Solana's Mango Markets DEX Raises $70M In One Of The Largest DeFi Token Sale

What Happened: Mango Markets, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) powered by the Solana SOL/USD blockchain, has raised $70.5 million in a 24-hour token sale.

At one point, investors had contributed more than $500 million in USD Coin USDC/USD for 500 million MNGO tokens, hinting at a valuation of $10 billion at the time.

U.S. investors, however, were barred from participating in the sale, with the Mango Markets team likely anticipating potential regulatory hurdles down the road.

While most of these funds were removed after the lapse of the 24-hour grace period, the project still managed to retain $70.5 million in locked value, making it one of the largest seed-funding raises in DeFi history.

Why It Matters: The Mango Markets DEX offers an on-chain trading platform for spot and futures trading.

It also serves as a lending platform, sourcing liquidity from its own pools as well as Serum – another exchange built on Solana.

The entire sum raised will go to the decentralized autonomous organization’s (DAO) insurance fund.

Another plus point for the high-speed blockchain was the low transaction fees involved in the token sale.

Assuming the average deposit was $1,000 from 527,000 unique wallets when the Total Value Locked (TVL) in the auction was at its peak, the transfer fees only amounted to a total of 3 Solana tokens or $100 for the entire amount.

By comparison, the same number of transfers on the Ethereum ETH/USD would have amounted to $5.27 million at current gas prices.

Price Action: At press time, SOL was trading at $44.10, gaining 8.72% over the past 24-hours.

MNGO tokens were trading at a price of $0.2678, trading close to its all-time high.