The Mantle Report: Growth Factors and Strategic Approach
1. Introduction
Facing increasing competition from other Layer 2 (L2s), Mantle has differentiated itself with a focus on offering access to real-world and crypto financial services and strategic use of its treasury funds.
In July 2025, Mantle experienced one of its strongest growth phases yet, in terms of onchain TVL, stablecoins market cap and MNT performance.
While this can be partially justified by a general positive moment for the cryptocurrency market, it appears Mantle is reaping the fruits of some of the strategic bets it had recently taken.
Interestingly enough, rather than a tech-driven roadmap, Mantle’s rise reflects a targeted approach according to evolving market demand.
This is the Mantle playbook: an overview of Mantle carried out by first looking at a snapshot of the ecosystem and then a deep dive into the main growth drivers of Mantle’s success.
Finally, we tie in this vision Mantle’s future roadmap and some reflections on the evolution of L2s.
2. Growth Drivers and Strategic Expansion
2.1 A Brief History of Mantle
Mantle was originally incubated by BitDAO and had close ties with the Bybit exchange. It launched with high expectations and a strong focus on mETH, its liquid staking solution, which attracted over $340m in TVL in only about 5 months after mainnet launch in July 2023, becoming the 6th biggest liquid staking token (LST), with 1.35% of the total marketcap.
Currently, mETH has risen to become the 4th biggest LST, with a TVL of over $1.69b.
To bootstrap initial adoption, Mantle also announced a $200m strategic fund, which solidified it as one of the biggest L2s by TVL, attracting major protocols.
As part of its vision to differentiate from other L2s and act as a connector between DeFi and traditional finance (TradFi), Mantle pivoted towards a modular cross-chain architecture, integrating EigenDA as a data availability provider and developing its own EVM-compatible execution layer.
By leveraging EidenDA, Mantle is not limited to Ethereum’s DA, which means it can scale more quickly and cost-effectively to support more chains. With the introduction of Helios, Mantle also separated its execution layer from its consensus layer. This allows Mantle to verify the correct states across multiple blockchains while still leveraging a lighter client.
This approach is also reflected in the main growth drivers and differentiating elements of Mantle, which we will dive deeper into in the upcoming sections:
Strategic use of treasury funds
Institutional Focus and banking
MNT Utility and Value Capture
2.2 Strategic use of treasury funds
Mantle has one of the biggest treasuries in crypto, with over $3.1b in assets
.While over 81% of these tokens are native MNT tokens, Mantle ranks in the top 10 treasuries that are holding the most BTC and ETH.
Having such a high % of native token, however, represents an aspect to balance carefully: it can act as a strong incentive alignment mechanism by linking the success of Mantle with the growth of the treasury, while at the same time can represent an element of risk in case of market downturns. With the value of the treasury closely tied to MNT, this could cause a downward spiral.
Mantle’s treasury has been deployed strategically. Notably, they have focused on incentives for long-term retention rather than short-term funding, as highlighted by the lack of recurring ecosystem incentive programs and a targeted focus on bootstrapping growth for key verticals and products.
2.3 Institutional focus and banking (UR)
The last year has been very transformative for Mantle, which has refocused its roadmap around offering financial services to frame its network as a bridge between DeFi and TradFi.
This was reflected in the Q3 letter shared with token holders, where they remarked on their focus on “Blockchain for Banking”.
As part of these efforts, they launched UR (now live in beta), an app that allows users to have a unified financial account for both FIAT and onchain transactions.
According to Mantle, one of the main pain points making it harder for cryptocurrency assets to go mainstream and integrate with the traditional financial sector is a fragmented UI/UX and the deep technical knowledge required to operate onchain.
UR focuses on solving these issues by providing a direct solution to crypto’s mainstream adoption barrier, making Mantle the first L2 to offer integrated banking access with a unified access to both crypto and FIAT services, such as:
Tokenised equity and bonds
Forex
DEX trading
Banking
Insurance
With UR, both retail and institutional users will be able to take advantage of a much broader range of services, which will benefit from the programmability and transparency of the blockchain, and are provided with:
A Swiss IBAN account, supporting multiple currencies
Mastercard Debit Card
Global Banking Rail Access
Seamless onramping and offramping
Imagine a family office that’s currently constrained to operate across Tradfi and crypto investment opportunities. With UR, they would be able to freely move their idle CHF into BTC and use it across Defi.
UR also integrates with other services offered by the ecosystem, such as the Mantle Institutional Fund, mETH, Function BTC and more (which we will dive into in the next section).
UR isn’t an isolated product, but is deeply integrated within the Mantle ecosystem as an additional flywheel, utilising MNT and distributing its revenues and economic activity to the Mantle network and MNT token holders.
Mantle’s recent ventures show how they are doubling down on this niche, with their acquisition of ReserveOne, a crypto index fund (reserve) holding BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and ADA, explicitly designed for institutional investors looking for long-term exposure to digital assets.
2.4 MNT utilities and value capture
The entire suite of products launched by Mantle is carefully curated around MNT.
MNT is the utility token of Mantle, powering the whole ecosystem, serving as the gas token of the Mantle network and granting voting rights on ecosystem proposals.
Mantle has focused on a deep link between the growth of the chain and the token value (call it a flywheel if you really have to), while many L2s have misunderstood the tokenomics of their native token.
This is achieved by:
Using MNT as a gas token on the Mantle network
Using MNT within ecosystem products such as UR
Ensuring ecosystem revenues flow back to MNT and that its holders get rewarded for their alignment
MNT is also widely adopted both in Cefi, thanks to its Bybit partnership, and Defi, offering several opportunities.
Here are some examples across:
CeFi
the close connection with Bybit translates into several opportunities for Mantle users to benefit from initiatives by the CEX.
This includes:
MNT to participate in Launchpool Projects on Bybit
MNT is supported in the structured products offered by Bybit
OTC Portal for MNT
Mega Drops and more MNT-specific advantages
DeFi
MNT finds broad use across Defi both as collateral, as liquidity and as an asset for liquid staking.
This includes:
MNT is used in money markets such as Pendle, Dolomite, with more coming soon
Provide liquidity on Merchant Moe
Deposit MNT into WOOFI’s vault
Participate in missions
Use MTN for liquid staking in Merchant Moe or Agni
The combination of these factors has made Mantle into a deeply integrated ecosystem which focuses on offering financial systems merging Defi with Tradfi, with a strong feedback loop where all value flows back to its ecosystem and MNT token holders.
The pillars of the ecosystem include, but are not limited to:
mETH: A strong staking and restaking primitive.
UR: A banking-focused app merging offchain and onchain financial services.
Mantle Index Four (MI4): an institutional grade fund giving investors exposure to a basket of differentiated assets such as BTC, ETH, SOL, USD, as well as yield-bearing tokens such as mETH, sUSDe, and BBsol, giving staking rewards.
Function (FBTC): a decentralised Bitcoin solution that deepens BTC use case within Defi. This includes re-staking within Babylon, depositing FBTC as collateral on lending markets, or deploying it into vaults to earn some yield
3. Future Roadmap and Food for Thought
In the near future, Mantle is expected to double down on their strategic focus on institutional and banking products, bridging Web2 and Web3.
Part of the Mantle Vision 2.0 involves broader alignment with Bybit, exemplified by two executives from Bybit having joined Mantle as key advisors on how to drive more synergies.
As part of these efforts, we can expect more campaigns similar to the ones being run with launchpads and megadrops, MNT-denominated trading pairs on Bybit, MNT options, and holding MNT as a requirement to become a VIP. Through these efforts, Mantle could benefit from fresh liquidity in its ecosystem from Bybit’s established user base of over 70 million users.
Another pillar of Mantle’s future roadmap is further consolidation in offering financial services onchain as well as placing increasing focus on RWA assets, with institutional demand expected to grow, following projected clearer regulations and more tailored products.
This report has highlighted how Mantle has managed to solidify its positioning among L2s.
By focusing on specific narratives such as banking and financial services, Mantle has balanced its growth with trends, narratives, and market demand.
Another differentiating element has been their focus on driving value to their native token, MNT, with a central role within the ecosystem and many channels that drive value to it.
This has distinguished it from other L2s, which have neglected to establish a clear link between the growth of their ecosystem and their native token.
Last but not least, Mantle has placed a strong focus on zero-knowledge proofs, with the aim of becoming the biggest ZK chain by the end of the year.
For readers who have kept on this far, here’s some alpha. The team has recently announced that they are strategically thinking about the long-term plan to reduce MNT supply.
A significant portion of the supply was already burned during the BitDAO and Mantle merge.
Can we expect more burn coming?
As always, the DAO will have the last word.
We hope you enjoyed this report. Expect more Mantle content coming from us.