Yesterday, $DARK was listed on Binance Alpha, and I received an invitation from Brother Ying to post in the Binance Square. This is a tweet I published on Twitter on April 11, analyzing and sorting out the relationship between mtnDAO, Edgar Pavlovsky, mtnCapital, and DARK for friends who are not familiar with it, and also serves as my first article in the Binance Square. Let's get straight to the point.
What is mtnDAO?
mtnDAO is a community-driven organization centered around the Solana ecosystem, with core activities including hosting hackathons and summits aimed at facilitating collaboration and innovation among developers. These events are typically held in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting developers from around the world, especially in areas such as DeFi and NFTs.
Simply put, mtnDAO brings together many top builders and founders in the Solana ecosystem. Solana co-founder Toly often mentions mtnDAO on Twitter and participates in the activities they organize to discover and connect more excellent developers. For example, Armani Ferrante, the founder of Backpack, participated in the mtnDAO v7 event held in February this year. Institutions and projects that have previously participated in mtnDAO activities include Delphi Digital, @Orca_so , and Step Finance.
Who is Edgar Pavlovsky?
Edgar Pavlovsky (X: @edgarpavlovsky) is one of the co-founders of mtnDAO, as well as a former member of the Marginfi team and the initiator of the DARK project. Another co-founder of mtnDAO is cobra (X: @barrett_io), and other event organizers include Sam Mehr (X: @slmehr), among others. They have collectively organized and promoted the activities and development of mtnDAO, playing a crucial role, and can be considered community leader-like figures.
What is mtnCapital?
mtnCapital is an experimental on-chain investment fund launched by mtnDAO, aimed at investing in projects within the Solana blockchain ecosystem. Its governance model adopts Futarchy (a decision-making mechanism based on prediction markets), guiding investment decisions through the price changes of the $MTN token.
mtnCapital launched the $MTN presale on MetaDAO's Launchpad on April 2, 2025, lasting a week and raising a total of $5.76M by April 9. The total supply of $MTN is 11 million, of which 10M were sold in the presale, and 1M along with $576k was used to add liquidity, currently in a fully circulating state. At the presale price of 1 $MTN = $0.576, the treasury currently holds $5.18M in USDC stablecoin.
What is the relationship between mtnCapital and mtnDAO?
Strictly speaking, mtnCapital is a sub-project or branch of mtnDAO. mtnCapital leverages the community resources and activities of mtnDAO (such as developer summits) to capture value and transform it into investment opportunities. While both share social channels and branding, mtnCapital's investment decisions are independent and determined entirely by the Futarchy governance model.
Nevertheless, the launch of $MTN indicates that mtnDAO is further expanding its community governance and capital operation capabilities through token economics.
How does mtnCapital operate? Latest developments?
As mentioned above, mtnCapital adopts the Futarchy mechanism for governance, guiding investment decisions through the price changes of the $MTN token.
In short, $MTN is the core of mtnCapital governance, and token holders express their attitudes towards investment proposals by trading $MTN, with its price fluctuations directly affecting decision outcomes. (📈=pass, 📉=reject)
For example, if the market believes a certain investment proposal (such as investing $100,000 in BTC) is favorable, the price of $MTN will rise, and the proposal will be passed; conversely, it will be rejected.
Currently, mtnCapital does not have much progress, with only two proposals still in the internal discussion stage, both of which are proposals to earn interest using idle treasury funds. The proposal content can be viewed in the mtnDAO TG group, and later everyone should also be able to see it on the mtnDAO governance page provided by MetaDAO: https://metadao.fi/mtncapital
What is DARK?
DARK (X: @darkresearchai) is an experimental project initiated by mtnDAO co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky, aimed at providing secure support for AI agents through Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) networks and enhancing AI capabilities using Model Context Protocols (MCP). Its core is $DARK Games, a competitive game universe designed for AI where humans can bet on match outcomes, sponsor AI, or design strategies to participate.
In simple terms, DARK creates a secure network environment for AI agents to compete autonomously in games, such as the classic game Dark Forest. Humans cannot play the game directly but can use $DARK tokens to bet on match outcomes through DARK Markets, or sponsor AI with tokens to enhance their performance, such as purchasing enhancements.
The first game of $DARK Games is Dark Forest. Friends who entered the circle earlier should know that in 2020-2021, a game called Dark Forest became popular in the Web3 community and was even a favorite game of Ethereum community and foundation members, known for its zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and 'Fog of War' incomplete information mechanism.
The game of $DARK is quite similar, except it is open only to AI players, and humans cannot play the game directly but can:
> Bet on match outcomes through DARK Markets and win rewards
> Sponsor AI, purchase enhancements to improve its performance
> Design AI strategies to influence their performance in the game
The game is expected to undergo its first tests next week, and DARK Markets will run on the Solana blockchain, supported by the $DARK token.
Some divergent questions
a) This series of ideas and products surrounding mtnDAO and its co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky has the flavor of the rise of daos.fun and ai16z (Eliza framework); is the next wave of narrative brewing?
b) mtnCapital and DARK have a close relationship with the same founder; how will the two develop in the future? Is there a possibility for mtnCapital to invest in DARK to build a flywheel?
Finally, I am attaching a relationship logic diagram I created, hoping it will help everyone understand this project:
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