Mento: The Place for Onchain FX

A message from Markus Franke, Co-Founder & CEO 

Hello Mento Community, 

After an incredible journey building one of the most widely used decentralized stablecoin platforms globally (15 local & global stablecoins, +7m users, ~450K daily active users and 550m transactions in 2024 alone), we are so excited to share the next phase for Mento.

Mento began with a mission to bring digital currencies to people everywhere, especially in countries where stable, accessible currencies were needed most. Along the way, we integrated with incredible partners including Opera MiniPay and Valora, powering several use cases across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

Today, I am thrilled to share our new brand identity, driven by a renewed sense of purpose, that belongs to the Mento Community and all those who are building alongside us:

Mento is becoming the place for onchain FX

The foreign exchange (FX) market, the largest and the most liquid financial market in the world, with over $7.5 trillion traded daily remains largely offchain. Centralized middlemen, slow processes, limited market hours, and fragmented liquidity are just a few of the inefficiencies holding back the current system.

We believe that the next major evolution of financial infrastructure is onchain FX. After two years of building a decentralized stablecoin platform that serves a thriving community, Mento is now evolving into a decentralized FX infrastructure, not only bringing the world currencies onchain but also allowing users to efficiently swap between different currencies.

Since its inception, Mento has grown into a platform with the broadest portfolio of assets with 15 stablecoins, including the top 10 most traded pairs globally. These currencies are actively used for cross-border payments, remittances, microloans, savings, and onchain yield. The Mento Asset Exchange has made it possible for stablecoins to be traded directly with one another with low slippage at real-world FX rates, powering millions of currency swaps in apps like Squid Router and MiniPay.

We’ve seen real-world impact, from local business owners in Kenya accessing credit in cKES (Kenyan Shilling) to users in Latin America making everyday payments with cCOP (Colombian Peso).

The same tools that made stable currencies usable at scale are now becoming the foundation for a more ambitious system: a unified, onchain FX platform that offers:

• A modular, multi-chain FX infrastructure for both retail and institutional users
• A wide variety of stablecoins that can be swapped at real-world exchange rates 
• Transparent, programmable markets that operate 24/7, without barriers

To support this, a new technical architecture, Mento V3, is underway to unlock a unified, onchain FX system that operates across borders, chains, and use cases. Key components include: 

• Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) for diversified stablecoin backing. 
• Fixed Price Market Makers (FPMMs) for low-slippage swaps anchored to real-world exchange rates. Unlike traditional AMMs, these are optimized for FX markets.
• Multi-chain architecture across EVM and non-EVM ecosystems, for deeper DeFi integrations, real-world institutional flows, governed entirely by the Mento Community.

Mento is building toward a future where a significant share of the world's largest market, FX, operates onchain. In this vision exchanging stablecoins becomes cost-efficient, transparent, onchain and universally accessible. Join us in this vision!  

Quote our pinned tweet with the line “The place for onchain FX” on Twitter/X to help amplify the message and help us build the future of onchain FX.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing:

• A detailed roadmap for Mento V3
• An onchain FX hackathon for builders across the ecosystem
• Several exciting new partnerships we cannot wait to share
  
  

These are super exciting times for us and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts about the new Mento brand in our community channels, Twitter/ X and Discord.

Join us for a Mento Community AMA on X Spaces:

Thursday June 19 at 6pm CET. Add to your calendar. 

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Grateful for all your support,

Markus