Polychain leads $1.1 million seed round in privacy DEX Manta Network
Polychain has led a $1.1 million seed round investment in privacy-oriented decentralized exchange Manta Network.
The startup said Tuesday that it closed the seed round with other investors including Hypersphere Ventures, Three Arrows Capital, Defiance Capital, Multicoin Capital, and Alameda Research, to name a few.
Started in 2020, Manta Network aims to launch as a Polkadot parachain with plans to roll out its test network later this quarter.
Manta expects to participate in Polkadot's parachain auctions to launch its mainnet around the third quarter of 2020. Manta is eyeing a privacy-oriented decentralized exchange as its first product, dubbed MantaSwap, by applying zkSNARK technology.
"There are many user experience frictions for implementing a privacy-preserving DEX that we are solving through a combination of modern, scalable implementations of zkSNARKs and leveraging Polkadot," Shumo Chu, CEO of Manta and an assistant professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, told The Block.
“Manta's unique approach to building as a Polkadot parachain enables them to offer plug-and-play privacy to a multitude of use cases and projects, starting with their own privacy-preserving DEX," Polychain partner Ben Perszyk added in the statement.
