A friend in the foreign exchange market recommended this project - Mento, which is doing forex on-chain.
Australia is a traditional dense area for forex trading, and many Chinese friends around me have been pulled into forex groups and platforms actively or passively, so I do have some understanding of the forex market's scale.
He said, "Since US stocks can now be on-chain, why can't forex be on-chain?" -- It seems to make sense. With an unbiased attitude, I spent some time carefully looking into it, and it's quite interesting.
Recording tonight's DD results, with limited time and possibly not comprehensive enough, to be supplemented in the future.
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Global FX daily trading volume is about $7.5 trillion (BIS 2022 data), far exceeding stock and bond markets. Traditional forex markets indeed have obvious pain points:
🚫High cross-border remittance rates: SWIFT, bank transfers with 1% fees and T+2~T+5 days to account;
🚫Only open 24×5, with time limitations;
🚫Almost no low-cost channels for small cross-border payments;
🚫Forex settlement relies on USD centralized clearing system, unfriendly to non-US markets.
Mento has done two things:
1. Multi-currency stablecoins (cUSD/cEUR/cKES/PUSO) + on-chain AMM.
2. Combining with @minipay and other light wallet products, first landing in African and Southeast Asian markets.
I think it aligns well with recent market mainstream directions, as stablecoins are essentially the "on-chain" version of USD or fiat currencies. DeFi and stablecoins have long-term positive trends.
Without discussing execution capabilities and other details, just looking at the narrative itself. If it can capture the two core tracks of emerging market cross-border payments and on-chain liquidity pools, it might form a valuation of tens of billions of dollars.
Even if it only captures 0.1% of global FX, it's a multi-billion dollar opportunity, and stablecoins + AMM + light wallets have already verified initial feasibility in the African market.
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I'll look into the project team, economic model, technical framework, and other details when I have more time. In terms of direction, it seems to have potential.
