Mango Network: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What’s Really Happening
When you hear Mango Network, a decentralized finance platform built on the Solana blockchain that lets users trade, lend, and borrow crypto with low fees. Also known as Mango Markets, it was once one of the most talked-about DeFi projects on Solana, offering everything from perps to spot trading without needing a centralized exchange. But today, things look very different. After a major hack in 2022 that drained over $100 million and a slow, quiet rebuild, Mango Network lost its momentum. Many users moved on. Trading volume dropped. The team stopped posting updates. And now, if you search for it, you’ll find a mix of old guides, scam alerts, and confused new users wondering if it’s still alive.
What makes Mango Network different from other DeFi platforms? It was built for traders who wanted speed and low costs. Unlike Ethereum-based DEXs that struggle with high gas fees, Mango ran on Solana—where transactions cost pennies and confirm in milliseconds. It supported leveraged trading up to 10x, native token staking, and even margin lending for assets like SOL, ETH, and BTC. The native token, Mango Coin, the governance and utility token of the Mango Network ecosystem, used for fee discounts, voting, and incentive rewards, gave holders a say in upgrades and a share of platform revenue. But without active development, the token’s value faded. Today, it trades at a fraction of its peak, and most major exchanges no longer list it.
Related to Mango Network are other Solana DeFi projects like Raydium, a liquidity protocol and automated market maker on Solana that still actively supports trading and staking, and Serum, a centralized-limit-order-book DEX built on Solana that was once a key partner of Mango but has since been largely absorbed into other platforms. These projects still have active communities and regular updates. Mango doesn’t. If you’re looking for a working DeFi platform on Solana, there are better options. But if you’re researching what went wrong with a once-promising project, Mango Network is a textbook case of how quickly trust can vanish after a security failure—and how hard it is to come back without transparency.
What you’ll find in the posts below isn’t a list of guides to using Mango Network. There are no active tutorials, no current airdrops, no new features to claim. Instead, you’ll see real analysis of what happened, why users lost money, and how similar projects are trying to avoid the same fate. You’ll read about failed DeFi tokens, risky exchanges, and the quiet deaths of crypto projects that once had big promises. If you’re trying to figure out whether to touch Mango Network today—skip it. But if you want to understand how crypto projects rise, crash, and disappear, these posts are exactly what you need.
