Last week, Mantle team representatives Arjun Kalsy and Jordi Alexander chatted with some key figures within Mantle Ecosystem to discuss various scaling technologies and the potential for enhancing the robustness of Mantle Network. Participants in this conversation were EigenLayer’s Founder Sreeram Kannan, LayerZero’s Head of Special Projects Max Power, Pyth’s Marc, and Biconomy’s Co-Founder Aniket, each contributing valuable insights and elaborating on their respective partnerships with Mantle.

Kicking off the conversation were Jordi and Arjun, recapping the recent successful launch event from EthCC in Paris.

J: We're experiencing our first days of mainnet now, officially out of testnet. How did you see these initial days going? And what is your expectation for the next few weeks? 

Arjun: It's been pretty wild, I think the launch went really well in multiple aspects. You can see Mantle Network’s TVL climbing daily. Native projects are doing well, so we're seeing many new projects launch. Everyday builders are reaching out to me saying, “We want to build with Mantle — what can we build? We've been talking to other builders building on Mantle. We want to join your ecosystem!” So I think it's been a great feedback point.

Over the next few weeks, there are a couple of things for us to really focus on:

1. Keep pushing on business development with different builders on how to make the network better.

2. Work with the team and communicate our technical roadmap over the next couple of quarters.

We've got a very talented, full-stack research team that has been looking into all types of different scaling technologies, such as ZK rollups, decentralized sequencers, and other ways in which we can make our network more robust and professional.

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Unique Aspect of Mantle and EigenLayer

J: With regard to EigenDA: Mantle was the first on board to really utilize the idea, and I think we've already seen Celo and some other projects starting to look at using the same data availability solution, which reduces the amount of interaction you need to do with the base layer. Are you seeing a lot of projects interested in this after our partnership?

S: Absolutely. Mantle Network is the first project we’ve worked closely with integrating EigenDA. There are a lot of new kinds of projects that want to reduce the total cost, but maintain a similar quality of security, which is exactly what we help with. As we get closer to mainnet, I think we'll see a set of announcements related to our partners starting to use EigenDA.

Mantle <> LayerZero: Frictionless Omnichain Experiences

J: LayerZero has been crushing it, I’ve seen the usage rising! What can you tell us from your side?

Max: We’re an omni-chain interoperability protocol. We sit between blockchains and allow communications between chains, creating omni-chain, unified experiences. LayerZero allows developers to send anything between chains. We’re really excited about Mantle. We support Mantle Network with an endpoint and allow developers building on Mantle Network, or wanting to move over, the ability to interact with other networks seamlessly.

Mantle <> Pyth: Instant Low-Latency Price Feeds for DeFi

J: What are you guys at Pyth up to right now?

Marc: Pyth is a financial oracle, providing an infrastructure layer to DeFi apps, including perpetual exchanges, synthetics, options, borrowing & lending, etc. Our goal is to provide low-latency price feeds for DeFi apps. We’ve been live on Mantle Network since Day 1 of mainnet and seeing usage. As the DeFi TVL rose, we started seeing Pyth price updates arriving on Mantle Network.

Mantle <> Biconomy: Account Abstraction for Crypto

J: What’s happening at Biconomy? I feel that Biconomy is the real deal from a purely technological innovation perspective. Can you also give us an ELI5 on account abstraction?

Aniket: Biconomy is working in the UX space of account abstraction. We provide a full-stack solution for anyone who wants to integrate account abstraction into their application. We offer a wallet-as-a-service solution where we have our own smart accounts & other services as well. We’re super excited to launch our tech stack on Mantle Network. We’re working with a bunch of DeFi and gaming dApps.

TL;DR on account abstraction (AA) is that it’s a new standard for creating smart contract wallets. AA aims to standardize smart contract wallets. With EIP-4337, the entire AA motive is to create a standard version of a smart contract wallet. We need this because normal EOAs are difficult for normal people to use due to many shortcomings, which we’re all aware of. With AA, we want to have security at the core but, at the same time, focus a lot on UX.

Potential Concerns With Restaking & EigenDA

J: When it comes to EigenLayer, there’s been some discussion about potential issues arising from $ETH restaking, even Vitalik shared his thoughts. The idea is that the Ethereum validators may be spread too thin, trying to validate too many things simultaneously. EigenDA is seen as a cleaner use case, and people don’t seem to have issues with it. Can you differentiate between the two kinds of use cases?

S: EigenLayer was created because when you’re building an infrastructure project that requires distributed validation, you need to have a trust network, and you need to have an economic stake bonded to make credible claims. EigenLayer is a mechanism that allows builders to utilize one of the largest trust networks, the Ethereum trust network, and its validator set with their stake.

Vitalik wrote this article about not overloading Ethereum consensus, which triggered healthy discussions. He specifically focused on overloading social consensus. Blockchains have this option of forking the network if something major breaks — this is the nuclear option. Since the DAO hack, precedence has been set that no matter what happens on the application layer, Ethereum will not fork. However, as projects build closer to the decentralized trust network, such as rollups, LSDs, EigenLayer, etc., there’s a possibility that something outside the control of Ethereum happens, which creates problems for Ethereum.

Specifically, talking about overloading computational resources of the node network and in relation to EigenDA, whenever you have a shared security system, you have the same set of nodes that have to run thousands of applications. Furthermore, all of them must replicate these applications, meaning adding new nodes doesn’t scale the system. The consequence of building a highly non-scalable system is centralization. Shared security, without proper thought, leads to computational overloading. This is why we’re building EigenDA. A major realization was that by separating the computation and data planes, both can be scaled separately. Data availability on the native chain will always have the highest security, but as a permissionless opt-in layer, we’re trying to reach as close as possible.

There are two major aspects to it:

1. Ethereum has a problem with the DA throughput, which is incredibly low at 80 KBs/sec; at EigenDA, our goal is 10 MBs/sec, and over time scale this further.

2. Also, no individual node will ever have to touch 10 MBs/sec, they can operate at a much lower value, ensuring the system is hyper-scalable.

Arjun: As we see other L2s imitate Mantle’s EigenDA implementation, I call it social proof. EigenLayer has established an interesting way of solving the problem of DA by solving crypto economic security first. Now, the floodgates have opened to several sorts of use cases. With Celo’s approach to building an L2 being very similar to Mantle’s tech stack, it has in some sense, validated our idea. The outcome is there for everyone to see on the network as the transactions begin to rise, the cost continues to go down.

Implications of EIP-4337 & EIP-3074

Aniket: I think overall, what we have to understand about EIP-4337 is how we can make applications more usable and how do we save unnecessary steps for users doing any interchain or cross-chain transactions. That's something EIP-4337 can achieve without forking any chain, that’s the value proposition. I think the next big achievement that will be happening in EIP-4337 is going to be a P2P Bundler network. I think in the next four to six months we will be seeing a public mempool where things will achieve more decentralization, and we can work a lot around the cost reduction — a pretty exciting roadmap ahead for EIP-4337.

Omni-Chain Accessibility

Max: What Stargate does is that it enables you to move from any other connected chain to Mantle Network. Stargate currently supports eight chains. It would mean that users could move from another L2, like Arbitrum or Optimism, to Mantle Network, and move from BNB chain or from Polygon. That would enable people who are maybe not native to Ethereum to come and explore Mantle Network and see everything it has to offer. Stargate's chain expansion is done via community vote. So the Mantle team could come forward and propose, which is something that I personally hope that they do soon, because I'm a big fan of Mantle.

Integrating Pyth Into Mantle Network’s DeFi dApps

Marc: It’s super easy and fully permissionless. With our docs at pyth.network, you'll have all the details for integration. Anyone can access it and you'll find the contract ID, the price ID, and you'll be able to connect to our off-chain end point. You'll also be able to create your own kind of service to listen to this end point.

With an on-demand model, whenever a user might want to trade whatever asset, your protocol will be able to ping the off-chain end point, bring the price on chain and fill the user at the exact price. In practice, we've had great success with mostly exchanges, options or synthetics because of this low latency, refreshing the price updates every two seconds, but you can also have it whenever you want. Anyone can pretty much fetch a price off-chain and send it on Mantle Network for any of the 300 price feeds.

EigenLayer Moving Towards Full Functionality

S: We're building the EigenLayer marketplace in three steps. You can think of EigenLayer as a marketplace between Ethereum stakers, node operators and services. If you think of these three sides, we're already on the mainnet with the first side, which is staking. And then the next phase is node operators, which we will have a testnet for in a couple of months. Then a couple of months after that, to mainnet. At that stage, new services can be built on top, maybe another few months after. So that's the roadmap, you know, by Q1 next year, we should have all sides of the ecosystem working.

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That wraps up our Mainnet Arrival AMA. We’re extremely excited about having projects like EigenLayer, Pyth, LayerZero, and Biconomy as part of Mantle Ecosystem’s infrastructure, streamlining the user experience and paving the way for builders to create better products. 

If you enjoyed AMA discussions like these, let us know who you’d like to see on our AMAs next via Discord!