By
Bena Ilyas
April 22nd, 2024
Mango Markets obviously has a positive stance with retail investors which culminated in the success of its token sale.
Mango Markets, a decentralized exchange built atop the Solana blockchain network has concluded the sales of its MNGO tokens, raising as much as $70 million from investors. As reported by Coindesk, the actual funds pulled came in at $70,462,383, the entirety of which was locked in the Mango Markets smart contracts.
Mango Markets pride itself as the first Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) built on the Solana network with on-chain governance capabilities. The platform provides a number of products including Spot Market offerings where Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL) and Serum (SRM) can be cross-collaterized. The platform also offers decentralized lending where anyone can earn interests on deposits, and take out collateralized loans against its supported assets.
The massive $70 million funding is uncommon amongst decentralized finance protocols. The funding threshold the project attained has reaffirmed the potentials inherent in the Solana ecosystem. The capital raised according to the Coindesk report is billed to be used to power the project’s insurance funds. This will help provide guaranteed security, in case the protocol suffers any form of smart contract exploitation. Sources close to the project told Coindesk the protocol has often cautioned its token holders there is no guarantee that the smart contracts are immune from attacks.
The funds accrued through the token sales take its backing from the $314 million Solana Labs raised back in June. The round was led by a private American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from FTX Derivatives exchange Founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Solana, Mango and the Security of DeFi Protocols
How secured are DeFi protocols? This question has stirred a debate in the cryptocurrency ecosystem all week long as the news of the exploitation of interoperability protocol, Poly Network made the rounds. The platform which bridges and allows for interconnectivity between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon was hacked and the incidence lead to the removal of over $600 million in user’s funds spread across the three blockchain networks.
The digital currency ecosystem has seen a number of cybercrimes over time, however, the Poly Network exploitation came as the largest in DeFi’s history to date. Drawing on this, a good amount of decentralized application users on Twitter and other social media networks have questioned the safety measures that can prevent such occurrences in these protocols.
Mango Markets obviously has a positive stance with retail investors which culminated in the success of its token sale. While the Solana blockchain has not suffered a major bug vulnerability to date, the underlying Mango protocol’s best preparation for such occurrence is to continually review its smart contract, and secure an insurance fund as was noted earlier.
The popularity of cryptocurrency projects is gradually increasing by the day. The Poly Network hacking has revealed that blockchain protocols are not immune to exploitation. A smart way to mitigate risks and losses is via the capital allocation or investment in insurance funds, a niche that has started gaining traction in the digital currency world.