Many Web3 projects have slowly deflated government bonds during this prolonged bear market. As investor interests cool, net capital disappears from holders’ hands and private financing reaches its lowest level since early 2020.
However, Mantle Protocol managed to build up more than $3 billion in its coffers, making it the richest among all others, including the Ethereum Foundation, with $512 million – according to data Finbold retrieved on September 28 from DefiLlama.
While the Ethereum Foundation primarily holds Ethereum (ETH), Mantle has a more diversified treasury, which DefiLlama classifies as:
- Majors (BTC, ETH): $440.83 million
- Native tokens (BIT): $1.19 billion
- Others (MNT, USDC, USDT, etc.): $1.15 billion
- Total excluding native tokens: $1.83 billion
- Total treasury: $3.02 billion
What is the Mantel Protocol?
Despite being associated with the BitDAO (BIT) token by DefiLlama, the Mantle Network has Mantle (MNT) as its own token used for governance, on-chain fees, and staking rewards. Nevertheless, the association arises because the network is incubated by the BitDAO community.
Interestingly, the Mantle Network is described as a rollup layer-2 blockchain for the Ethereum ecosystem, similar to Polygon (MATIC), Optimism (OP) and Arbitrum (ARB), fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) – making it is possible to bridge ERC-20 tokens to Mantle.
Similar to other competitors, this protocol aims to provide greater scalability to the Ethereum-led Web3, greater efficiency in smart contract implementation, and affordability for decentralized app developers.
The team’s $3 billion treasury operations are considered transparent, with on-chain monitoring and reporting.
Financing for Mantle and BitDAO treasuries
2023 has been one of the worst periods for fundraising – both when looking at public sales (IDO/ICO/IEO) and private round data.
This phenomenon has posed a challenge to the growth of new projects, or to old projects that have ruthlessly used their previously raised capital to maintain their treasuries and finance their operations.
However, both the BitDAO community and Mantle Protocol were able to keep their coffers healthy as they were the richest in the entire Web3 space, which could provide benefits in the future.
Moreover, BitDAO (BIT) was one of the most successful fundraising cases in the crypto market. Raised $230 million in a single private funding round, over $379 million from its IDO and $14 million in an IEO on Bybit. This will all happen in July, August and September 2021 respectively. Data comes from CryptoRank.