Mara, a decentralized finance platform focused on Africa, has announced the release of a testnet for its upcoming Mara Chain. The Ethereum-compatible layer 2 network will use MARA tokens for fees and offer sub-second transactional speeds, low gas fees, and interoperability with other Optimism-based networks.

Developers in Nigeria and across Africa can build and test their decentralized applications on the Optimism forked Mara Chain, which comes after the recent launch of the Mara Wallet. Mara is actively seeking feedback from the developer community and partners to ensure continuous improvement of the platform ahead of the mainnet launch.