As Mantle continues to lead the charge for the mass adoption of token-governed technologies, we'll be revealing unique Mantle voices to provide fresh perspectives on the wider blockchain industry and how significant market trends and opportunities are relevant to Mantle Ecosystem and the community.
You may have heard some of these voices on our frequent AMAs on X/Twitter Spaces or at various other physical activations across the globe — if you'd like to share your thoughts or continue the discussion, make sure you submit questions at our future AMAs!
Without further ado, here are Mantle's November insights, straight from the team at Mantle.
- NFT | NFT Growth Lead, @ricematcha
It is no secret that the last cycle of NFT liquidity slowly dried out as incentives ran out and leverage positions got liquidated in a seemingly momentum-driven asset class that is highly illiquid in nature. However, it would be unfair to overlook the commendable efforts that are paving the way for more sustainable and novel use cases of NFT technologies.
Mantle Network advocates for the use of token-governed technologies, and Mantle Journey itself is a resounding testament of our commitment to exploring and utilizing NFTs to elevate the overall UX for our wider community. We believe in the value of identity credentials and the benefits it unlocks for users while tapping on existing social attestations. Mantle Journey is a conceptualization of an incentive program to gamify how users ultimately interact and explore ecosystems. As of end November, the total number of Mantle Journey Soulbound Token holders stands at approximately 179,000. In addition, Mantle's inaugural NFT collection, Citizens of Mantle, is our way of sprucing things up for our community. As a fully complimentary whitelist mint, we also believe in lowering the barrier to ownership in collections where there will be higher supply and lower price-point assets, aligning with the notion of building an ever-inclusive IP and onboarding users seamlessly. As of writing, there are 34,968 Citizens of Mantle NFT holders, and the trading volume sits at an estimated 124,700 $MNT on Mintle, the freshest marketplace on Mantle.
We are also on an active lookout and are keen on supporting projects that utilize NFT technology under the hood, and understand the clear value-add that NFTs bring to their core offering, whether it be digital twin models, on-chain authentication or a direct representation of your real-world assets and activities (RWA/As). The opportunity here is vast as it very much remains a blue ocean market for the more nascent use cases of NFTs, with no real dApp that has really been able to go-to market and carve out a significant market share themselves.
- Gaming | Gaming Growth Lead Geezee
When it comes to blockchain technology in gaming, we are still in the very early stages. While web3 game developers have not yet reached a consensus on how blockchain can be implemented into the gaming industry, there are some promising hypotheses going around. Having spoken with thousands of game developers from around the world, Mantle gaming has identified and backed a couple of developers that are creating great projects and implementing blockchain technology in a sensible manner. We've supported developers from indie sized studios to large gaming studios from some of the top 10 gaming companies in the world, and while their approach towards web3 in gaming are all different, they each have the potential to open a whole new world of gaming through their projects.
- DeFi | DeFi Growth Lead @GabrielGFoo
The DeFi industry has been on a transformative journey, reshaping traditional financial paradigms and fostering a more inclusive, permissionless financial ecosystem. As of late, the sector has witnessed exponential growth, driven by a confluence of factors such as blockchain technology maturation, increased institutional interest, and a growing demand for decentralized alternatives to traditional financial services. DeFi protocols, ranging from decentralized lending and borrowing platforms to automated market makers and yield farming, continue to evolve, enhancing their capabilities and interoperability. Mantle aims to position itself at the forefront of trust, decentralization, and innovation by pushing the boundaries of decentralized finance through its sustainable and hyper-composable DeFi environment.
In our effort to become a formidable yield powerhouse in the industry, our foray into tokenizing RWAs in collaboration with Ondo marks the first major foundational layer of our DeFi ecosystem. With the launch of RWA-backed yield-bearing token $USDY and its wrapped rebasing tokenized bearer note $mUSD, Mantle enables users to tap into U.S. Treasury bills' sustainable real yield (currently 5.1% APY) right from their crypto wallet. Aligning ourselves with the core Ethereum ethos of decentralization, the upcoming Mantle liquid staking protocol — Mantle LSP, aims to further decentralize the Ethereum validator set and support its goal of becoming the world's computer. In addition to that, Mantle LSP, a Mantle core product that combines simple and modern design and robust risk management, aims to deliver a highly rewarding $mETH experience with the highest sustainable core yield for users' $ETH. We aim to plug these sustainable and natively yield-bearing assets everywhere we can to effectively supercharge the Mantle DeFi ecosystem.
Backed by the unfair advantage of wielding the largest on-chain treasury in the world, when discounting native tokens, we aim to solve the cold-start problem that many founders face and be able to take DeFi protocols from zero to one, one to 10, and 10 to 100. With the passage of MIP-28, the Mantle community has voted to allow for the deployment of over $1 billion worth of Treasury assets to provide liquidity support to the applications building on Mantle. This proposal also introduces new strategies that aim to diversify the approach to generating returns for the Mantle Treasury to further drive continued ecosystem growth and other tokenomic activities into the distant future. Through our continued efforts and commitment to the Mantle DeFi ecosystem, we want to empower builders on Mantle to build the most innovative applications and token-governed technologies to onboard the next billion users into DeFi.
- Infrastructure/Tooling | Infra Growth Lead @alittlezuki
Mantle Network has engaged extensively with blockchain developers and projects worldwide, gaining invaluable insights into the evolving landscape. We have identified and supported a range of developers and teams that are pioneering innovative solutions in the realm of blockchain infrastructure and tooling. These projects are at the forefront of enabling the broader adoption of blockchain technology by providing essential building blocks for the development of dApps.
Our support extends to a diverse spectrum of developers, from independent startups to established enterprises. We cover all the neccessary blochchain infrastrucure and developer tooling and also highlight our infrastructure ecosystem in a thesis-driven way, such as frictionless onboarding toolkits. As the blockchain infrastructure and tooling ecosystem continues to mature and expand, Mantle Network remains committed to fostering collaboration, supporting innovation, and contributing to the development of the essential foundations that will empower the broader blockchain community to create transformative decentralized applications.
- SocialFi | Head of Ecosystem Research @0xavarek
In my opinion, the social category is one of the toughest verticals within the web3 space to crack. Many have tried, and most have failed. Even those that have ostensibly achieved some sort of success (friend.tech and its more successful forks) are also now starting to fade away.
Why is web3 social such a tough nut to crack?
First, we have to acknowledge the fact that the premise on which most web3 social projects build their products upon is one that is necessarily assumptive and thus, pretty flawed. Too often have we heard the narrative that web2 social is sorely lacking in the areas of privacy, ownership, and censorship-resistance, and that web3 social is the key to fixing that.
Whilst it may be true that most web2 social platforms are lacking in the aforementioned areas, and that web3 tech is indeed able to help with these issues, the true (and sobering) question here should be — do consumers even care about all/any of that?
If the controversy-riddled history of social media has proven anything, it is that consumers may care less about issues of privacy and ownership than we think. If we set up an entire vertical on the assumption and overestimation that they do, when in actuality they do not, said vertical will find it tough to bootstrap any users or attention.
Additionally, the web2 social space is already highly saturated, and the fight to capture attention and bandwidth is already such a ruthless one; how can web3 social even think about coming in to capture any significant slice of the huge pie if our only real value-add is in areas that consumers don't really care too much about?
While tough to swallow, this is something we have to honestly acknowledge and embrace. The only way for web3 social to make any significant progress is for us as a space to be very sure, and specific, about the ways in which web3 technology/elements can augment, bolster, or fill in the gaps within the web2 social space. After all, we are mostly just a database, mostly populated with smart contracts. We are rarely a magic bullet.
We cannot afford to assume product-market fit (PMF) when there is none. We cannot afford to create solutions to problems that may not even exist that pertinently. What real gaps, then, can we look to build on?
For one, the problem of dark social is one that is prevalent within the web2 social space; this is something that web3 tech and elements can definitively solve via the indexing of on-chain data, and even off-chain attestations. For another, tokenisation allows for a financialization layer atop user-generated content (UGC) that web2 infrastructure cannot empower as seamlessly.
Instead of positioning ourselves within the extremely crowded arena of UGC creation and/or hosting, perhaps we should think about focusing solely on building something above and beyond (a financialization layer/a social graph layer) said arena to empower it in ways that traditional methods can not? Friend.tech seems to have understood the pertinence of this financialization well, but the fact that they attempted to compete in the UGC arena has ultimately led to the trajectory on which it currently is.
Focused-building with a clear unique-selling point (USP) is key, and if we choose too many arenas to battle in, we will ultimately lose.
Flowing from the above, these are then the areas that web3 social should focus on, instead of directly competing against extant web2 juggernauts. Valiant as the cause might seem, this would be a fight that we would be bound to lose. We simply cannot let lofty ideals guide the way we shape this vertical. Incremental steps will lead the way forward.
At Mantle, we are setting ourselves up to be at the forefront of this; we have, and will continue to, identify strong product-first, and consumer-centric teams and products to support and guide. From the web3 livestreaming platform Chat3 to the web3 social-graph-based review app Okapi, we are confident that users will come to love partaking in web3 social on Mantle.
