Mento Airdrop and Governance AMA with Mento Labs Founders
June 14 2024
by Victoria Calmon
What is the Mento platform? Can you explain what it's all about for those who are new to the community?
Mento Labs spun off from cLabs about a year and a half ago to develop the Mento Platform, a fully decentralized EVM platform for launching and operating local stablecoins. Local stablecoins (stablecoins in different currencies) in addition to USD-stablecoins enable not only local currency payments, but also on-chain FX, (micro-) credit and funding, hedging, saving, or UBI. Mento features a virtual AMM that allows users to swap stablecoins efficiently, with the Mento reserve as liquidity provider.
The suite of smart contract tools the Mento Labs’ team developed allows the community to easily release new stablecoins into the market. While USD-stablecoins are widely used in trading within regions with robust banking infrastructure, in many parts of the world, access to financial infrastructure should be a basic human right. The Mento Platform is designed to deploy and operate local stablecoins effectively, providing an efficient FX market to support them and enhance financial accessibility globally.
How does the Mento Platform address global financial challenges, particularly in developing economies?
From day one, the Mento and Celo community had the goal to make currencies accessible globally, even on low-end phones, to support saving, lending, borrowing, payments, and remittances. Remittance fees are still high, averaging 6-7% globally according to World Bank statistics, but much higher especially in the global south. Making local currency stablecoins easily available can reduce costs. For microlending, there's a huge credit gap in emerging markets, and local currency credit can help bridge this gap. By offering a platform where users can save in a stable dollar and borrow in a local currency, Mento provides a powerful tool against local inflation and expensive foreign currency loans. Decentralized and open-source infrastructure also helps that the platform is tailored to local needs, local partners on the ground who understand the market can operate local stablecoins. The platform provides the infrastructure while they leverage their local expertise.
Let's go over the achievements Mento has reached so far. Can you talk about some partnerships and IRL activations to inform users about Mento’s active presence in various regions?
Mento has been around for the last four years, but in its current form, it's been about a year and a half. Two more stablecoins were added to the platform, currently counting five: Celo Dollar, Celo Euro, Celo Real, West African Franc, and Kenyan Shilling, with many more on the roadmap. The community has also done a major update to the protocol, which allows the Mento Platform to offer stablecoins backed by different types of collateral.
Mento now offers improved oracle infrastructure with partners like RedStone and Chainlink. In terms of user adoption, we're excited about wallets like Opera MiniPay in Africa, which gives the Mento stable, cUSD, access to millions of users, making it the second-most used stablecoin in the world. We're seeing increasing velocity of money among users There's significant momentum with Valora and microlending platforms like Haraka and impactMarket. There are also partnerships with HaloFi for savings and Ammer Cards for payments with POS infrastructure backed by Mento stablecoins. Mento is integrated with several routers, e.g. SquidRouter, allowing easy transactions from e.g. USDt on Ethereum to cUSD on Celo. The Mento Labs team has been active in events like ETHDenver, the Africa Money and DeFi Summit in Nairobi, and upcoming events like the Stable Summit in July.
Now, let's talk about internal developments and any alpha you can share with us today.
Users can find more and more currencies on Mento. To scale this even more, to allow for a multitude of decentralized stablecoins designed for specific use cases by diverse operators, the Mento Platform will offer a toolkit called Stablecoin Factory, still in development with milestones planned for this year. This development and more details on Mento can be found in the whitepaper. There are also exciting developments to share around Mento governance: the community voted on MENTO governance token. There is currently Episode 1 of the MENTO airdrop going on, and users can find out more about eligibility and how to claim here.
Origins of Mento Platform and Governance
Mento started as an initiative within cLabs and the Celo community. It became clear that Mento needed its own focus and governance, separate from Celo. This separation was achieved through a Celo governance vote, making Mento the only governance system fully born from another governance community. This new structure allows Mento to focus on local currency stablecoins and grow independently while still being rooted in the Celo ecosystem. And since MENTO has been voted into existence, the governance of the stablecoin platform has been decentralized from inception.
The governance token holders now have control over the core Mento smart contracts, community treasury, collateral for stablecoins, oracles, and exchange spreads. This decentralized control means they can decide how to allocate Mento Platform resources and grow adoption. It's an exciting time for Mento as a fully decentralized stablecoin platform.
Let's talk about the recent Airdrop. Can you give more details about what happened in Mento Airdrop “Episode 1”and what we can expect in “Episode 2”?
The initial airdrop was focused on retroactively rewarding existing participants in the Celo ecosystem—voters, stablecoin holders, and those who transacted with Mento stablecoins. We applied a dampening curve to ensure fair distribution, giving smaller allocations to high-volume participants and more balanced rewards overall. The airdrop started on Monday and this episode is currently gated by KYC, residents from the US, UK and some other countries are excluded from this airdrop. We're excited to see the community claiming their allocations and there will be future episodes.
What's planned for “Episode 2”?
We are focusing on growing the community by rewarding Mento stablecoin usage in partnership areas like Valora, MiniPay, HaloFi and many others. New community members who spread the word and engage with Mento content should also be rewarded. Details will be announced on Twitter and Mento Discord, so stay tuned. We are inviting everyone to join the Stablecoin Summer with us!
What's next for Mento after the initial airdrop?
The community is buzzing, every day we learn about new partnerships and developments in regions where Mento can have real utility. There are community discussions on currencies such as Colombian Peso, Philippine Peso, Ghanaian Cedi, or the Japanese Yen, all through strong local partnerships. The Mento Labs team is developing the Stablecoin Factory to scale the offerings sustainably.
To find out if you can claim your $MENTO tokens, check out the official Mento Airdrop page: https://airdrop.mento.org/
For more information follow @MentoLabs
Head on over to Discord to meet the community: http://discord.gg/mentolabs
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