Maximize Your Rewards: Makers and Takers Win Big

Mangrove’s reward system continues to offer incredible benefits for both market participants:

• Takers: Earn 0.01 MGV per $ of volume traded.

• Makers: Get 0.1 MGV per $ of effective volume provided.

The more you trade or provide liquidity, the more you earn. It’s that simple!

👉 Explore the full announcement and all details here: Epoch 5 Announcement

Passive Earnings Made Easy: Vault LP Rewards

Looking to maximize your DeFi potential? Don’t miss Mangrove’s Vault LP reward programs, running from December 23, 2024, to January 23, 2025.

🔑 How It Works:
1️⃣ Provide liquidity to any of Mangrove’s listed vaults.
2️⃣ Hold LP tokens to accrue rewards.
3️⃣ Claim your earnings once $MGV becomes transferable.

📊 Current Reward Rates (by Trading Pairs):

• ARB-USDC, WETH-USDC, WBTC-USDT, USDC-USDT: ~0.01 MGV/$/day

• weETH-WETH: ~35 MGV/ETH/day

💡 The earlier you join, the higher your potential returns!

👉 Learn more and get started here: Vault Rewards Guide

Start Trading and Growing Today!

Epoch 5 presents a unique opportunity for DeFi enthusiasts to increase their earnings through Mangrove’s cutting-edge platform. Whether you’re a trader, a liquidity provider, or both, the time to act is now.

🔗 Trade and provide liquidity today: app.mangrove.exchange

Let’s grow together, Mangrovians! 🌳

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💡 Hypothetical APR potential? ~36.5%.

Read the full article here.

https://mirror.xyz/mangrove%F0%9F%8C%B3.eth/2Oc3deHx1fiBemihrPbwwNHEZoqEWMvzIuWGtDninYw

Why Join Early?

Timing matters in Mangrove’s Vault LP programs. Early liquidity providers gain the most because:

1. Higher Share of Rewards: Early participants receive a larger proportion of rewards before the pool grows.

2. Better Returns: Slightly better rewards per dollar of liquidity are available to those who deposit earlier.

It pays to act fast!

How to Participate

Getting started is simple:

1. Provide liquidity to any of the listed vaults. https://app.mangrove.exchange/earn

2. Hold LP tokens to accrue rewards automatically.

3. Claim rewards once $MGV becomes transferable.

Start earning passively with Mangrove today! 💰

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Here’s how you can start earning:

• 💰 Takers receive 0.01 $MGV per $ of volume traded.

• 🛠️ Makers earn 0.1 $MGV per $ of effective volume.

At Mangrove, we’re redefining the DeFi trading experience:
Unlike traditional DEXs where liquidity is locked and underutilized, Mangrove allows you to trade, post offers, and unlock your assets—giving you endless opportunities.

Whether you’re a trader looking to maximize your volume or a liquidity provider aiming for higher returns, Epoch 3 is your chance to profit.

🔗 Want all the details? Dive into the full announcement here:
👉 Mangrove Epoch 3 on X

Let’s make this Epoch the most rewarding yet! 🌴

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💡 Why Mangrove Stands Out:
✅ $10M raised in seed and Series A rounds with backing from industry leaders like Wintermute, Greenfield Capital, Cumberland, CMT Digital, and Gumi Cryptos.
✅ Vaults powered by Kandel-Aave offer:

• Revenue Streams: Lending on Aave, profit-from-spread, and MGV incentives.

• Hands-Free Management: Vault managers optimize deposits for you!

🤝 We’re thrilled to welcome @Redacted Labs as our first vault manager! As France's first regulated DeFi desk, they bring MICA-compliant strategies that bridge crypto and TradFi.

Ready to explore the future of DeFi? Dive into Mangrove today and unlock the potential of optimized liquidity!

👉 https://app.mangrove.exchange/trade

Let’s shape the future of decentralized finance together! 💪

Ready to enter the world of DeFi and start earning? It’s simple! The WBTC-USDT vault on Mangrove is offering an impressive 21.20% APR this morning. All you need to do is:

1️⃣ Deposit your assets into the vault.
2️⃣ Let Redacted Labs handle the management for you.
3️⃣ Sit back and earn not only the vault’s high APR but also $MGV rewards as part of Mangrove’s incentive program! 🎉

With Mangrove vaults, there’s no need for complicated strategies or constant monitoring. Your assets remain unlocked, giving you the flexibility to maximize earnings while we handle the heavy lifting.

🔗 Start earning today: Access the WBTC-USDT Vault on Mangrove

Don’t miss this opportunity to step into DeFi and let your assets work smarter for you.

Subscribe now

Leveraging Mangrove’s liquidity engine and advanced DeFi strategies, these vaults are designed for maximum returns while managing risks.

✨ Supported pairs include:

WBTC-USDT

ETH-USDC

ARB-USDC.e

More pairs are on the way!

Learn how these vaults work, the yields you can earn, and how Mangrove’s dynamic liquidity solutions make this innovation possible!
Read more on X

🚀 Ready to earn? Explore the vaults here: https://app.mangrove.exchange/earn

🌟 What’s Inside the Program?

• For Takers: Earn rewards for every dollar of trading volume.

• For Makers: Get rewarded for competitive offers with better spreads, longer activity, and consistency.

• Special Rewards: Tailored incentives for Kandel LPs and community contributions.

• Epochs Overview: Dive into the details of the 6-epoch reward system, with over 10M MGV tokens up for grabs!

Read the full breakdown of our Incentives Program on Mirror].

👉 Plus, catch the Twitter thread with all the highlights here: https://x.com/MangroveDAO/status/1859597136599355418

Stay ahead in DeFi and discover how Mangrove rewards your efforts. Let’s build a dynamic, thriving trading ecosystem together! 🚀

Here’s what’s new:

• Enhanced Trading Experience: A redesigned interface for seamless swaps, bridges, limit orders, and market orders.

• Passive Earnings Made Easy: Our new Earn Page brings Vault Managers (like RedactedLabs) to handle strategies so you can earn without the hassle.

• Incentives for Real Users: With V2, the MGV governance token takes center stage, rewarding users for meaningful contributions to volume and liquidity.

🚀 Start trading now: https://app.mangrove.exchange/trade

📚 Learn more about Mangrove V2 in our updated dApp Guide: https://docs.mangrove.exchange/

🌳 Stay tuned for more updates on strategies, features, and incentives!

We're excited to delve into how Mangrove is optimizing your DeFi yield with our latest article. 

By leveraging our unique "Offer-is-Code" architecture, you can now:

• Source Liquidity Seamlessly: Utilize assets from any DeFi protocol without moving or locking funds.

• Optimize Kandel Strategies: Enhance your trading strategies by integrating liquidity from platforms like Aave.

• Implement Advanced Techniques: Explore strategies like the ETH-wstETH Loop, managed and enhanced by Kandel, for maximizing yields.

• Collaborate and Innovate: We're inviting DeFi strategists to join us in developing new routers and strategies.

This advancement not only maximizes capital efficiency but also fosters greater interoperability within the DeFi ecosystem.

🔗 Read the full article here

Let's push the boundaries of DeFi together!

Best regards, The Mangrove Team

📖 Read our latest article on how to take advantage of Kandel's features to maximize your DeFi returns!

🔗 Read the full article here

🌊 Welcome to the next chapter of our launch series! We're thrilled to announce the beta launch of the Mangrove DEX on Polygon's Mainnet - app.mangrove.exchange.

This is the opportunity to get involved as an early adopter with Mangrove, experience trading with an on-chain order book, and make use of market and advanced limit orders.

Subscribe now

Mangrove Beta 🌳 now on Polygon Mainnet

After a successful launch on the Polygon Testnet with over 6500 active monthly users, Mangrove is launching its beta on Polygon Mainnet with the USDC/USDT market, with zero fee applied. Early adopters will be rewarded based on their active participation and usage of the protocol. To take advantage of market orders and advanced limit orders, head over to app.mangrove.exchange.

Consult our dApp documentation for a comprehensive step-by-step guide on placing market and limit orders, and tracking your open orders and fills.

The Power of the 'Offer-is-Code' 📈

Mangrove introduces a novel "Offer-is-Code" approach, enabling liquidity providers to post smart-contract offers and advancing DeFi trading, enhancing control, flexibility, and efficiency while addressing fragmentation in the DeFi space.

Mangrove's ecosystem consists of Makers (liquidity providers), who post and own custom smart-contract offers, also known as smart offers. Takers, who buy or sell assets with market or limit orders; and Keeper bots, responsible for detecting and managing failing offers. For more information, refer to our article: Building the Future of DeFi together and to our documentation: Makers, Takers, Keepers.

Use Mangrove SDK & Craft custom maker contract 👨‍💻

The Mangrove SDK allows developers to write dApps that work with Mangrove’s ecosystem. Via SDK, you can post, update, or take advanced limit orders on the Mangrove order book directly from a command line interface.

The best starting point for connecting your dApp to Mangrove is the Getting Started section. If you just want to dive directly into reading about the technical details of the SDK, jump to the SDK Overview.

Developers can also build and use their own strategies to post offers. Mangrove’s strategy library assists in creating custom-maker contracts to post smart offers on Mangrove. The library offers several starting points to design your own maker contract to provide liquidity on Mangrove.

Stay tuned for our next announcements! 📣

To be among the first to discover our upcoming features and incentives program, follow us on Twitter and join the Mangrove community on Discord. 🌊

In the heart of the city known for its charm and spirit, Paris, a crypto event is taking shape. The Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), Europe's premier Ethereum event, is all set for a grandeur display of community engagement, cutting-edge technology, and knowledge exchange on July 17-20, 2023. Embodying the ethos of a communal celebration, the event promises four days of intense conferences, networking, and learning.

At Mangrove, we're pleased to announce our broad participation during EthCC6 week. As a sponsor of EthCC, we'll be at our booth on the DeFi days in building B, ground floor (Collège des Bernardins, 20 Rue de Poissy, 75005 Paris), the 17th and 18th of July, ready to engage, share insights, and connect. Furthermore, we'll present Mangrove’s “offer-is-code” approach on the main stage of EthCC on July 17th, share our vision for the future of DAOs at 'The DAOist' on July 16th and 'How to DAO' side events on July 18th.

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Mangrovians on EthCC’s stages

Our Head of Product, Gabija Tuinaite, is scheduled to speak at EthCC6’s main stage on July 17th from 2:20 pm to 2:35 pm. She'll share insights on how the DEX space is radically evolving with the ability to execute custom logic on-chain, and will introduce Mangrove’s unique "offer-is-code" approach.

In her talk, titled ‘Mangrove: Offer-is-Code Approach Revolutionizing DEXes’ Gabija will explain how this approach improves liquidity provision, changes how decentralized exchanges work, and alters trading strategies in the DeFi world.

Then, on July 20th from 1:40 pm to 1:55 pm, our Governance Lead, PhilH, will take the Louvre Stage. He will present our research work on protocol DAOs and methods to address issues emanating from common practices such as coin voting and grant programs in his talk titled 'Rethinking Legitimacy and Efficiency in DAOs'.

PhilH will discuss innovative alternatives pioneered by MangroveDAO and other projects within the crypto space.

Engaging Attendees at Our EthCC Booth

Beyond our speaking engagement, we'll be running a dedicated booth at the EthCC6 event. Positioned at our stand on the 17th and 18th of July in building B, ground floor (Collège des Bernardins, 20 Rue de Poissy, 75005 Paris), we look forward to engaging with all attendees, sharing insights, and forging meaningful connections within the DeFi community.

Co-hosting the Future of France (FoF)

Besides our presence at EthCC6, we are thrilled to announce that we are co-hosting the Future of France (FoF) side-event. Synonymous with constant innovation and industry growth, FoF gathers France's DeFi projects under one roof for an evening of exploration, networking and fun!

Scheduled for July 17th, from 7:00 pm till 1:00 am at La Caserne, FoF is much more than just a conference. It's a unique mix of professional congregation and festive ambiance, filled with music, delightful nibbles, and a unique venue - a former fire service station with a large courtyard. This year's impressive partner list features Morpho Labs, Sismo, Aleph.im, Jarvis Network, Spectra (prev. APWine), Ondefy, Kleros, Mt Pelerin, FeverTokens, Synaps, Swaap Labs, MiMo Labs and Mangrove of course 🌳.

Speaking the DAO language

In addition to these events, our Governance Lead, PhilH, will be gracing two talks at side-events during EthCC at:

• The DAOist - July 16th 2023, 10 am - 2 am, at La Fabrique République (More info here)

• How to DAO - July 18th 2023, 1 pm - 5 pm, at Le Duplex (More info here)

As we gear up for these events, we extend a warm invitation to everyone attending EthCC6. If you're planning to attend EthCC6, feel free to reach out here. We're all in this to make the Future of France even brighter. See you there!

We've been engaging in discussions about the exciting potential of Mangrove as the innovative order book DEX over the past few weeks.

If you haven't had the opportunity yet, we highly recommend reading our latest article, which includes our launch announcement on the Polygon Testnet and an explanatory piece.

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We’re thrilled to announce the Mangrove Community Campaign powered by Galxe, starting from May 24nd.

This is your chance to get a hands-on experience of the world's first programmable DEX.

As a token of our appreciation, we are offering exclusive NFT badges to those who are willing to explore the uncharted Mangrove ecosystem and take a leap of faith. Now, let's delve into the details.

TL;DR

• Mangrove Community Campaign begins on May 24nd.

• Participants can complete various off-chain and on-chain tasks to earn three different NFTs.

• Complete the tasks on Mangrove’s Galxe campaigns and claim your NFT badges.

• The ranking system includes three levels: Mangrove Seed 🌱, Mangrove Tree 🌳 and Mangrove Forest 🌳🌳🌳.

• While there is no limit to the number of Mangrove Seeds 🌱 and Mangrove Tree 🌳, there are only 250 Mangrove Forest 🌳🌳🌳 NFTs available.

• The testnet is set up on the Polygon Mumbai Network.

To earn the Mangrove Seed 🌱 NFT, follow these simple steps:

1. Follow Mangrove on Twitter.

2. Join Mangrove's Discord and Telegram communities.

3. Retweet the announcement about Mangrove's community campaign on Twitter.

4. Redeem your NFT on Mangrove’s Galxe profile.

Becoming a Mangrove Seed 🌱 participant is just the beginning. It's a crucial step towards unlocking more limited NFT opportunities that we will reveal later.

To earn the Mangrove Tree 🌳 NFT, explore the true potential of the Mangrove ecosystem by:

• Making a market order and a limit order on Mangrove's exchange.

• Redeem your NFT on Mangrove’s Galxe profile.
  

Only a select few can claim the limited and rare Mangrove Forest 🌳🌳🌳 NFT

To earn this NFT, demonstrate dedication by:

• Providing valuable feedback on Mangrove Testnet (20 NFTs).

• Successfully inviting the highest number of new members on Discord (50 NFTs).

• Participating and winning in community events and competitions (180 NFTs).

Winners will receive the Mangrove Forest 🌳🌳🌳 role on Discord, enabling them to claim the esteemed NFT on Mangrove’s Galxe profile.

Written by Lennart Laubisch, Head of Community at Mangrove

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🌊 Welcome to the first article of our launch series! This article covers the launch of the Mangrove DEX on Polygon's Testnet - testnet.mangrove.exchange.

Become an early Mangrove user and enter the Mangrove. Experience trading with an order book model, offering market and limit orders. Grab the opportunity to secure unique NFTs in our upcoming quests campaign, powered by Galxe.

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Mangrove 🌳 a new trading paradigm

Mangrove is an order book decentralised exchange aimed at enhancing the DeFi trading experience. It focuses on providing flexible and reactive liquidity to address issues such as fragmented liquidity, high slippage, and under-utilised capital. Mangrove's "offer-is-code" approach allows liquidity providers to create custom smart-contract offers, enhancing flexibility, control, and efficiency while addressing DeFi fragmentation issues.

The Mangrove DEX ecosystem consists of Makers (liquidity providers), who post and own custom smart-contract offers, also known as smart offers. Takers, who buy or sell assets with market or limit orders; and Keepers, responsible for detecting and managing failing offers. For more information, refer to our article: Building the Future of DeFi together and to our documentation: Makers, Takers, Keepers.

Some of the game-changing features Mangrove introduces include:

• Reactive liquidity: Offers are not locked in a pool and remain ready for use on Mangrove when needed. As long as an offer posted on Mangrove is not taken, it can generate yield elsewhere on the chain, with platforms like Aave, Beefy, or Tetu serving as great examples.

• Amplified liquidity: Liquidity can be leveraged across multiple pairs to optimize trading potential. For example, the same USDC liquidity can be used to create offers on WETH/USDC, WMATIC/USDC, and WBTC/USDC pairs.

• Persistence: On-chain offers automatically repost with zero latency and no gas costs for makers, enhancing trading efficiency. This is achieved through attaching code to on-chain offers so that the proceeds of executing an offer can be used to repost another offer, typically on the other side of the book, with zero-latency.

• Last look: Makers can implement defensive mechanisms in the smart offer code to cancel a promise if market conditions shift.

These features aim to minimize fragmentation, consolidate DeFi liquidity on Mangrove, and put it to work, providing users with enhanced control, flexibility, and efficiency in their trading experience.

One example that showcases Mangrove's capabilities is its DEX’s advanced limit order which is now available on the Mangrove dApp. These orders have unique characteristics that differentiate them from traditional DEX’s limit orders:

• Until a limit order is taken, funds remain in the maker’s wallet. This allows makers to change their minds and spend the funds elsewhere without having to cancel the offer and recover the locked funds.

• Limit orders can become reactive thanks to custom code embedded in them, giving in particular the ability on the Mangrove dApp to have access to advanced features normally only available on CEXes such as “Immediate or Cancel”, “Good ‘til time” or “Fill or kill” limit orders. More information about these 3 types of limit orders here.

Advanced limit orders can use more sophisticated custom comusde, using, for example, oracles to enhance the trading experience. To incorporate your own custom limit order code, you can refer to the limit-order SDK documentation.

How to use the Mangrove DEX 🔧

Initially, Mangrove is launching its Testnet with the following markets: WETH/DAI, WETH/USDC and DAI/USDC.

To start trading on the Mangrove DEX, head over to testnet.mangrove.exchange. Take advantage of market orders and advanced limit orders. Get started with ease, no matter your experience level.

Consult our dApp documentation for a comprehensive step-by-step guide on placing market and limit orders, and tracking your open orders and fills. 📈

Early Mangrovians: Get rewarded with exclusive NFTs 🎁

As a Mangrovian and early user of the Mangrove DEX testnet, you'll be eligible to redeem up to three special NFTs. The first two will be available to all who participate in the Mangrove questlines. In addition, a third, limited edition collectible will be exclusively available to the winners of our special competitions on Mangrove Discord server. We're excited to announce that these questlines and competitions are set to launch this week! 😎

Stay tuned for our next announcements! 📣

To be among the first to discover our upcoming launches and to redeem your NFTs, follow us on Twitter and join the Mangrove community on Discord. 🌊

Curious about the people who are working on Mangrove, the first programmable DEX? You've come to the right place! 😄 In this series, we're taking you behind the scenes to introduce you to the dedicated members of Mangrove's Product & Research Team.

Today, let's get to know Hamza, Jamil, Gabi, and Vincent – the driving force behind Mangrove's Research & Product development. 🚀

Join us on this exclusive journey to learn more about their unique backgrounds, thoughts on DeFi, and their vision for Mangrove's future. Get ready to be inspired! ✨

Meet the Team: A Blend of Skills and Expertise 💡

Vincent, our co-founder and researcher, describes the Mangrove team as having "diverse backgrounds and experiences, which we consider to be our greatest strength." Let's explore the strengths each member brings to the table, highlighting the unique skills that contribute to the team's success:

• Vincent Danos himself has an outstanding academic record with strong mathematical and global expertise, having published 175+ papers in fields ranging from computational biology to decentralized finance.

• Hamza El Khalloufi, our researcher, has a strong experience in traditional finance.

• Jamil Bouhdada, our DeFi Scientist, boasts expertise in Data Science and is an active participant in the DeFi space, always on the lookout for innovative projects.

• Gabija Tuinaite, our Head of Product, possesses a solid background in mathematics and finance. With prior experience as a quantitative analyst, she also served as a product owner at a rapidly expanding Lithuanian start-up.

The diversity of the Mangrove team empowers us to develop cutting-edge solutions, such as the "offer-is-code" approach in the Mangrove protocol. This innovative method allows liquidity providers to implement defensive strategies, post dynamic offers, and automatically replenish liquidity. By addressing DeFi challenges related to information, fragmentation, and asset utilization, we strive to create a more efficient and effective ecosystem for all participants.

The Power of Community 🌐

"Community involvement is crucial for the development of Mangrove," says Jamil. "By enabling DeFi builders to build on top of Mangrove, we can create a more diverse DeFi ecosystem that can better serve users' needs." Mangrove's flexible smart contract platform paves the way for new liquidity pools and automated trading strategies, ultimately benefiting the entire DeFi landscape.

Redefining Trading 📈

What sets Mangrove apart from other DeFi projects is that it represents a whole new primitive in the space. "By letting the user define his own logic through smart contracts, Mangrove is opening a new design space for DeFi products," explains Vincent. "This flexibility and customization are unique in the DeFi landscape and hence, I believe Mangrove has the potential to be highly impactful.”

Exploring New Horizons 🚀

"Our primary focus is on our fully on-chain market-making strategy called Kandel, which instantly reposts offers," Hamza shares. Kandel optimizes trade execution and generates profits from the spread by leveraging real-time order flow, user-defined price ranges, and a geometric progression-based price grid.

In addition to Kandel, the team actively explores subjects like options and liquidity unlocking. "Our team is dedicated to driving innovation in the DeFi space, and we hope that our ongoing research will contribute to the advancement of the industry," Hamza emphasizes.

Addressing the Challenges 🛠️

Mangrove aims to address two major issues in DeFi liquidity provision, as explained by Gabi: "The first problem is the locked liquidity problem, which cause liquidity fragmentation across different protocols. The second problem is the reactive liquidity problem, which is overcome through the offer-is-code approach." By using this approach, Mangrove can discretize many continuous AMMs, enabling greater flexibility and control over liquidity provision.

Looking Ahead 🧭

Gabi shares some exciting updates for Mangrove users: "We are planning to release the Mangrove DEX and the first product on Polygon in the first half of 2023." More products and partners integrations are also planned for 2023, aimed at driving wider adoption of the Mangrove ecosystem.

Fueling Growth ⛽

Mangrove plans to use the recent $7.4 million in funding to develop products and features that help build their envisioned ecosystem. As Vincent mentioned, "our vision for Mangrove is to become an infrastructure where the total potential of liquidity will be unlocked." By giving developers the tools they need and building a platform that makes it simple for users to access liquidity, Mangrove aims to open up a whole new world of DeFi opportunities.

Overcoming Obstacles 🚧

Developing Mangrove hasn't been without its challenges. As Gabi shared, "since Mangrove is exploring a completely new design space, defining the go-to-market strategy was not an easy task." The team ultimately decided to start with a fully on-chain market-making strategy to demonstrate Mangrove's potential.

Now that you've had the opportunity to meet the remarkable team behind Mangrove, you can truly appreciate the passion and talent fueling this pioneering DeFi project. Hamza, Jamil, Gabi, and Vincent, with their diverse backgrounds and expertise, form the perfect combination of innovation that sets Mangrove apart.

As Mangrove continues to evolve, the team remains dedicated to creating a more open, accessible, and inclusive financial ecosystem that benefits everyone. With an array of exciting products and features on the horizon, the future looks brighter than ever for Mangrove and its users.

We hope you enjoyed reading about Mangrove. 🤓

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, don’t forget to join our Discord and follow us on Twitter. For those wanting to go further, our whitepaper and developer documentation are the perfect dive into the nitty-gritty details.

Happy exploring Mangrovians 🐒🌳

DENVER, Colorado Feb 28th – Mangrove, the order book-based Decentralized Exchange, announced its Series A fundraising of USD 7.4 million. Led by Cumberland, Greenfield Capital and followed by CMT and gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC), this round succeeds the company's seed funding round of USD 2.7 million in July 2021, which was backed by prominent VCs including Wintermute Ventures, QCP Soteria Node, Monday Capital, Noia Capital, Zeeprime, Atka Capital, Stake Capital and John Lilic.

“We have amazing support from world-class crypto-native VCs and can't wait to launch our new market technology to enhance capital efficiency in decentralized finance (DeFi),” says Vincent Danos, Co-Founder and Researcher at Mangrove.

Mangrove introduces a novel approach to Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) with its “Offer-is-Code” approach. On Mangrove, liquidity providers can post “smart offers” of liquidity, i.e., smart contracts as offers. This innovation means that DeFi users are able to list promises instead of locked commitments. Promised liquidity can be shared, borrowed, lent, and at the same time, be displayed in Mangrove's order book, ready to be sourced when, and only when, an offer is matched.

With over $50 billion locked into various protocols, inefficiencies in capital utilization are widespread. Given the programmable nature of DeFi, there is arguably no need for locking capital in one place, which is however currently to a large extent the case. It is also commonplace to lock capital across multiple unconnected liquidity pools. As a result, the potential for earning yields is not fully utilized, while on the flip side the cost of capital increases.

“Mangrove solves these inefficiencies as the liquidity/collateral does not have to be on the CEX/DEX itself but can be sourced from another pool or DeFi protocol once the order in the order book is hit. And yield can be generated elsewhere until the offer is taken. That way Mangrove is disrupting one of the core notions of DeFi – having to lock your liquidity in one protocol compromising on capital efficiency. The disruption is very needed,” said Gleb Dudka, Principal at Greenfield Capital. “Mangrove opens up a large design space for novel DeFi strategies, applications and even protocols.”

“DeFi is already more transparent, innovative and inclusive than TradFi,” said Miko Matsumura, Managing Partner at gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC). “But in order to upgrade the world financial system, world-class DeFi builders need to improve on capital efficiency. This is why gumi Cryptos Capital is proud to have invested in Mangrove.”

Mangrove was founded by a group of researchers in 2021, as the team noticed that traditional exchange market makers did not use their own capital, but instead borrowed it from the market. They wondered why this concept wasn't replicated in decentralized finance and decided to build a DEX where market makers could operate without locked capital. The key was to use the taker's funds to collateralize a loan that would be used to pay the taker. The collapse of FTX showed that users appreciate the capital efficiency of an order-book exchange, but should not be required to trust a centralized provider. By replicating the capital efficiency of a centralized exchange in a trustless exchange, Mangrove helps address fundamental problems in the market.

Today, Mangrove's programmable order book offers its users the possibility to use existing strategies to achieve higher returns or to develop their own strategies to obtain more flexibility. The founders created the platform as a one-stop-shop where developers and DeFi protocols can build sophisticated trading strategies and integrate features including partial liquidations and carbon markets among others.

Furthermore, Liquidity providers have the flexibility to cancel the promised liquidity at any time if they feel that the orders are not executed under favorable market conditions. Users can also maximize liquidity potential with consistency, as the executed code allows a quote to be automatically added back to the order book.

In addition, with an intuitive user interface arriving soon, Mangrove’s users will be able to easily swap, place limit-orders, and run automated market-making strategies on Polygon Mainnet.

"Cumberland believes Mangrove's foundational on-chain limit order book technology has the potential to establish itself as a new DeFi ecosystem primitive, ” John Napier and Nate George, VC co-leads at Cumberland say. “Not only can Mangrove's design immediately generalize applications like constant-product AMMs, its architecture is also flexible enough to unlock new on-chain trading strategies, enabling just-in-time liquidity and maximizing capital efficiency. We are excited to see Mangrove continue to build towards their ultimate vision of ‘Total Value Unlocked’."

Mangrove will use the funding to deliver products and actively pursue research.

*********

About Mangrove DAO

Mangrove DAO has created an innovative platform that allows liquidity providers to post offers in the form of smart contracts, unlocking the potential of DeFi liquidity. This new platform, known as Mangrove, is a 100% trustless and on-chain DEX that is based on an order book model. Unlike traditional pools-based DEXs, LPs do not have to lock in their liquidity and can utilize it elsewhere on the chain. This dual use of liquidity offers a competitive advantage that is expected to make Mangrove the most liquid DEX in the industry.

About Greenfield

Greenfield Capital is a European crypto-native investment firm, backing developer teams building toward an open, decentralized, and more robust architecture of tomorrow’s web. Founded by Sebastian Blum and Jascha Samadi in 2018, Greenfield provides funding and competent support in operations (e.g. running validators for networks and protocols in-house), tokenomics and governance. Having delivered superior capital returns with their I. and II. crypto fund, Greenfield initiated 2021 its III. crypto fund, the largest fund dedicated to crypto in Europe to date (€135m). Greenfield’s portfolio includes Nym, NEAR, Celo, Dapper Labs, Safe, Liquity, Arweave, 1inch and The Fabricant among others.

About gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC)

gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC) is an early-stage crypto-native venture capital firm. gCC deployed its $21M fund I into the “crypto winter” of 2018 to back founders at the earliest stages such as OpenSea, Yield Guild Gaming, 1inch Network, Qredo, Agoric, VEGA protocol and Astar. On the strength of fund I gCC raised a $110M fund II and continues to back world-class founders and entrepreneurs who are building the foundational layers of web3 or who use blockchain technology to gain significant competitive advantage. 

About Cumberland

Launched in 2014 as the crypto arm of global trading firm DRW, Cumberland is one of the world’s leading crypto liquidity providers, serving institutional counterparties through OTC spot and derivatives. In addition to its core trading business, Cumberland's global team partners with TradFi and DeFi native companies to advance their Web3 and DeFi strategies, serves as a resource to regulators and policy makers, and makes investments in promising new projects.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Karolina Kowalik, Lead PR & Events at Greenfield and Miko Matsumura, Managing Partner at gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC).

In this article, we will introduce you to Mangrove, aka the DeFi Revolution. You might think that it sounds presumptuous, but we feel we have the arguments to demonstrate it. 💪

What is Mangrove? 🌳

It’s a Decentralized Exchange (DEX)! It’s the new kid on the block.
“Ah, yet another one”, you might think. Well, hold your horses because this one is a different beast.

Mangrove is based on an “order book” model, which you may know from traditional finance exchanges (more on that later). However, Mangrove is particular in that it allows liquidity providers to post arbitrary smart contracts as offers. What that means, is that the listed offers can point to pieces of code: we call them Smart Offers.

As you can imagine, this new flexibility enables participants to post offers that are not fully provisioned. The Mangrove’s order book lists promises instead of locked commitments.

💡 There might be new words and concepts for you here, and that’s okay: we will cover those in the second part of this article.

The promised liquidity can be shared, borrowed, lent somewhere and at the same time displayed on Mangrove, ready to be sourced when (and only when) an offer is taken.

The resulting consequences are far-reaching, because it removes liquidity fragmentation and the lock on assets, allowing its use in multiple places.

This dual use of liquidity is such a competitive advantage that it will become sub-optimal not to amplify reserves on Mangrove, making it the most liquid DEX.

Impressive, right? 😎

So, how does it actually work? What is different about Mangrove compared to what is out there today?

In order to understand, we will explore the evolution of financial systems, starting with Traditional Finance (TradFi), followed by Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and now with the arrival of Mangrove, which is poised to shape the future of finance.

The DeFi Revolution: Total Value Unlocked 🔓

To grasp how novel our “offer-is-code” approach is, let’s start by explaining the purpose of an order book model. This is the system behind today’s traditional stock exchanges.

Traditional Finance and order book model

In an order book model, Buyers and Sellers come together and place their orders. Buyers of course, aim to buy at the lowest price possible, while Sellers aim to sell high. For trades to happen, both parties need to converge on the price.

But what if no agreement is found on price? What if there is not enough coins/products/assets to be bought or sold?

This is where Market Makers come into play. They are people/entities who facilitate trading by buying and selling to satisfy the market — the prices they set reflect the supply and demand. By doing this, they provide liquidity.

For Decentralized Finance (DeFi) players however, this approach brings some concerns: centralization of powers, lack of transparency, forced-reliance on 3rd parties, and no self-custody of assets.

That is why Decentralized Exchanges were created.

The birth of Decentralized Exchanges

Also called DEX, they leverage the principles of Web3 and blow away the negatives aforementioned.

They function differently, using liquidity pools instead of an order book model. “But why”, you might ask.

Well, a simple reason is that on-chain updates can take time, due to the speed of transaction validations of the underlying network. Assuming you would have an on-chain order book, it is easy to see how existing orders can be exploited when there is high price volatility, for example.

That is why in TradFi, Market Makers make a lot of changes to their orders, always adjusting their Buy/Sell prices. Depending on the blockchain network used, this would be slow, dangerous and just impractical. 😬

But wait, what about those liquidity pools we mentioned earlier?

A pool simply contains usually two tokens, creating a trading pair. Liquidity providers (LPs) are required to provide tokens in equal quantities. When trades occur, a small fee is charged, and distributed proportionally to all LPs. Of course there is more to it than that, and that is not the point of this article.

To wrap up on liquidity pools, let’s briefly mention how the price fluctuates: each token swap within a pool results in a price adjustment, according to an algorithm. The ratio of the tokens in the pool influences the price. This is what we call an Automated Market Maker (or AMM), and different protocols may use variations of this.

So… what’s the problem?

While DEXs and liquidity pools remove the dependence on an order book and Market Makers, they also bring their own concerns:

Slippage
It is the price delta between the expected price of a trade and its executed price. How much slippage occurs depends on how much liquidity is available VS the order size.

• Uniswap V3, for example, does improve the above but is still subject to those weaknesses because of the way liquidity pools are designed

• Slippage is not new to AMM design, and also exist in traditional order book markets

Arbitrage
It is the process of buying an asset on one market place and selling it on another, making a profit. It’s a consequence of AMM design, because the price is influenced by the token ratio within the pool. As an LP, you basically have to share your expected revenue with arbitrage traders.

Fragmented liquidity
For each pair of tokens to be traded, a new pool must be created. That means the overall liquidity of a single token on a DEX is broken into many pools. As new tokens get listed over time, new trading pools must be created; this only gets worse.

Total Value Locked (TVL)
LPs must provide capital beforehand to populate liquidity pools. It is locked away and under-utilized, leading to substantial capital inefficiencies.

Enter Mangrove, the first programmable exchange

As previously said, the main difference between Mangrove and other DEXs is the ability to attach code to offers. This translates into several disruptive features:

Reactive liquidity
The liquidity on offer in the order book is not locked in a pool. As long as an offer posted on Mangrove is not taken, it can generate yield elsewhere on the chain  — Aave, Compound or Morpho are great examples.

Last look
Since an offer contains code, defensive mechanisms can be baked in to cancel a promise previously made:

• For instance if the market conditions are not anymore satisfactory at the time the offer is taken VS when it was posted

• Code can cover any unwanted case scenarios (ex: high volatility), and therefore can mitigate/solve problems of slippage and arbitrage

• Code helps make zero-latency trading decisions, with as much information as available on-chain at the time the trade occurs

Persistence
Through the executed code, the offer can automatically repost itself on the order book.

Our cutting-edge DEX is built with the goal to be a new design space for strategists, traders, market makers and other market participants such as DeFi builders, to come up with innovative strategies leveraging the principle of reactive liquidity.

Mangrove isn’t just a product — it’s an ecosystem 🌱

Rest assured, the statement above is not yet another Marketing stunt, in an attempt to differentiate or make noise — allow us to demonstrate in this section.

The next generation order book

As we just saw, Mangrove is what you could call a “next generation” order book. If you are selling apples for oranges, you don’t need to provide the apples upfront and have them sitting idle in a vault, under-utilized and slowly rotting away.

Any person, trader or entity can run their own personal, custom-made strategies by listing code in place of offers. Yes, you might feel like we are repeating ourselves but this is precisely where the essence of Mangrove lies.

Anyone can write strategies, develop an app, integrate their project, taking advantage of the previously mentioned principles. Mangrove effectively becomes the cradle of crypto trading innovations.

As an example, we are about to release a first trading strategy, called Kandel. You will be able to use it via our Web UI or SDK. It will be publicly available to use and tweak. Kandel is only a leading example, here to inspire other ideas. For us, it is not the end of the line — it is the beginning.

That is how we want to measure success: we aim to create a growing, organic ecosystem that comes up with disruptive new ideas on its own, all enabled by Mangrove as a platform.

Researching new concepts

It is worth noting that our team is composed of both engineers and researchers, which is not common in our space. We are proud to work with top-class PhDs and academics, who create innovative strategies and solutions for DeFi. They are always on the lookout for new inventions.

An example of what Mangrove could enable is partial liquidation, where someone with a credit line wants protection/reevaluation before his position gets fully liquidated. This would lead to fewer liquidations on borrow/lend protocols.

Another idea is Carbon tokens trading (i.e. tokens issued from Carbon Credits). Following its principles, Mangrove could allow Carbon markets to amplify their liquidity by listing tokens in several pools, and provisioning them only when offers are taken.

Join and build the Mangrove Community 🔨

As we get closer to the launch of our first product version, we would love to expand our horizons and welcome new participants in our Community.

We already met with many excited players, who are collaborating with us to integrate and explore the possibilities offered by our DEX.

We will soon be deployed on Polygon network, and plan to integrate with other chains in the future.

That’s all for now folks!

We hope you enjoyed reading about Mangrove. 🤓

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, don’t forget to join our Discord and follow us on Twitter. For those wanting to go further, our whitepaper and developer documentation are the perfect dive into the nitty-gritty details.

Happy exploring Mangrovians 🐒🌳

Written by Antoine, Developer Relations at Mangrove.

We presented in the first part that Total Value Locked (TVL) is often ‘the’ metric used to gauge the success of a DeFi protocol. Mangrove disrupts this narrative and unleashes the liquidity in DeFi, as Liquidity Providers (LPs) do not need to ‘lock’ in their liquidity beforehand but promise it and only deliver when called upon. 

Enter Mangrove, the exchange where offer is code

The Mangrove protocol is a decentralized exchange with a global orderbook, capable of  aggregating all the available on-chain liquidity with an optimized matching engine. You could view it as a liquidity offer protocol which does not require collateralization.

In simpler terms, it is a marketplace for promises of liquidity, where “offer is code”. Actually, when an offer from the orderbook is matched, the portion of code embedded within it will execute. This code’s mission is to find the liquidity requested by the taker of the order : it can pull it from the maker’s inventory, source it from a pool or even borrow it from a lender, or any on-chain sourcing strategy that the maker has built in his offer code. When the order is successfully executed, the orderbook gets updated. Easy as that (lol).

This new flexibility enables liquidity providers & DeFi traders to post offers that are not fully provisioned. Liquidity can be shared, borrowed, lent and, at the same time, be displayed and amplified in the Mangrove's orderbook, ready to be sourced when, and only when, an offer is hit.

The Maker, the Taker and the Keeper

Making liquidity available

An offer posted on Mangrove can be summarized as follows:

(volume A given, volume B wanted, gasreq) + code + bounty (implicitly defined), where:

• An offer on Mangrove contains the following information:

• A volume of tokens A that the offer gives

• A volume of tokens B that the offer wants

• An amount of gas requested to execute the offer ("gasreq")

• The smart contract that will be called when the offer is executed ("code")

• The native chain token provisioned in case the offer fails to execute ("bounty")

With Mangrove, Makers can experience a new trading environment, with unprecedented features in the DeFi space:

• Reactive liquidity: no capital locked in the order book

• Last look: defensive last look mechanism to renege on an offer (for instance if market conditions are not satisfactory enough for the Maker)

• No exclusivity: the maker can post several offers for the same assets, Mangrove acting as a liquidity amplifier for the DeFi markets

What if everyone makes empty promises? This is where we need providers to leave a native token provision. It is a key element of the Mangrove ecosystem, as it provides an absolute flexibility for the liquidity provider to accept or renege an offer: 

Taking available liquidity

Just like a classical orderbook, the Taker can buy or sell digital assets on Mangrove, with market or limit orders. He has access to an interface where he can look at the orderbook in real time and take available orders from the offer list.

When the Taker sends an order out, Mangrove executes the offer logic of all the offers it crossed:

• If the first order is successful and the liquidity promise is fulfilled, it is removed from the book, and the Mangrove moves on to the next offer until the entirety of the Taker’s order is filled (whether it’s a limit or market order).

• If during the execution, on order reneges on his offer, and the liquidity is not matched, the gas incurred is reimbursed to the Taker and Mangrove executes the next offer logic from the orderbook until desired volume or limit price.

The Taker can also add a level of complexity to his strategies by  having the ability to snipe specific orders from the orderbook, we’ll get to that in Part 3!

Cleaning the orderbook

To ensure a clean orderbook, free from spam and failing offers, bots (or Keepers) are continuously scanning the orderbook. Keepers are responsible for detecting failing offers and making the offer fail on-chain, with a gas price set such that the offer's bounty compensates for the spent gas. They act as guardians of the Mangrove ecosystem. 

A new on-chain strategies design space

The set of features proposed by mangrove present an opportunity for sophisticated on-chain participants, EVM wizards, MEV researchers, or more classical market-makers to come up with new on-chain trading strategies.
 

In the Part 3 of our introduction series, we’ll explore some of the strategies you’ll be able to deploy on Mangrove. Stay tuned!

TLDR : while DeFi 1.0 is based on the TVL metric, yield farming and AMMs, some smart builders have been busy crafting a new object that will completely redesign the DeFi gameplay, unlocking a new technological space that any dev could soon explore

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The Total Value Locked (TVL), the Measure of Success for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Protocols

Over the past years, the number of DeFi products and their usage has been growing exponentially: you can now trade, lend, borrow, invest into cryptocurrencies and derivatives thanks to hundreds of different fully on-chain protocols. 

Besides the traditional metrics of active users and volumes, one of the key indicators to measure this emerging alternative to traditional finance is the Total Value Locked (TVL) in these protocols. 

At time of writing the TVL in DeFi has exceeded USD100bn. This means that more than USD100bn worth of on-chain assets is being put to work on DeFi protocols. 

A critical building block enabling the proper flow of assets on-chain is a type of decentralized exchange called an Automated Market Maker (AMM).

The complexity of maintaining on-chain order books was replaced by two pools of assets and a price determined by the curve.

As you can see from the graph above the more assets you have in a given pool, the smaller the price slippage when trading. This is why liquidity, as in the dollar amount of assets present in the pools, is so essential to the performance of AMM-based trading. Similar to how order-book depth and volume ensures efficient trading on centralized exchanges, the TVL within an AMM vouches for its usability and is viewed as the main measure of success.

The AMM liquidity war and the fragmented liquidity in DeFi

AMMs are eating Centralized Exchanges: a tipping point in the brief DeFi history was the surpassing of Coinbase, the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in the US, by Uniswap, one of the first decentralized exchange protocols, in August 2020. One month later, the daily volumes on Uniswap were ten times higher. This was made possible by a similar increase in TVL up to $1.7 billion in September 2020.

AMMs are, for most of them, open-source based decentralized applications, meaning that they could be easily copied. Some challengers do not even hesitate to bribe liquidity providers (LPs) with financial incentives. For example, some DeFi protocols offer four-digit Annual Percentage Yield (APYs) for LPs staking their liquidity, through protocol token rewards.

During the DeFi summer in 2020, a new DEX, SushiSwap, launched a “vampire attack” on Uniswap, luring its liquidity providers with the promise of substantial token rewards. The first DeFi war was actually a battle for liquidity. SushiSwap’s TVL skyrocketed to $1 billion in Nov 2020, draining Uniswap’s pools which plummeted by 57%. The opening act of the DeFi wars was soon followed by similar attempts to attract liquidity providers with juicy yield-farming incentives, by AMM protocols like Bancor, Balancer, Curve, Cream and others.

This liquidity war had tremendous consequences: it attracted lots of new users with the promise of substantial APYs but it also led to a liquidity fragmentation over a growing number of protocols. 

Some market players make some profit when liquidity is fragmented, arbitrageurs have access to both the expertise and the off-chain infrastructure needed to execute strategies that benefit from market inefficiencies and volatility. But running such strategies is costly and reserved to a select few, so most market participants are actually getting degraded trading conditions from this situation.

Liquidity fragmentation is at odds with the promise of a highly-liquid and frictionless crypto-markets paradigm enabling anyone to instantly trade any asset at a very low cost. The dominant model of “value locked” in pools and protocols leads not only to trading inefficiencies for most market participants as described above, but also to inappropriate liquidity allocation by LPs, insofar as some protocols lure LPs with crazy but unsustainable short-term APYs. 

Meanwhile, soon-to-be founders were building the Future of France…

Witnesses of the great rotation of capital and the frictions created by such a fragmentation of liquidity a group of smart French researchers have been deeply analyzing market-markers’ raison d’être, behaviours and strategies, with fresh minds and no preconceived ideas on crypto markets and DeFi.

The researchers came up with a rather simple postulate: in the world of traditional market-making, you sell assets that you don’t own and buy assets without cash on hand. With this in mind, the researchers experimented and worked with the goal to make the life of market participants easier, while creating a healthier environment for their liquidity. 

This is where the idea of a new type of DEX was born.  

What if, instead of collateralizing each order with your liquidity, you could just promise it, and fetch it upon being required by the protocol? In the meantime, the assets would be comfy earning yield and not being spread among many products and positions.

DeFi would greatly benefit from mechanisms that ensure that pools of liquidity can tap into each other. Liquidity should be unlocked to the fullest possible extent. It should form a nurturing ocean, rather than a myriad of scattered puddles. And strategies that generate yield out of exchange operations should be accessible to anyone, in a permissionless manner, rather than kept under control by a financial elite.

With this approach, and months of active research and iterations, the researchers became founders. Assisted by a growing community of devs and strategists, they ended up building Mangrove, this novel technological space that will become the essential building block in maximizing capital efficiency in DeFi, a space where liquidity is unleashed. 

Enter Mangrove, the first programmable exchange.

Mangrove is a new type of DEX addressing liquidity fragmentation. It is architectured and implemented with the goal to be a new design space, a novel environment for strategists, traders, market makers and other market participants, to come up with innovative strategies leveraging the principle of reactive liquidity. While the assets may be put to work in lending protocols or other yield generating products, they can still be leveraged to constitute a robust on-chain order book for users to execute their trades. This dual use of liquidity is such a competitive advantage that it will become sub-optimal for LPs not to amplify their liquidity on Mangrove, making it the most liquid DEX.

While we have unlocked this untamed technological space that Mangrove represents, we hope many frens will join the fun and explore new paths of arbitrary financial objects. 

In the next posts in the series, we will describe the core mechanisms of Mangrove and the benefits they bring about to both DeFi occasional and professional users. We will also explore the ecosystem of Mangrove, which will thrive thanks to the diversity of its stakeholders and the coordination features of its DAO.