Mantle’s Aave-Powered Credit Market Crushed $1 Billion in Less Than Three Weeks, Propelling DeFi TVL to Record Highs Even as $MNT routes flow in a classic TVL price decoupling.
Summary
- Mantle’s Aave lending and lending market surpassed the total market size of $1 billion just 19 days after launch, while Mantle DeFi TVL reached a record of over $755 million, up 66% in a week.
- Aave V3 on Mantle quickly captured about 40% of the network TVL, led by $USDT and packaged $ETH deposits and backed by a six-month stimulus program funded from Mantle’s community coffers of more than $4 billion.
- Despite rising TVL and volumes, $MNT underperformed while $AAVE rose, with analysts flagging a TVL price gap, while traders are still trading $MNT as a high beta risk in a choppy BTC and $ETH market.
Cloak ($MNT) Aave ($AAVE) integration has become a niche Ethereum ($ETH) tier-2 to become one of the fastest growing DeFi distribution tiers on the market, with numbers so large that macro agencies can no longer ignore them. In just 19 days since launch, Mantle x Aave’s loan and lending market has surpassed $1 billion in total market size, while Mantle’s broader DeFi TVL has soared to an all-time high above $755 million, a jump of 66% in one week.
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According to a March 2 press release, the $1 billion threshold was crossed “following a record-breaking $800 million launch on Friday” and a weekend of “more than $200 million in organic inflows,” despite what the team describes as “volatile” broader conditions. This move ended a month-long increase. AInvest and other media outlets note that Mantle’s DeFi TVL more than doubled from roughly $333 million at the end of 2025 to around $445-543 million at the end of February, driven primarily by the launch of Aave V3 on February 11 and a six-month incentive program tied to Mantle’s $4 billion community treasury. Aave’s deployment quickly concentrated liquidity: within days it accounted for approximately 40% of Mantle’s TVL, with the assets delivered led by $USDT and packaged $ETH.
Mantle bills itself as a “first distribution layer and gateway for institutions and TradFi to connect to on-chain liquidity and access real-world assets,” anchored by the $MNT token and integrated with partners such as Ethena’s USDe, Ondo’s USDY and other yield-bearing dollar products. The protocol emphasizes “old-school security with decentralized efficiency,” leaning heavily on Aave’s status as the largest on-chain credit network with approximately 60% market share and more than $50 billion in net deposits, according to the same press release. In no uncertain terms, Mantle is trying to industrialize DeFi credit distribution: it deploys treasury capital to drive liquidity, uses Aave as the risk-managed front end, and then directs both institutional and retail flows into that stack.
For token traders, the picture is more nuanced. In fact, as Bankless Times and others have noted, Mantle’s TVL and volumes have soared $MNTAave’s price has lagged, at one point falling around 4-7% in a week when the Aave token gained double digits. Analysts consider this a classic ‘TVL price disconnect’: real capital flows into the network in search of returns, but secondary market buyers still deal $MNT as a high beta risk asset in a choppy macro situation. In a market where Bitcoin is trading near $70,400 over the past 24 hours, up about 3.5%, and Ethereum around $2,060 with a daily increase of about 2.8%, Mantle’s story is less about its nominal price and more about whether this TVL is stable enough to justify its emerging role as a DeFi lending hub.
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