Mento: Onchain FX Markets - Decentralising World Currencies - Markus Franke

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TradFi FX markets are slow, expensive and often lack liquidity for direct swaps between different world currencies, having to route through USD pairs. While crypto could technically solve pairing through AMM pools, those needed to be arbitraged in order to reflect TradFi rates. With 15 fully-backed stablecoins, Mento is building the largest FX infrastructure, bringing world currencies onchain through its robust multi-currency stablecoin platform. In order to provide traders with accurate real-word FX rates, Mento employs FPMM (fixed-price market makers) which gather offchain data from multiple oracles. Instant settlement, cross-border, at a fraction of a cost of conventional remittance providers, while also avoiding traditional banking limitations.

Backed by strong on- & off-ramp integrations, Mento also caters towards day-to-day use cases, empowering locals and businesses to diversify their FX exposure without the hurdles of TradFi. Mento enables smooth cross-currency transactions without traditional banking limitations, unlocking DeFi yield for a wide variety of currencies.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Markus’ background, from TradFi to DeFi
• Unbanking the banked
• Starting a stablecoin protocol on Celo
• The role of stablecoins
• FX markets & Mento’s design
• FPMM vs. AMM
• Mento’s target audience
• Centralised vs. decentralised stablecoins
• Mento governance
• M0’s approach
• Integrating with banking systems

Episode links:

• ⁠Markus Franke on X
• Mento on X
• Celo on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - ⁠⁠gnosis.io⁠⁠

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.