Solana’s Mango Markets DEX Raises $70M in MNGO Token Sale

Mango Markets, a decentralized exchange on the high-speed Solana blockchain, raised $70 million in a token sale. 

Investors had plowed over $500 million in USDC (+0.02%) into the cross-margin trading platform’s 24-hour sale, racing to get a share of 500 million MNGO tokens up for grabs. But much of that drained away in the final minutes of a daylong grace period that followed, leaving $70,462,383 locked up in tokens.

Many decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols aim to raise between $1 million and $15 million in seed stage funding, one source said, making Mango DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organization) $70 million an outlier.

Mango offers a trading hub for spot markets, perpetual futures and lending. It sources liquidity from its own pools as well as from Serum, an exchange built on the Solana blockchain.

The DAO’s website said MNGO has three goals, including to capitalize an insurance fund, distribute the DEX governance token and incentivize liquidity for market makers. Ninety percent of tokens are locked up in a governance fund, 5% in an insurance policy and the remainder in contributor tokens.

The raised fund in a token sale will go to DAO’s insurance fund to secure a hefty backstop for Mango Protocol’s lenders if things go south. Hacks happen in the Wild West of decentralization, and Mango DAO cautioned token buyers that it couldn’t guarantee its smart contracts would be bug-free.

Solana Labs, the leading firm behind the network, raised $314 million in June. Solana itself has been the blockchain of choice for Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire who founded the FTX crypto exchange and who has invested heavily in Solana-based projects.

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