Why you should pay attention to Mantle — Bridging + Airdrop
Hey folks, so this past month we saw the meteoric rise of Base, Coinbase’s brainchild and Ethereum’s hottest OP-stack L2, yet you may not have heard about Mantle, another Ethereum L2 which besides using optimistic roll-ups, touts modular architecture and extremely high scalability.
What I’ll be covering in today’s article is why despite its small size, the Mantle network is an L2 that shouldn’t be ignored and why it’s still worth bridging towards and trying out.
Let’s layout some groundwork shall we?
1/10th of the TVL
To be completely transparent, I’m still really new to Mantle, but I’ve heard about it quite often from the Bankless podcasts, who has them as one of their official sponsors. What I do know though is that in both of their short lifespans, Base is killing thme, with almost a 10x in TVL:
Now we can speculate as to many of the possible reasons for why this is, but for the purposes of this article, I won’t go in detail and will just say two words: friend tech.
Airdrops
Despite the crazy difference in TVL, the other major difference between Base and Mantle’s releases are their respective airdrops, or in in Base’s case, the lack of one at all. It’s pretty funny, because even though people from Base have explicitly said several times, that there’s no plans for an airdrop on Base, the hopium is still strong with the crypto-nerds:
As we’ll breakdown later, Mantle by stark contrast has one of the most detailed airdrop/incentives maps for an L2 that I’ve ever seen. On September 11th, Mantle announced that there will be 20 million worth of $MNT that will be airdropped towards people exploring the ecosystem:
Through what they call “MJ Miles,” depending on what activities you conduct, you have a chance of earning a share of the 20 million $MNT after each season. Here’s the TLDR:
As you can tell from the list above, by far the best use of your time is to perform on-chain activity, where you can earn up to 1 million MJ miles by performing 100,000 transactions on the network. Similar to the polygon network, gas fees are extremely cheap (especially compared to Ethereum mainnet) and transactions can be done for cents on the dollar.
Making things even easier, you can track your MJ miles earned via your profile page to see exactly where you stand:
As you can see in the graphic above, you can get 120 MJ miles right off the bat, simply by setting up your profile.
Great, so how do I get started on Mantle?
Similar to the Matic network, in order to perform transaction on the Mantle network, you need the native token $MNT for gas. $MNT can be obtained in a variety of ways, but perhaps the simplest is to bridge tokens from Ethereum mainnet to Mantle via their official mainnet bridge, because as of right now you will get a “$MNT bonus” for bridging over an asset — for me after bridging over some $ETH, I received approximately 3 $MNT, or about $1.50 worth of $MNT at time of writing:
Right now the following tokens can be bridged, including:
To note, Mantle also has their own fiat on-ramp through Banxa where you can buy $MNT via Visa/Mastercard, albeit with a 1.99% gateway fee, or else you can bridge other assets through other platforms including symbiosis.finance, orbiter.finance, and via.exchange. I’ve only used orbiter myself, but I should also note (and I believe this is the same with Symbiosis and Via as well) that you’ll most likely run into one of two problems:
- You won’t get a bonus $MNT for your transaction like you would on the official bridge, meaning that you’ll have no gas to complete transactions even with assets bridged over, which means…
- You’ll have to obtain $MNT by other means, either through an exchange/fiat on-ramp/uniswap via mainnet which can be annoying and just as costly.
A final note about getting setup — in order to ensure you have Mantle setup in your wallet (like Metamask) make sure you go to Chainlist to add the right one. It’s EVM-compatible so it should just take seconds:
OK, so I’m all setup — what do I do now?
There are several protocols available on Mantle, and I’d suggest heading over to DefiLlama to check them all out. Perhaps the hottest protocol on Mantel which is not listed on there is is fan.tech (which I might do another post on later), which is another version of friend.tech or post.tech, where all transactions and shares are through $MNT.
Conclusion
We’re still really early here folks, but so far my experience with Mantle has been pretty fantastic, with super cheap and super fast transactions. I haven’t touched a lot of the protocols myself so if you find any gems that are worth checking out, I’d be more than happy to hear about it in the comments below.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
