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MANTRA CEO: Week in Review
Recorded: April 19, 2025 Duration: 0:50:57Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Mantra's CEO addressed the project's recent challenges and future strategies, emphasizing a commitment to transparency, community engagement, and growth through innovative tokenomics and partnerships. The conversation highlighted the importance of accountability in the crypto space, with plans for a public dashboard and ongoing discussions with institutional investors to strengthen the project's foundation.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. so
okay okay we're back sorry guys we had technical issue and uh probably because of the surge of the
amount of people that we had uh quite fast so this tends to happen unfortunately with
xpaces sorry john for that uh you were actually in the middle of the explanation of what Mantra has been doing
recently. So we already went through your personal intro. As a short reminder, we agreed
that we would go first through a personal intro about Mantra, the project which you
were in the middle of, mentioning us about all the BOLUA features that you implemented.
And after that, we will go through the events of the week,
obviously,
trying to know more,
dig a bit deeper.
After that,
we'll go through the plans,
what you have in mind
for the future ahead,
laying for Mantra.
And in the end,
we will select questions together
from the audience
in the live chat
in the thread.
So please, guys,
do not hesitate.
Once again,
this thread is open for you to ask questions. So please, guys, do not hesitate. Once again, this thread is open for you to ask questions.
So please, John, if you can take back from where you left,
that would be great.
Okay.
I think I was halfway through kind of talking about the chain and kind of what people are...
Recent people who joined our community are kind of knowing mantra for.
So, yeah. So, you know, we kind of had this kind of,
you know, merger of tokenomics,
which has, you know, become one of the key points
to discuss later on in the aftermath of the events
this past weekend about how we were able to take
the initial ERC token that we launched back in 2020
and merge it and migrate to our new kind of mainnet L1 token or coin when we launched our
layer one blockchain at the end of last year. So, you know, we were, you know, one of the
leaders in RWA tokenization. We continue to be fundamentally focused on that space
and focusing on how do we compliantly, seamlessly,
and transparently bring real-world assets on-chain
that make them composable, functional,
and bring more utility to these types of tokenized asset classes.
So I think we've done a lot of work in this space.
My whole career has kind of been centered around this concept in general.
And we have a very strong team that is full of conviction and resolve at the moment.
We feel like we're in war mode right now and, you know, as much motivation as ever to bring it back.
And I think for those who have been with us for a very long time, Mantra has been down before.
We're definitely down now, but we're certainly not out.
And we'll keep pushing, keep building,
and keep communicating with our community
as transparent as possible.
And hopefully we'll turn this into an opportunity
for Mantra, but also for the broader crypto space
to bring enhanced transparency to the space
and do things the right way
and lead with integrity and hard work.
Yep. And maybe learn from things.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I offer to you that we start talking about what happened during the night of the crash.
So let's have a short reminder of the events as they unfolded, both for you personally as CEO of Mantra, but also what you know about the events from a more objective perspective.
One week, we are almost one week now after what happened.
So what have you been able to gather?
Maybe first from your personal point of view when it happened
and then with the more recent elements.
Yeah, so I was in Seoul, South Korea when this all went down.
And I think that was initially a big point of FUD
because it happened while I was sleeping.
So the events transpired on Sunday evening Dubai time, very early in the morning Asia time.
And for, you know, I think an hour or two at least, we were not able to actually directly communicate because we were still figuring out what was going on, figuring out if there was an exploit.
A lot of misinformation going around as if there was some sort of rug.
So I was actually woken up.
I think I went to bed at like 12, 1230 midnight Korea time.
And I was woken up around 5 a.m. local time by my hotel calling the room, you know, frantically trying to get through.
Obviously, this was an emergency.
And, you know, frankly, that was probably the worst wake up I've ever had in my life.
And immediately got on the phone, started talking to the team, which was already in a war room.
And was basically trying to figure out what went wrong and what happened.
And the very quick response and rationale that I had was that there was some massive liquidation event on centralized exchanges.
Not KuCoin, I will say.
And this had caused this massive price decrease, which obviously was the talk of you know the
entire crypto space at the time so you know so maybe yeah to explain to our audience who is not
familiar with this concept so what do you call mass liquidation because as far as people would
be aware like they're just seeing mantra om token being able to be traded on each of our platforms. So what could possibly be these liquidations to start with?
Sure. So, you know, to be honest,
I'm not entirely sure how perpetuals work on KuCoin,
at least when it comes to the OM market or how, you know,
how you'd leverage this to be able to take it with OM on KuCoin specifically.
But in general, other exchanges or exchanges allow for different types of collateral positions
to be used to take leverage trades directionally.
And in this instance, Ohm was allowed to be used as collateral.
And when Ohm was used as collateral for leveraged Ohm positions,
you're effectively putting risk on risk, basically.
And, you know, effectively what happened was there was, you know, a sharp price decrease, which, you know, I think there's been some really good third party analysis from kind of crypto researchers called TraderView2.
He had a couple couple interesting threads based
off the the trading data that he was able to analyze and ltrd that basically were able to
show kind of that there was effectively this kind of like targeted um trade put on that really tried
to push the price in order to hunt liquidation levels And what we're then seeing is that as that occurred,
these kind of liquidations occurred on other exchanges, which kind of resulted in this very drastic price decrease. And then that was compounded by additional short selling,
compounded by additional misinformation, and all different things that basically
caused this kind of cascading downward spiral. And as you know,
collateral was seized and liquidated their own collateral,
it actually just meant more selling because then that collateral started being
sold. So it really was this, you know,
quite unfortunate and messy scenario that occurred on
exchanges. And, you know, to be honest, we're still, you're still in the process of trying to get full information from various
exchanges, but so far haven't really been able to get that information that we've requested
or that's being requested to paint the full picture.
Do you know when, where this, like, let's say this push down on the price started uh sunday night uh uae monday
early morning asia so i think around like maybe which which platform oh which exchange um
the big yellow one okay okay okay interesting um but by the way I want to make it very clear, I'm not insinuating that they had anything
to do with this.
I want to make it very clear.
They have enough users for that.
In general, I think the market movement started in the perpetual market and obviously the perpetual
market of Ohm on that platform is the biggest and most liquid.
Yep, absolutely.
And actually, that's maybe a question that we'll come back to because like from your recording of events, the liquidity seems to be an issue here.
that for whatever reason, market makers and your team even were not ready to counter such an action, right?
Like from what it seems to have been the set of events.
So, well, maybe we can dig into this a bit later.
What potential mechanisms could have led to this you already mentioned and what are
the the causes that you suspect you uh personally after what you learned throughout the week like
what what do you think happened sure well i think it was it's actually know, relatively clear what happened. I mean, before, before the price crash,
what would be the, the interest for an actor, a stakeholder to do that? Like what, yeah, you see what I mean?
What could happen?
So, you know, I don't want to necessarily say that this was
maliciously intended to, you know, hurt Mantra or the community or our project or anyone involved.
I can't say that and I don't want to insinuate it and I don't know it.
But someone definitely profited or benefited from this trade and maybe the trade was just a trade.
But someone was able to take advantage and kind
of hunt these liquidation levels maybe there was awareness and information um about that that
obviously if that was the case then maybe there's something a bit more nefarious behind the scenes
but i don't know that and you know there's only a few select people in the world who would know
that type of uh information um and because of that's kind of the, yeah, which is unfortunate, but hopefully in due
course, you know, additional information will be able to come out. And, you know, obviously,
we're going to continue to try to work with exchanges and other people to get as much
information and obviously share it as much as possible with the community whenever we do know it.
But this was unprecedented.
I think it highlighted a lot of different things in the industry that need more transparency.
And I think the fact that these leverage positions were able to be taken within the confines and bounds in terms of conditions of platforms and allowed this
to get to the size that it did to cause the impact that it did.
And I think this does call for a little bit of a review of kind of what are we doing.
And hopefully this will be a good opportunity for us to continue to improve those processes,
good opportunity for us to continue to improve those processes, continue to work on risk
mitigation policies and create a healthier, better space.
And I know that on our side, we're absolutely committed to that.
And we're going to try to lead from our perspective with what we can do on providing transparent
information about our token, our holdings.
And I think we've already committed.
Well, so we already put out a
statement of events this week that kind of stated exactly what happened. And it also kind of
reshared the, you know, the fact that like the team didn't sell, the investors didn't sell,
and they all put out their wallets and published them. We'd actually put out a transparency report
around tokenomics and token holdings last week prior to this all happening. And we've committed to putting out a public dashboard
that has live token balances
of different vesting buckets
as well as team holdings, basically.
So this is something that I think
the space needs to do more.
And actually, I believe we may even be posting that
either today or tomorrow.
So we're working on trying to bring this
enhanced transparency.
This is a V1 of that,
but we want to continue to get feedback from the community
and continue to make sure that everyone can make
whatever investment decision they need to
based off as much available information as possible.
Okay.
And so this will be set probably this week.
What we'll do most probably is once this interview is over,
we will add all the links that we
mentioned throughout the space
as first comment to
the thread so that people can find it back
most easily. Amazing. Appreciate that.
Okay, nice.
Well, two questions then that
deride directly from what you mentioned.
First, what
are your market makers' opinion about it?
Because I guess you have been working.
I know that the names of the market makers
actually know some of their teams personally.
And there are serious teams,
so they must have seen it happening.
And do you have some kind of opinion
that they have about the
situation did uh was there like some lack of um i would say was there some mistakes made in the
responsiveness and from your perspective obviously and was there maybe also um how how could we say
There may be also, how could we say, as you mentioned, there are only a few people that could have known the situation before it happened.
Could it be on the table that there was an initial risk that very few people were aware of on the token, considering the liquidity issues and that actually there was an exploit there from
like internal obviously internal mischief malicious action sure so I guess on the first one
you know we we obviously worked very closely with all of our our trading partners and liquidity
providers they're all of our investors as well, as I mentioned before.
But I think fundamentally, the broader public doesn't necessarily understand the role of
what a market maker is supposed to do.
They're supposed to provide effectively passive liquidity that's delta neutral and not take
directional risk on a token.
Exactly.
Right. token um right so um obviously when you know this whole incident went down um you know no matter i
mean to be honest the way that you know these models work is you know you have these loan
option models right and i've discussed that on a on a podcast with zach from genzio um because this
has become a big point of contention like you know your market makers are doing something wrong or what so have you. And what we've seen is that market makers in this situation had no power to do anything to really stem this
just because of the sheer volume and sheer size.
And one thing that is actually quite clear and was a bit of misinformation in the market
was that not all the data was actually publicly provided
transparently by exchanges. And some of the trading data during those hours has been scrubbed
from the public record. And I think that's something that needs to be cleared up. And
actually, it's great that we had third-party analysts like TraderView2 and LTRD, who came
out and did some really deep research into what actually went down looking in the trading data
based off of information that we were able to pull from active participants in the market,
including from some of the information from our market making partners, because it was made, you know, it was basically hidden.
And this is something that, again, you know, we want to, you know, continue to hold to a very high standard, our exchange partners.
And we hope they do the same thing with us because, you know because exchanges request information from token projects all the time.
And generally speaking, it doesn't go the other way.
So I think it is important that as a community,
it's something that we should be understanding
what are the risks of trading anywhere.
What is the leverage in the system?
And how can it work?
And I think from the second part of your question uh you
know about like people being aware of risk and whatnot you know generally i think what you're
able to see is that if you look actually and you know i've corroborated this in in another uh in
other um interviews like there was risk and leverage on you know exchanges that then got
moved around to other exchanges,
again, all within the confines in terms of business of these exchange platforms.
So they were able to accept the risk that they took on
and the leverage that was put on these exchange platforms.
But in one situation versus the other, the risk was unwound professionally
and you didn't see a cascade and uh you know this massive
massive you know price collapse right so i think it's really important that like we also um you
know have professional um processes and you know um you know management of of risk like this because
frankly speaking this could happen to to any crypto project that has leverage on its token if it's not managed
properly. Like on a Sunday night, it's the absolute worst time to unwind something like this. Honestly,
I fundamentally believe that if this had went down on Monday, it wouldn't have. Even if the price
dipped, it wouldn't have had the same cascading impact because you would have been able to manage the situation much better.
And so that's what one could ask himself, like in the end, the whole setting and you're right to mention it, to mention specifically it happens during the weekend, obviously, when the teams are less responsive, etc, etc.
So which really brings the conversation back to, in the end, isn't there a very limited set of people that could have had the information to put up such an operation, which in your case could help you to, you know, like, obviously get to the potential usual suspects much, much faster.
usual suspects much faster.
Yeah, I mean, you know, again, we would love to use this as an opportunity for both Mantra
and the broader community to provide information more transparently.
And I think it will help the industry mature so we can all avoid situations like this happening
again, because, you know, it's not good for anyone to have this happen.
It's not good for the industry. But I think it was very, very important for us to, you know,
show up, to be present, to be communicative. You know, I appreciate you guys having me on here.
But, you know, when I was in Korea on the day that it was going down, we were supposed to be
hosting an RWA summit that day. And I still wanted to go and show up and make sure that everyone knows that hey mantra is not running we're not hiding you know yeah we didn't we didn't
went out obviously exactly we didn't we didn't you know we didn't sell we didn't you know rug pull or
anything like that and you know i think our actions in the resulting you know a couple days
um you know show that hey we're here we, we're committed and we want to move forward as best as we can.
Obviously, understanding that this has been a traumatic situation
and we want to be there for the community during this tough time.
But we're still here and we're still building.
Okay, nice.
So we'll get to this part very soon, actually,
because there is a lot, I hope, in stocks on your end.
Yep.
Then I watched a couple of your recent interviews
obviously after what happened you were mentioning uh these uh loans also a bit earlier uh so the
the loans that you you make with the so selling through otc technically the tokens that are still
vested that are still like locked for people to understand clearly so tokens
that cannot be uh like sold on the market in uh in any order book but uh you are able to get the
like tether or whatever counterpart uh to these uh to these tokens that you offer to buyers in OCC.
And then with this extra liquidity, you are able to, let's say,
so there have been accusations of pumping or whatever, but I would say most generally support the movements,
the price movements of the token.
That would be like my way to frame it because
it's actually i mean it's not specific to mantra actually we know it's happening with a lot of uh
tokens lots of crypto projects on the market uh coming back to your point that it could have
happened to other projects yes it could definitely so So like this mechanism, what you what could you say about it? Like in terms of scale, in terms of how much of the supply is actually locked in these conditions? Like what is to be expected?
Yeah, sure. So, you know, I think this was kind of propagated on the initial interview I did with CoffeeZilla on the evening of the first day.
It was like the last interview I did at like 1 a.m. or something.
And, you know, I think there was a little bit of a positioning that this was some sort of nefarious act that we did.
But basically, we, you know, we raised capital and the way that, you know, you can raise capital is twofold, right?
You can either sell equity in a business or you can sell tokens.
And in these cases, we would sell vested, long-dated tokens in accordance to our public
emissions schedule or longer- longer dated right so like the particular you know allocation that I'm
referring to is a it's called the seed bucket it's been publicly shared in our
public and it could be visible on the dashboard that you're officially putting
well it's it's available on the dashboard but it's also been been
available in all the historical, you know,
communications around tokenization, sorry, tokenomics that we've ever,
ever put out into the market for, I mean, for months, even,
even over a year now, to be honest.
So we have the seed bucket and we would sell tokens from that.
We didn't sell them all at the same time.
We haven't even sold all of them to date.
And, you know,
the reason for that is to basically help fund
the growth of the business, to pay for operational expenses,
to pay for marketing campaigns and initiatives.
And also in some cases when there's excess capital
to repurchase tokens off the market,
that helps support the liquidity of the market
and potentially can be sold later, right?
And I say potentially because one, we never did sell.
And two, we never had any intention to sell at any time because, you know, we still had
ample supply in the seed bucket to be able to sell going forward.
So effectively, this got turned into some sort of like you guys pump the price.
So effectively, this got turned into some sort of like, you guys pump the price.
I think I said on CoffeeZilla that I did, or that we did, I should say, like, you know,
roughly 10 million-ish or so of buyback.
And I think it's closer to like 13 or so.
We're still working on getting the final numbers, which, you know, I've already committed to
putting transparently out into the market, this type of information.
And it was, you know, in the bigger scheme of things, I would consider it relatively
nominal, given how much volume OM does and how big it trades in the fact that we did these type
of purchases, repurchases, you know, over the course of basically a year. So I was doing some
basic, like, basically, what you're going to be able to see in this transparency report is
how much was done and how much this compared to the average actual you know
a volume of of the time period when these uh repurchases happened okay okay and all this
information will be available well we will add it uh obviously in the list of things uh absolutely
appreciate that okay uh so yeah in this regard um like from from what I guess we can understand at this stage, just to have an order of magnitude, what kind of size of position do you think could have caused the initial price drop that started the cascade of liquidations afterwards?
price drop that started the cascade of liquidations afterwards?
And what size in terms of percentage of the circulating token?
That's a good question.
I'm not entirely sure, to be completely honest.
I think the person who's done the most deep research on it,
but again, this is just their assertions
and not necessarily,
it doesn't even actually say this in there,
is that Trade Review 2 document from Dom.
And it says something that there was initial selling,
like a significant market sell of Ohm on the spot market
on one exchange right around the time.
And then this was perpetuated and compounded
by massive perp
selling on the other one which drove down price dramatically and then kind of kicked off this
liquidation like these liquidations and i'm from my understanding these liquidations were you know
massive in the hundreds of millions of dollars yep but so the initial uh movement there is no
estimate at the moment uh in terms of the size of the position that we actually started?
My understanding that it was, you know, millions of tokens per second, basically.
Like, it was a lot.
Yeah, so once again, we're talking about a very restricted amount of potential unusual suspects there.
So this was not an average retail person or
it was a retail or whatever yeah it was someone big okay so once again in this
set of in this set of information that there must be I mean hopefully you'll
get to the bottom of it as fast as possible but you also mentioned that you
were able to show from the beginning that the
team's allocations were absolutely not involved in the whole process. So hopefully this will also
share as a link for people to be able to check on-chain data. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So basically,
the three documents that can kind of show that is one, the, the public transparency
report, which is called understanding on that we put out
the week prior to this event transpiring is a good one. These,
the statement of events that we put out this week, and then that
dashboard that we will be sharing within the next, you
know, either today or tomorrow, will clearly show that, you know,
actually nothing, nothing moved from our side. And our investors. I want to put out there as well for our investors,
because a lot of our investors were getting dragged through the month that they participated
in this as well. You know, they fortunately came out and, you know, made strong statements
and, you know, shared their wallets as well. And, you know, really refuted the claims that
they were participating in this in an unfair way as well as well um so i do want to say thanks to their support it's been um it's been tough for all of us but they've been standing by
us and uh we're going to continue pushing going forward okay one last question before we switch
to the future actions because that's actually also very important for people listening to us
one last question what would you have done differently should have it been uh another
day of the week when the team is active, etc.
What could have been done to offset this differently?
I mean, again, I think in different words, the thing people have asked me, what do I
regret?
And honestly, my biggest regret is the fact that I went to sleep Sunday night.
And I just, I I mean I'm serious like
I just wonder if I could have helped or done something different um been there faster quicker
or or whatever um when it was all going down to uh to help it yeah I mean that's that's the worst
feeling to be honest what features what mechanism could have been used to actually,
like what did you have in stock to help counter it
if you had been on deck?
I mean, honestly, some of this stuff is just around communication, right?
Like I didn't know that there was, you know,
a margin call or some sort of liquidation event about to be happening.
But if, you know, maybe the exchange could have came and said something to us in
the middle of it, and maybe we would have been able to do something to support it.
And this is a lot of what ifs and a lot of woulda, coulda, shouldas, I guess.
But I guess the, you know, the one thing that, you know, we have done in the events transpiring is just to be in constant communication with the exchanges to make sure that, hey, we're looking at these leverage situations again and just making sure that something like this won't happen again. position that's the most obvious question that most communities not only about mantra not only
mantra community but that's the most obvious question that most communities will have and
always have is are the projects that we are putting our trust our money in ready to counter
such an attack or to be responsive enough to mitigate the effects of such an attack and uh
will it happen again that That's the point.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess the, like, to be completely honest,
this, if, you know, for whatever reason,
you know, collateral ratios are not changed
or terms of business are not kind of adjusted
on exchanges that allow for this type of risk
to be utilized, where you have, you know,
your own token being used as collateral
for leveraged positions on that token, you know, that's obviously risky, right? Cause then
fundamentally the collateral is tied to the leverage. Um, and, you know, I think that's
just a naturally, uh, something that needs to be kind of adjusted because it's like,
you know, I think it's kind of like giving, you know, um, like needles and, you know like needles and you know pipes to drug addicts right like
you're kind of feeding yeah that's maybe a better way to say it so it is you
know it really is a problem and you know hopefully we can kind of get away from
this and you know frankly you know this probably should be one of the major
discussions going forward.
How do we make this a safer, more legitimate industry?
And I guess, you know, from the team perspective, like, you know, we're just trying to do everything
we can to show that we're still here.
We're still fighting.
We're still pushing.
And we're going to do everything we can to bring it back and do what's right by our community.
bring it back and do what's right by our community. And we're not going to stop until that happens.
And we're not going to stop until that happens.
Right.
this is when we have to, you know, really put up or shut up. And, you know, it's a tough time for
all of us. It's a tough time for our community, but this is our opportunity to do what's right.
And to be remembered in a more positive fashion. Yep. So let's switch then to the specific actions that you intend to take in order to reassure the community, as well as all stakeholders, I guess, all your more institutional stakeholders, etc.
So I guess there are different sets of actions that you intend to take, more organized towards the community, organized towards the stakeholders, larger institutional
investors, et cetera. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So, and I think we
came out with a couple like set of action plans that had been put out to the community about what
we're going to do about it. You know, first and foremost, we wanted to get the statement of events
out there about what transpired, what happened. So people can have, you know, fundamentally,
you know, the right information that they can then formulate
their own opinions on one way or the other. That we've already done. We're going to be putting out
this public dashboard, and this is, again, just a V1. I invite everyone to look at it and to ask
for more information and request more features so that we can continually add them over time
around token holdings, around buildup of tokens on exchanges, around emission schedules. All this stuff is very critical
information. And we want to make sure that the users that are holding home and the community
members that are part of our ecosystem can have that at their fingertips readily available and
and always up to date.
always up to date. So that's something, again, I think it's actually coming out today.
So that's something, again, I think it's actually coming out today.
Then the burn program is something that was kind of become a very hot topic.
I said that in kind of solidarity and in alignment with the community,
I would burn my personal team allocation.
I think it got misconstrued a little bit that I was burning all the team's allocation.
I won't speak for them, but I can speak for myself. So I want to burn, or I, you know, I, I am going to be burning my, my tokens.
There was some feedback about like, Hey, you're not going to be incentivized to work on this
anymore. And frankly speaking, I think I have all the incentive in the world to clear my name up.
And for now that honestly, pretty much everyone in
the crypto space knows Mantra and knows me, I have every reason in the world to make it right.
But aside from that, I think we do have a plan in place that fundamentally will make sure that
people still feel like there is alignment and there still is an incentive for us to continue
building and continue working on Mantra and driving as much value towards almost humanly possible.
So, you know, obviously we'll be putting that out in, you know, imminently, basically.
We're working as well on some buyback programs to instill confidence into the market.
And, you know, honestly, a lot of it is continued business as usual, right? We need to continue showing that some of these, you know, partnerships, that some of these
kind of institutional relationships
and our efforts
to bring tokenized assets
on chain are continuing.
You know, we have a few
announcements
around some of the tech
initiatives that we launched,
you know, particularly around,
you know, the EVM
kind of implementation
that we've been working on
for our chain that's coming.
So, you know while
we want to make sure we can control the narrative and get our side of the story out there transparently
communicate to everyone who's you know a part of this horrendous situation um it's still business
as usual as mantra we need to keep shipping we need to keep building um and we need to keep uh
you know uh doing what we can to to make this right it's pretty much non-stop no around the clock activity
for us just you know okay so that would mean an update of the roadmap yep yep okay so when can
the community expect it to be out probably weeks yeah i would say coming days i mean it'll be not
basically it's all non-stop for us right now i
mean this is a round the clock 24 7 uh thing and there's nothing more important than this right now
okay definitely so yes guys please stay tuned to mantra if you want to learn the last updates
that will be coming along in the next couple of days uh you have the official account of the ceo
john here with us please do
not go and try to look for it elsewhere and find some kind of copycat or fishing link or whatever
you have the opportunity to follow the news from the project right from here and I guess you have
obviously the official account of Mantra also in your contacts shown So you can find it from John's account as well.
Okay, okay, okay.
And about the stakeholders,
like the more institutional side of the business,
is there something,
because obviously now that there are all these OTC loans
and the others in the works,
there is also a threat of institutional investors
to not be as enthusiastic
to be part of the project
as they used to.
How would you mitigate that risk?
Yeah, I mean, to be honest,
we're very fortunate
that our investor base
is super aligned.
They've been very, very supportive
and we've actually had
a large number of people
reach out to actively extend
their own vesting okay um which yeah which is which is great which will be shown on the dashboard
once again right this would all be shown on the dashboard because we'd have to update our tokenomic
emission schedule yes oh right now every everyone is here to basically um you know support the
project and support our community during this tough time.
I mean, in some ways they're also supporting themselves because if you're liquidating at
a, you say what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, obviously, you know, in the end of the day, everyone wants to make money here,
right?
At least from the investor perspective.
And, you know, I think, again,
It's because there is no term vision still.
Absolutely.
100%. And, you know, again, if we didn't keep building, if we didn't show up and, you know, I think there is no vision still. Absolutely. A hundred percent. And, you know, again, if we didn't keep, if we didn't keep building, if we didn't show
up and, you know, face the music, so to speak, if we didn't come to the front lines and say,
Hey, we're going to, you know, we're not like we're wounded, but we're not giving up.
Then, you know, then why would they choose to do this if they didn't feel like we were
still fighting?
If we didn't have, you know, a strong pipeline of partnerships and information and products coming.
So we're fortunate that we have these type of investors behind us that are in the trenches with us.
Absolutely.
And have you actually, I didn't check, but is it in the works such a feature like Aave did recently,
feature like uh recently you know where they the use of the protocol actually uh creates um rewards
for the holders instead of only for the for the protocol is it something that you're investigating
also for your users or uh it hasn't been on the table yet yeah absolutely so actually i want to do
i want to give a quick shout out because uh one these supporters slash people that has been keeping us very publicly accountable on Twitter is on the space, Crypto Fundamentalist.
I promised them that I would be doing a value accrual video, and I will be doing that value accrual video.
I think that's a good opportunity to share that with all you guys about how we're seeing value accrual within the ecosystem and and how we're going to be working towards driving
that value back to home holders so that is something that as well that's coming okay so
guys definitely stay tuned there will be a lot in the works in the coming days so on my end uh i am
i'm all through with these specific actions that we intend to take. Maybe it's time to go to the community and see what kind of questions we have in the thread.
So guys, as I mentioned,
as I mentioned, if it's only about emotional reaction,
which is totally understandable,
and I think John really empathizes with you as well
and is really trying to make it it work for for the best for everyone
but we will not be picking obviously such questions as they won't add value for other
people who are listening at the moment so let's see uh is it possible a good one is it possible to talk to
exchanges to put some sort of trading circuit breaker mechanisms in place for crazy fluctuations
as we see in tradition trade fire right as we see in transfer yeah, right? As we see in TradFi, yeah. I mean, I think that in general is an interesting, you know, question.
That's more important for us, though.
Yeah.
Well, you know, again, I think this is an opportunity for Mantra
to lead in transparency and, you know, be a part of the conversation,
you know, with exchanges and, you know try to bring forward um this space to
become more mature um and and become safer for investors um so i you know obviously i can't
enact that with exchanges but i do think it's something that uh would be relevant
i think i have a couple of questions about uh this last month token unlocks uh would you yeah
i've seen it from defi viking yeah ask about
token unlocks that occurred this month still no mention of them or where they went i'm not entirely
sure what what he means by token unlocks that have already occurred but there are future ones meant
to occur later this month and as i mentioned earlier these are from investors who have um
you know in many cases already reached out saying
that they want to extend their vesting, you know, enhance and take more of a cliff, you know, so
that they feel aligned. So what is the way we put it? Well, so, you know, again, the public,
the public admission schedule for this bucket was a six plus 12 month unlocking schedule. And that means that from the
end of this month for another year, there'll be daily unlocking of investors. And again,
these are the tokens that we're talking about, you know, enhancing the cliff to give, you know,
a few more months at least of time before they would actually receive anything.
Okay.
Maybe he could also be referring to the airdrop, the Gendrop.
So we didn't have this Gendrop campaign that went on and those tokens were
received, I believe, at the end of last month.
So that has already gone into the market.
And I guess in your dashboard, you could add the, like,
the objective is obviously to have as much clarity and also
maybe to understand for investors especially retail investors where they stand compared to
more institutional and what kind of types of decisions are being taken so i guess having the
aggregated data of like the the amount of vested tokens uh the percentage that is being uh
re rescheduled etc like for for people to be
able to to prepare now because i guess absolutely yep okay so this you say it will be out today
uh well the v1 will be yes so i think there's going to be i mean we we are very much open to
feedback and suggestions here i'm looking at the comments again.
Crypto Fundamentals has another good one.
Follow up to the team commit to publishing a framework or dashboard that allows home holders to track protocol revenue, token syncs, ecosystem growth metrics.
So this dashboard can be used for a lot of things.
It can be used for tracking token flows.
It can be used for tracking development of the ecosystem.
It can be used for tracking wallets and you know seeing publicly transparent tokenomic
details and i think you know we're fully committed to all of that i think it'll be a great thing for
the community and a great thing to have in the space as a basic standard of expectations
yep actually maybe this will be then reproduced by other hopefully hopefully so i have a couple of questions about the burn of your
allocation uh so one first is can you categorically confirm that you will burn your your allocation
and the second one is when you're um talking about your allocation are you um are you meaning the
300 million tokens which are about to which are vested in 2027
or just your 700K tokens?
I mean, so, okay.
So I don't have 300 million tokens that are meant for me.
But the tokens that are allocated were allocated for myself
as part of the team.
Again, the backstory here is that, you know,
Mantra had an ERC token that fully vested its team
in advisor allocation years ago,
and I repurposed those and put them back into the business
and revested everything for the future.
Anything that is, you know, in my public wallet,
I've purchased myself, earned from staking
or other activities, right?
I'm talking about the future allocation of tokens um that i'd be burning i'm not going to burn the ones that i
have in my wallet but i'm just staking those and i want to continue taking them currently they're
liquid staked on one of the liquid staking protocols called fluxstra and they remain there
and they'll be visible to everyone. Absolutely. Okay.
Okay.
But yes, I will 100% be burning my tokens.
That is categorically a fact.
But again, I want to talk about the fact that I also think that there will be some ways that we can make sure that the community and investors know that I'm in it for the long haul.
There will still be alignment. And one of the ways that we're thinking of this is to have milestone-based incentives for the future that when hit, it can be a big upside opportunity,
but it's gonna be very significant.
It's a little bit like what Elon did
with his Tesla shares,
where when he hit these milestones and targets,
he was able to unlock upside.
Okay, well, hopefully it will work just as well.
Then one question from Igor Tatourin.
Maybe I missed this question.
I wanted to ask how soon will you provide a plan
for the buyback and burning of OAN tokens?
So I guess, as we mentioned,
this will be in the coming days.
Yes.
The burn, at least yes.
Yep.
So Igor, stay tuned.
The plan is coming in the in the coming days and that's about uh most of the interesting questions i see that could bring added value to
the community listening to us at the moment if there is one more that you will be uh i see what
will be your target price to reach for your upcoming buyback.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not going to comment.
I'm not commenting on that.
Okay, okay.
Well, that would be some long-term commitment, let's say.
Okay.
So actually, one thing I will tell you.
So DeFi Viking is asking about the OM upgrade, I think.
Those tokens are still coming, DeFi Viking.
Okay. Yeah, so anyway, we've answered his questions twice. then those tokens are still coming DeFi Viking okay
so anyway
we've answered his questions twice
so on
my end that's all I see
once again if you see one
last question you may select it
or if there is one aspect that you
think we may have overlooked
throughout the interview some point you
think you want to put the emphasis on
before we wrap it up?
Please do not.
Maybe just one super quick question
and then maybe I can just kind of close off.
So CJBTC, he had asked about some of the Kaitobe rewards.
I just want to, again, make a statement
that the Kaitobe rewards that we had going out
are in conversation to increase
given the token price has decreased. At least
in terms of ohm amount of ohm right. So people who are yapping and sharing information about
the community, you know, we're going to continue to support them and incentivize going forward.
Okay. So anyway, that's that last bit. And then, yeah, I mean, I guess I appreciate you
having you having us on here. This is the first exchange that we've been able to do an AMA with in the midst of this crazy, crazy week.
You know, I just want to kind of continue.
I definitely will not be the last.
But, you know, I just want to say thanks for that.
I want to say thanks for everyone for tuning in on a holiday weekend.
You know, it's Easter weekend.
And, you know, just in general tuning in on the weekend
to hear about what went down, what we're doing about it.
And for everyone who's asked good questions,
again, please don't refrain from asking the tough questions.
Let's try to set a new standard
for accountability, transparency, and move the space forward.
I really appreciate everyone for, you know, the messages of support.
And, you know, for those who are not so supportive
in the public, you know, please do point that towards me
and don't, you know, do not, you know,
say these type of things to the team
who had nothing to do with it.
So appreciate everyone.
Thanks for having us on.
We're going to continue to work over the weekend
and the coming days.
It's wartime for us and we're here and we're not going anywhere.
Thanks, John. So thanks again for joining today. It has been a very informative session. I hope we're able to provide you guys with as much information, both about the events and what's planned ahead and to help you make the best decision once again this
was absolutely not any kind of advices in investment or whatsoever this was
really to bring you the latest news and hopefully there will be even more news
coming through with the further interviews that John will be having in
the coming weeks with more information coming back from
interview, let's say. Hopefully this will work out well. We'll be here as always. KuCoin will
be supportive of all the projects we have on the platform. Well, thanks again, John. I hope we were
able to answer some of your questions, guys. If there are still some, please do not hesitate to tag us along in the thread and we'll try to come back to it.
And as mentioned, we will publish the links of all the sources John and I mentioned throughout
the interview so that you may have a follow-up of the sources where to fall back to. So thanks
again for joining. This has been very informative.
Happy Easter, everyone, nonetheless.
And have a nice weekend.
Ciao.
Ciao.
Happy Easter.
