Mento

The company

Mento issues more distinct currencies than any other entity on this map, and it is the strongest linking node in the whole dataset: open almost any local currency page here and Mento appears on it.

It is a protocol rather than a company in the sense the other large issuers are. There is no bank relationship behind the tokens, no custodian to name and no reserve account for an outside firm to examine. Everything it does is visible onchain, which is a genuine strength, and it also means the questions worth asking about it are completely different from the ones worth asking about a fiat issuer.

Sources: Mento, Mento reserve dashboard

Reserve posture

This is the part most listings get wrong, and the first version of this page got it wrong too.

Mento runs two backing models at once. Its documentation states that the Reserve backs the dollar and euro units, USDm and EURm, and that the Reserve holds other issuers' fiat backed stablecoins against them: USDC, USDT and USDS behind the dollar unit, and Circle's EUROC behind the euro one. The second model is a collateralised debt position system that Mento states is forked from Liquity v2, in which a user locks the dollar unit and borrows a currency token against it.

Which token sits in which model is a question about today rather than about the design. The documentation describes the borrowed side as covering GBPm and others, and says most Mento stablecoins are CDP-backed, which is the direction of travel rather than the current state. Mento's reserve dashboard reports where the supply actually sits, and when DIA read it on 5 August 2026 it named three borrowed markets: the pound, yen and Swiss franc units, each collateralised in the dollar unit at more than one and a half times the debt on that reading. Every other currency token was counted in the Reserve backed set alongside the dollar and euro units. The borrowed layer was a low single digit percentage of Mento's circulating supply.

So a Mento pound is a claim on Mento's dollar unit, and a Mento naira or real is a claim on the same Reserve that stands behind that dollar unit. Neither one is a claim on a bank account holding the currency printed on the ticker, and there was never meant to be one.

That is a coherent design and it is not the design most people assume when they see a local currency ticker. The documentation names the failure modes for the borrowed side plainly: a position can become undercollateralised through movement in the exchange rate, or through the dollar unit losing its own peg. On the Reserve backed side the question is what the Reserve holds, and because it holds other issuers' stablecoins, a reader inherits those issuers' disclosure along with Mento's. A reader evaluating a Mento token is working through one of those two questions rather than the safety of a bank account.

Sources: Mento protocol documentation, the Reserve, Mento protocol documentation, collateralized debt positions, Mento reserve dashboard

Coins issued

The roster below is what makes Mento structurally important to this map. Several currencies here have exactly one token and it is Mento's, which means that for those currencies the entire onchain answer comes from one protocol's collateral design rather than from a market.

Mento's own reserve dashboard publishes the reserve's holdings and a collateralization ratio, which is a materially better form of disclosure than most issuers offer in any form. It is worth reading what that ratio covers before carrying it to a coin. The documentation defines it as reserve holdings divided by the supply of the Reserve backed stables, so it is one figure for that whole set rather than a statement about any single token. The dashboard does publish a ratio per borrowed market, and that measures something else again: dollar unit collateral locked against what has been borrowed from it.

One consequence for readers comparing coins across this map: a Mento token and a fiat backed token with the same peg are not competing products with different levels of safety. They are different instruments, and a disclosure rating built to measure fiat reserves does not rank them against each other.

Sources: Mento reserve dashboard, Mento protocol documentation, collateralized debt positions

What this map tracks

DIA reads Mento token supply from contract state on Celo and on the other chains each token is deployed to, the same method used for every coin on this map.

The reserve question does not arise in the usual form here, because there is no offchain balance to reconcile. What DIA records instead is the structure: which unit a token is borrowed against, and what stands behind that unit. Recording it that way is the only way a reader can see that several apparently unrelated local currency coins on this map share a single point of failure.

One caution worth stating. Mento has renamed tokens onchain, so a ticker recorded from a listing can be stale against what the contract actually reports. DIA gates its reads on the symbol the contract returns rather than the symbol we expected, which is how that class of mismatch becomes visible instead of silently wrong.

Sources: Mento protocol documentation, collateralized debt positions, Mento reserve dashboard

Common questions