Why gCC Invested in the 7.4M Mangrove Funding Round

In traditional finance, your capital naturally sits in one place at a time: earning interest in a money market account, locked in a pending limit order, or escrowed as collateral for using leverage. But what if your capital could be in multiple places at the same time? What if capital escrowed for a limit order could also earn interest in a money market? 

Zero-TVL DEX

Mangrove is a “zero-TVL” orderbook DEX that contains offers of liquidity. Put another way, Mangrove is a DEX that doesn’t require liquidity to operate. 

Orders on Mangrove point to liquidity (sitting in any arbitrary smart contract) that can be called (by executing pre-authorized code) to settle transactions when matched. Users can deploy their capital into other protocols (earning interest, trading fees, liquidity mining rewards, etc.) while still using that same capital to make markets and earn additional trading fees on Mangrove. Uniswap LPs, Aave depositors, and anyone with externally deployed capital can leverage Mangrove for yield amplification. 

Programmable Money → Programmable Orders

Orders in Mangrove can contain embedded strategies. For example, a market maker may use a “reactive offer” that will post a new order on the opposite side of a market when the order on one side is executed. Other orders may require the synchronous execution of multiple orders to balance risk or liquidity. Institutions or seasoned traders can build their own strategies, while users who want to passively access amplified yield can deposit into vaults with pre-defined strategies built by Mangrove (and eventually the community). 

Exceptional Team

Mangrove compliments their unique design with an incredibly strong and technical team led by core contributors Vincent Danos, Jean Krivine and Adrien Husson. Vincent and Jean met academically in the early 2000s and have worked on distributed systems modeling together over the years. Both are currently researchers at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS); Vincent for 30+ years as a director, and Jean for over 10 with a specialization in theoretical computer science. The full team of 16 is rounded out by Adrien Husson, who was a PhD student under Jean, and Pierre Laurent who helped incubate the project. Mangrove in its current form is the culmination of the team’s collective efforts over a 3+ year span. 

Conclusion 

Mangrove brings to market a new paradigm of capital efficiency: one where your capital can be in two places at once. This is not only impossible in TradFi, but also represents a zero to one innovation for DeFi. Led by the rigorous efforts of this outstanding team, Institutional LPs, Market Makers, and passive DeFi users alike will benefit from this new model with the launch of Mangrove this spring.


Disclaimer
Information is provided for general educational purposes only. This presentation is not an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of offers to buy securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment decision. For more important information, please see disclaimer

Author: Evan Mair