing investors with financial products and services that meet the security requirements of the traditional market, as well as protection from malicious actors thanks to a decentralized identity system.
MANTRA Chain is a Layer 1 (or L1) blockchain focused on the RWA sector. The MANTRA Chain blockchain is based on the Cosmos SDK and is part of one of the largest Cosmos Hub ecosystems in the crypto industry, which includes more than 50 well-known decentralized networks such as:
- Celestia,
- Sei Network,
- Injective,
- Saga,
- Cronos,
- Dymension,
- ZetaChain,
- Fetch.ai and many others.
The MANTRA team chose Cosmos IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) technology because it simplifies blockchain development and provides developers with the necessary tools to create interoperable, i.e., interoperable decentralized networks. In addition, MANTRA Chain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing decentralized applications (DApps) to be ported seamlessly between the Cosmos Hub and Ethereum ecosystems.
MANTRA Chain has its own decentralized identity system known as Decentralized ID (DID), a kind of decentralized KYC counterpart that allows user identity to be confirmed in the blockchain environment. The Mantra team launched the Hongbai testnet (testnet) in 2024, after which the main net (mainnet) is due to be released the same year.
MANTRA Nodes are a group of validators in the MANTRA ecosystem whose primary functions are to secure the network, create new blocks, and generate revenue in various blockchains. In addition, the goal of MANRTA validators is to expand its ecosystem in the Web3 space.
MANTRA DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that manages the MANTRA ecosystem with the help of a community — the owners of the native OM token. Participants must have collateral in OM tokens equivalent to $100 for each vote.
OM token
In August 2020, the team issued its own MANTRA token with the ticker OM — a few months before the decentralized autonomous organization MANTRA DAO was launched. OM tokens were distributed to whitelisted investors in a public tokensale.
Although MANTRA Chain is part of the Cosmos Hub ecosystem, OM was released only on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 token. Other EVM-compliant networks, such as BNB Smart Chain (BEP-20), Polygon, and Base, were later added.
The Mantra team plans to launch the main Hongbai network in 2024, after which OM tokens will be able to migrate to their own blockchain. Currently, as of July 2024, the token supply is limited to 888 888 888 OM tokens. However, once the Hongbai main net is launched, the restriction will be lifted, and the OM token will have no maximum issuance, meaning it will become inflationary.
The future of MANTRA
RWA became one of the most trending areas in the cryptocurrency market between 2023 and 2024. According to data from the DeFi Llama service for July 2024, RWA ranks 9th among all DeFi categories in terms of blocked assets in decentralized protocols (TVL), which exceeds $4.6 billion. Over the year, the TVL of the RWA sector has grown more than 29 times from the $158 million recorded in July of the previous year.
Given that MANTRA is among the top ten leading platforms in the RWA sector of the crypto market by capitalization, it has every chance to remain among the leaders and grow as investors' demand for this segment increases. By this indicator, MANTRA has already surpassed such well-known projects as Synthetix, XDC Network, Centrifuge, and Chia.
