Manta Network has reportedly secured $1.1 million via a funding round, in a bid to establish a fully private Polkadot-based decentralized exchange.

Specifically, Polychain Capital was reportedly in charge of leading the round, together with the involvement from Hypersphere Ventures, Three Arrows Capital, Defiance Capital, Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, BTC12 Capital, Genblock Capital, Rarestone Capital, AU21 Capital and TRG Capital.

Manta reportedly looks to establish a Polkadot-based automated market maker exchange, which comes with fully private swaps. It employs zk-SNARKs with Groth16 proofs, featuring the similar cryptographic tech seen in Zcash (ZEC).

True privacy in DeFi is not an easy task to achieve, as DeFi protocols are easily traceable, via blockchain analytics software, since the smart contracts don’t attempt to obfuscate the flow of funds, even when going through numerous tokens. 

For decentralized exchanges, privacy insufficiency has a tangible impact on the markets, where front-running is pervasive in DeFi. Bots will have eyes out for transactions that can be copied and broadcast with increased cost, making sure the bot will be able to loot in prior to the original sender. 

With exchanges having the same nature as Uniswap, the bids will be put down by front-runners prior to a large order taking place, extracting value from the trade.

Despite protection mechanisms are reportedly in place to limit this practice, most importantly, the slippage tolerance setting, the full transparency of a majority of smart contract blockchains is an obstacle to serious trading activity.

The decentralized exchange framework employed by Manta brings the concept of shielded tokens beyond its scope to form completely private swaps.

Manta will reportedly be functioning as a parachain on Polkadot, a layer-one blockchain binded to the Polkadot ecosystem.