We’re almost coming up to a year since we first introduced Mantle to the community, and we’re in for an exciting year-in-review with only a couple of months left to go in 2023. We kicked off this quarter with plenty of new announcements, achievements and also exciting updates — if you missed out on any of them, now’s your best chance to catch up on what’s been cooking at Mantle in October 2023.

On-Chain Metrics (as of Oct. 30, 2023)

• Total Value Locked (TVL) increased to more than $138M after 10M USDT, 10M USDC and 10K ETH were bridged over from the treasury to mandated decentralized applications (dApps) for liquidity provision based on MIP-26
• Total TVL on dApps saw a high at more than $50M, with AGNI Finance, iZiSwap and FusionX leading in the top three spots
• Total Transactions since Mantle Network Mainnet currently at more than 18.4M

Ecosystem Focus

• New Projects Deployed on Mainnet: Mantle welcomed 13 new projects to Mantle Ecosystem, including RabbitHole, OpenOcean, PoPP Planet, Chat3, ApeX Protocol, 1delta, Rivera Money, Swapsicle, Joba Network, Mantle Inu, Starmaker, IDriss and Meson
• Showcase Apps: We’re deep in discussions with Showcase Apps on upcoming collaborations, and users can look forward to new offerings on Mantle in the next few weeks, including the collaboration with Ondo on providing access to the U.S. Treasury yield via $USDY.
• Podcast & AMA Spotlight: As Mantle Ecosystem grows and new collaborations take place, we’ve launched two new podcast series — Mantle Ecowaves and Showcase Radio — to further the understanding of featured dApps and projects that are building on Mantle and staying ahead of the web3 curve. For members of the Mantle community who are still new to the burgeoning ecosystem of dApps and want to find out more about use cases for $MNT or other Mantle offerings and products, these new podcast series are the perfect opportunity to start. Aside from Mantle’s owned podcast series, we’ve also been featured on 16 other AMAs with ecosystem allies this month, not just in English but also in Japanese and Mandarin.

Zooming in on Product Progress

• Mantle Journey Updates & Feature Add-Ons: Based on community and ecosystem feedback, we’ve introduced multiple updates this month to Mantle Journey, including the specifics of the Season Alpha reward pool split, protocol leaderboards and other upgrades such as the addition of a Mantle Journey Miles tracker, the introduction of a Referral Program and new social verification methods. Currently, the Season Alpha reward pool has been boosted to 25M $MNT, with 10M $MNT allocated to protocols and 15M $MNT allocated to Mantle Journey users.
• Citizens of Mantle NFT Complimentary Mint & Mintle: The complimentary minting event went live mid-October for whitelistees, with more than 36,000 users on the whitelist minting their unique Citizens of Mantle NFT. This event ends on Nov. 10, 2023, and users who are not on the whitelist can easily make a bid for any of the hundreds of Citizens of Mantle NFTs listed on Mintle, a secondary NFT marketplace that hosts NFT collections deployed on Mantle. If you’ve yet to mint your complimentary NFT as a whitelistee, mint yours here before the event is over.
• What’s Next: In the past few weeks, Mantle has been teasing the launch of its Liquid Staking Protocol and the collaboration with Ondo — more details on Mantle’s newest products will be revealed in the next few weeks.

Happening on Socials & Community

It was NFT season on Mantle, with several Citizens of Mantle NFT events being hosted online across X/Twitter and Discord.

• Change Your PFP: Citizens of Mantle NFT holders changed their profile pictures across their social media accounts to the character they minted or successfully bid for.
• #ShowYourCitizen Traits Showcase: With thousands of combinations of basic characters with dynamic traits such as headgears, accessories, eye colors and others, the community showed off their favorite Citizens of Mantle and highlighted the traits they loved. With Mantle Journey, holders would possibly be able to unlock rare traits and characters, so holding on to their NFTs is key.
• Backstory Contest: Finally, we invited the community to create backstories for their Citizens and were stoked to see plenty of interesting, creative submissions come through. Check out the winning entries and notable submissions here.

Events: Hackathons, Panels & What’s Next

• New Hackathon Builds: Our journey to meet as many aspiring and seasoned web3 developers across the globe took us to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in October, where the Mantle Dev Rel team were at ETHKL. Developers challenged themselves to #BuildonMantle and hats off to the winning super builders, who continue to espouse the potential of dApp innovations, hyperscaled on Mantle Network.
• Mantle on Stage: We’re also actively maintaining a global presence at notable events, such as with Mantle’s Head of Ecosystem Arjun Kalsy speaking at Ethereum Hong Kong and Public Liaison Igneus Terrenus at Blockchain Life in Dubai.

Where will Mantle be next? Catch the team at Thailand Blockchain Week and in Istanbul for Devconnect and ETHGlobal — details will be found in upcoming updates on X/Twitter!

New in the Content Bank

• Mantle Research: Our first research article by Head of Blockchain Research Franck Cassez is now up on the Mantle blog, covering the technicalities of gas fees on rollups. Our in-house research team is gearing up to cover fundamental topics in Layer 2s (L2s) and web3 from an analytical perspective to give the community more in-depth, research-supported insights.
• New Wallet Tutorials: Choosing the right wallet integration could be a challenge for developers considering all the options out there. The Dev Rel team has added new wallet guides for reference: Safe Multisig Wallet | iME Wallet | OpenBlock Wallet

Ecosystem Initiative Highlights

• EduDAO had a busy month across several events as community partners at Ethereum HK, ETHMiami, ETH London and Cal Hack. We’ll be seeing EduDAO’s students at Devconnect and ETHGlobal Istanbul at an EduDAO-organized hacker house in November.
• Game7 recently announced a brand new partnership with CryptoUnicorns as part of its commitment to web3 gaming.
• HyperPlay’s web3 gaming ecosystem has been expanding to include more intriguing and sophisticated games to satisfy every gamer’s whim, and most recently with BR1: INFINITE. Community Game Night is happening on Nov. 1, 2023.