Mantra DAO (OM) Team Responds to Founders ICO Scam Allegations Calling it FUD

Mantra DAO (OM), a Defi protocol that offers mortgages, loans, and cross-chain Defi products was listed on the Binance Innovation Zone today. The protocol is built on top of the Ethereum network but offers cross-chain functionality on Binance Smart Chain as well. However, the listing of the defi protocol drew heavy criticism from the Chinese community for the alleged fraudulent past of founders behind Mantra DAO.

The Chinese crypto community alleged that the founders of the newly listed project were involved in many fraudulent ICOs back in 2017 and the founder of the project opened a casino.

Many believe the push for the success of the Binance Smart Chain(BSC) has made the Changpeng Zhao led-firm overlook certain shortcomings of projects getting listed on BSC.

There are some opinions in the Chinese community that as long as you agree to use Binance Smart Chain or Polkadot, Binance will significantly lower the listing standards, and some fraudulent projects will appear. Especially the Polkadot chain is full of fraud projects from China.

The accusations seem more grave because another BSC-listed project Meeakat Finance was allegedly rug pulled for $32 million just a day after listing.

Mantra DAO Co-founder Calls Allegations A FUD

Manta DAO co-founder John Mullin hit back at reports of ICO scam allegation and said ongoing allegations are FUD. He said same accounts were responsible for similar allegations at launch last year.

Mullin added that the suggestions at the time were that “we had no tech, no devs, and couldn’t build” but that they have now put those to bed:

We’ve launched multiple working products, are in the Parity Substrate Builders Program, have over $50M in TVL, $120M worth of assets staked to our validator nodes, and nearly 50% of the token supply locked in our staking contracts. We’re on the verge of launching our own launchpad with several upcoming IDOs, and are even working on a regulated version of several of our products.

Binance Claims its Listing Research Committee is Robust

Binance claims its listing research committee comprising of 5 members do thorough research and check every parameter before passing the project for listing. However, the most recent listing of OM, the native token of Mantra DAO has caught many in the Chinese crypto community by surprise.

BSC lately has gained a lot of traction in the wake of the Ethereum network’s rising gas fee making many of the defi protocols barely usable, this forced many projects to shift to BSC in the short term. Not just Defi protocols even spot traders have turned towards BSC to save on the astonishingly high transaction cost on the Ethereum network. Binance Smart chain is currently processing nearly double the volume of the Ethereum chain.

The race to cash on the misery of Ethereum’s scalability issues during the peak of a bull run might have made Binance overlook a few anomalies. The firm has not addressed the issue at the time of writing.