Looking ahead to 2025, Mantle will continue to drive the integration of blockchain with DeFi, AI, gaming, and consumer sectors.
Author: Mantle
On January 22, 2025, several core contributors of the Mantle ecosystem gathered for a Twitter live stream to share in-depth insights on recent major developments in the Mantle ecosystem and key plans for 2025.
Mantle's Chief Alchemist, Jordi, participated as the host of the event, with other live stream guests including: Mirana partner SoHan, Mantle product lead YZ, Bybit co-founder and Mirana's funding partner Yaxi, Mantle Network BD head VEER, Mantle Network product head Joshua, mETH Protocol head Edmund, Ignition's growth director Zuki, and Ignition CEO Thomas.
The topics discussed during the live stream included: the design concept and differentiated innovation of Mantle's newly launched enhanced index fund, developer support and ecosystem building, the integration of Mantle's technological innovations with AI, etc., helping the community establish a clear understanding of the ecological milestones occurring or about to occur within Mantle.
Below is a summary of the content from this live stream event, welcome to read the full article.
Launch of a New Enhanced Crypto Index Fund
In last night's live stream, Mantle's Chief Alchemist Jordi opened the session by introducing the newly announced enhanced index fund. He stated that while this fund is similar to the S&P 500 index fund in traditional financial markets, it has its unique features, providing cryptocurrency investors with a convenient investment tool and serving as a bridge for traditional financial investors to enter the cryptocurrency market.
Product Design Concept
When discussing the concept behind this new product, Mirana partner SoHan elaborated: "We believe there is a huge demand in the market for products that can provide diversified exposure to cryptocurrencies, and as the regulatory environment improves, more traditional financial investors will enter the crypto market. However, they face challenges in selecting tokens, managing assets, and ensuring security. This product allows investors to gain beta exposure to the crypto market. We have always focused on alpha, but in reality, the beta market is a much larger market."
Initially, the fund will cover four assets: BTC, ETH, SOL, and USD, and will adopt a rules-based rebalancing strategy to ensure transparency and low costs. The fund primarily targets institutional-level crypto-native and traditional financial investors. Its design is simple, making it easy for investors to access the crypto market, especially traditional financial investors, who can enjoy the same protective measures as traditional funds, such as institutional-level asset security and custody services.
Differentiated Innovation Points
Product lead YZ further analyzed the fund's innovation from another perspective. He believes that the ability to more easily access crypto assets, both from the user experience and regulatory perspectives, is one of the driving factors for this fund.
In addition, besides providing investors with exposure to the cryptocurrency market, the fund also has income-generating capabilities, which is a completely new concept for traditional financial users. "This is a key differentiating factor of the product and an important feature that distinguishes it from other similar products in the market."
He further emphasized that this is just the first product launched by the Mantle team under the "innovation" strategy, and more similar products may be introduced in the future, allowing more traditional finance and traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency space in various ways: "We can envision expanding to a combination of more mainstream coins and emerging tokens in the future, further enriching the product's diversity."
Future Goals and Ecological Value
When discussing future goals, SoHan stated that the most important goal is the fund's assets under management (AUM). The team plans to reach an AUM of $1 billion for the fund in the coming months. The participation of the Mantle Treasury provides strong credibility support for the fund, helping to attract more institutional investors. "In traditional finance, investors often prefer funds with a large investor base, so the involvement of the Mantle Treasury will help us gain the trust of institutional investors." Additionally, the projects the fund invests in, such as mETH, bbSOL, and sUSDe, are closely related to the Mantle ecosystem. Therefore, any AUM flowing into the fund will return to the Mantle ecosystem, providing support for ecological development.
Bringing Crypto into Everyday Finance: The Core Vision
The Mantle team's vision extends beyond investment products in the cryptocurrency market; it looks to the future of how to better integrate blockchain technology with everyday financial life. Jordi invited Bybit co-founder and Mirana's funding partner Yaxi to share her interpretation of Mantle's vision.
As a loyal fan of Mantle, Yaxi believes that Mantle is one of the few companies in the industry with a genuine long-term vision, which does not necessarily have to be profit-driven but aims to do something valuable. Currently, although blockchain has shown significant advantages in providing financial services, achieving "everyday finance" still requires addressing some market gaps. For example, the gap between traditional finance and crypto finance, as well as the cross-account issues between fiat and cryptocurrencies, are all goals that Mantle is committed to solving in the future.
By launching a new index fund and a series of innovations, Mantle aims to create a seamless platform that can manage both fiat and cryptocurrency accounts, allowing users to easily combine traditional financial assets with cryptocurrency assets for a seamless user experience. This not only enables them to enjoy on-chain yields but also allows them to use their crypto assets in everyday life, which is the core vision of Mantle.
Jordi also pointed out that Mantle's vision is to better integrate the decentralized on-chain world with the traditional centralized financial world. This can only be achieved through a true understanding of both domains. The Mantle team has always placed great emphasis on the development and application of crypto-native technologies, enabling them to fundamentally drive this integration.
Developer Support and Ecosystem Building
Next, Jordi invited VEER, head of BD at Mantle Network, to share his views on future ecosystem building. VEER stated, "We already have a treasury valued at $4 billion and an excellent product team; the possibilities for the future are limitless." The Mantle ecosystem has evolved from focusing on the development of the DeFi sector to becoming a modular yield chain, with its liquidity continuously growing. In the future, it will further focus on how to bring cryptocurrencies into everyday life. Therefore, building financial applications is crucial, and it will serve as the cornerstone of the ecosystem, developing alongside applications in gaming, culture, social, and consumer sectors.
At the same time, Mantle is actively promoting the integration of ecological innovation with AI. "We are hosting a large hacker house focused on building AI agents, which will bring more innovation to the crypto world." Over the past three years, Mantle has been promoting a program called Sozu Haus, aimed at discovering the most promising founders and early builders, seeking those who are visionary, unique, and vibrant, willing to work hard for long-term development. VEER firmly believes that "Mantle is the only blockchain capable of realizing all possible concepts; there are no limits to what we can do."
Integration of Technological Innovation and AI
Product lead Joshua also shared some insights on Mantle. Joshua stated that Mantle provides powerful asset tools to support developers in their innovations, helping them build within the ecosystem.
From a network perspective, regarding latency, Mantle has become the world's largest L2 ZK, completing basic transactions in seconds, with final confirmation times reduced to one hour. In terms of bandwidth, by integrating with Eigenlayer and applying innovative technologies like AI, the network's throughput has significantly increased, supporting 200 times the transaction capacity of Ethereum, capable of handling global large-scale transaction demands. Through these two technological initiatives, Mantle can support payments and transactions on a global scale, providing a solid foundation for mass adoption.
mETH Protocol
Edmund, head of the mETH Protocol, stated that the team is exploring how to collaborate the mETH protocol with AI-integrated DeFi applications, which is one of the main goals for this year: to improve the user experience of mETH, making it easier for users to get started. The team plans to use DeFi AI applications to help simplify the entire user experience process, allowing users to achieve better yields with mETH and cmETH. Another goal is to integrate with protocols reviewed by the team, so users can expect to see mETH appear in various DeFi AI protocols over the next year.
At the same time, Bybit, as one of the team's closest partners, currently supports users in staking ETH to cmETH and earning over 9% returns, while also providing OTC services for ETH to cmETH. Therefore, the user experience is very seamless. The team will continue to work closely with Bybit to improve the user experience of using cmETH and help users enjoy better yields in a very secure environment.
Ignition FBTC
Zuki, the growth director of Ignition, shared that the core vision of FBTC is to bring yields to Bitcoin holders, which is something the market has long been missing. Currently, despite various Bitcoin scaling solutions, the Bitcoin network itself does not provide native yields or additional returns, so we indeed see a market gap and a lot of demand from both retail and institutional investors, especially as people hold more and more Bitcoin.
FBTC currently has a TVL of 1.4 billion, with 117,000 holders and offers 32 use cases. This means FBTC has become a gateway asset for users to earn yields on Bitcoin, allowing them to access 32 platforms to earn substantial, stable, and secure returns. FBTC is currently deployed on 7 chains, including Mantle, Ethereum, BNB, Base, and Arbitrum, and the team is actively collaborating with both major players and newcomers. Supporters behind FBTC include Mantle and Antalpha Prime, with Mantle having rich experience in developing on-chain ecosystems, while Antalpha Prime is a core contributor leading the sustainable development of the BTC ecosystem. Zuki stated, "We plan to attract more participants and supporters to ensure the security of FBTC assets and provide foundational liquidity. Therefore, we are very much looking forward to the empowerment from the Mantle ecosystem in 2025, as well as from the entire crypto world, to elevate Bitcoin and FBTC to new heights."
MantleX
As the head of MantleX, Jordi pointed out that MantleX is essentially an attempt by Mantle in the AI field, aimed at participating in this social transformation, and has already been in discussions with some well-known teams to deploy AI agents on Mantle. He is very confident in driving Mantle towards AI development.
MantleX plans to leverage the latest advancements in AI technology in 2025 to promote the construction of AI applications on the blockchain, empowering agents with financial management and autonomous operation capabilities. At the same time, MantleX will operate an AI fund and will work with teams to develop many practical agents. In the future, Mantle hopes to fully autonomously operate Mantle X through these agents.
Q&A Interaction Session
- How will BTC-Fi develop in 2025? Will it be like RWA? The real question is, is it in its early stages or has it already entered a more mature stage? What stage are we currently in with BTC-Fi?
Zuki answered:
Since Bitcoin is the native asset of cryptocurrency, while RWA is not, I believe BTC-Fi is still in a very early stage. Currently, people are more inclined to use native tokens from Ethereum or other chains to earn yields. Bitcoin is gradually entering the on-chain world. At the same time, we are also seeing many innovative Bitcoin yield options, such as Babylon Staking. Therefore, we will see more innovative options providing yields for Bitcoin holders. RWA-Fi will help the development of BTC-Fi. No one says these two are completely independent; it is entirely possible to use Bitcoin as a base asset in conjunction with the RWA field or products. So 2025 will be an important year for both areas. I hope FBTC can also contribute significantly to BTC-Fi and RWA-Fi.
Thomas (CEO of Ignition) answered:
We might be in the second stage of BTC-Fi. I say this from the perspective of an institutional custodian, so my viewpoint may lean towards the institutional side, but I believe the degree of adoption actually depends on three things: liquidity, capital efficiency, and utility. With the development of this field, especially regarding Bitcoin, the infrastructure has improved significantly compared to the last cycle. There are also more and larger yield opportunities, stronger liquidity, and greater legitimacy. So combining these factors, along with favorable macroeconomic conditions, I believe we will see a very strong year ahead.
- Is it possible to obtain all cmETH rewards on L2 without touching L1?
Edmund answered:
I think achieving this would actually be quite troublesome because all cmETH rewards come from those re-staking protocols, and we do not know whether they only intend to launch on L1 or if they would also be willing to launch on L2. We will communicate with re-staking protocols as much as possible to ensure a smooth user experience. Therefore, we hope to enable some protocols to deploy their native tokens on Mantle. This way, users can claim rewards on L2, but getting all protocols to do this is a bit difficult because cmETH itself includes multiple re-staking protocols. So we will try our best, but if it doesn't work, users will still need to go to L1 to claim.
Summary
The Mantle team is confident about the future, especially with the integration of blockchain and AI technologies. Mantle is providing more innovative, faster, and secure blockchain application solutions for global users. Looking ahead to 2025, Mantle will continue to drive the integration of blockchain with DeFi, AI, gaming, and consumer sectors, particularly through projects like mETH Protocol and FBTC, providing more opportunities for developers and users. With technological advancements, Mantle's ecosystem will thrive in a broader range of application scenarios.
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