I was recommended this project - Mento, which is about foreign exchange on the blockchain, by a friend who does forex trading at night. Australia is a traditional area with a dense population of forex traders, and many of my Chinese friends have been actively or passively pulled into forex trading groups and platforms, so they do have some understanding of the forex market's scale. He said, "Since US stocks can go on-chain now, why can't forex?" -- It seems to make sense. With the attitude of not being a biased old fogey, I spent some time looking into it carefully, and it is indeed quite interesting. Let me record tonight's due diligence results; time is limited, so it may not be sufficient, and I will supplement it in the future. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The global FX average daily trading volume is about $7.5 trillion (BIS 2022 data), far exceeding the stock and bond markets. Moreover, the traditional forex market has obvious pain points: 🚫 High cross-border remittance fees: SWIFT and bank wire transfers have a 1% handling fee and take T+2 to T+5 days to arrive; 🚫 Only open 24×5, with time restrictions; 🚫 There are almost no low-cost channels for small cross-border payments; 🚫 Forex settlement relies on a dollar-centric clearing system, which is not friendly to non-US markets. Mento has done two things: 1. Multi-currency stablecoins (cUSD/cEUR/cKES/PUSO) + on-chain AMM. 2. Combined with lightweight wallet products like @minipay, it has been launched first in markets like Africa and Southeast Asia. I think this aligns quite well with the recent mainstream market direction, as stablecoins are essentially the "on-chain" version of the dollar or fiat currency, and the long-term trend of DeFi and stablecoins is favorable. Let's not talk about execution capabilities and other details for now; just the narrative itself. If it can capture the two core tracks of emerging market cross-border payments and on-chain liquidity pools, it could form a valuation in the billions of dollars. Even if it only captures 0.1% of the global FX market, that's a hundred billion dollar opportunity, and stablecoins + AMM + lightweight wallets have already validated initial feasibility in the African market. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the future, when I have time, I will take a look at the project team, economic model, technical framework, and other details. In terms of direction itself, it should have potential.