Case Study: Mantle's BD Strategy

Understanding Mantle's testnet BD strategy

Mantle Network is making waves in the L2 landscape - they accumulated ~41M TVL in the first month after launch. In this blog, we’ll deep dive into Mantle’s BD strategy; highlighting key partnerships and integrations that have propelled its growth.

Mantle Network is incubated by BitDAO, which is backed by the likes of Pantera Capital, Dragonfly Capital, The Spartan Group, and Bybit. 

Bybit, in particular, has been actively seeding the BitDAO treasury from its futures trading volume. As a result, BitDAO boasts a treasury with ~1.75B in assets, including approximately ~$625M in stablecoins, ETH and BTC, making it one of the most well-capitalized DAOs in the space. 

They launched their testnet in January 2023, and over a period of six months, the network gained over 600k unique wallets with millions of transactions. 

Mantle was the first ecosystem that adopted (and announced) EigenLayer’s DA tech stack, setting a new standard in the L2 landscape. This got them on everyone's radar - building into the narrative of a cheaper and faster chain for not only DeFi but also GameFi and SocialFi

EigenLayer brought a novel concept to the table using staked ETH to ensure data availability for rollup-based L2s. 

As Mantle Network progressed towards its mainnet launch, the team focused on building a developer-focused ecosystem by bringing onboard key partners and integrating essential infrastructure tools to support developers. 

Some notable infrastructure partners - 

Covalent: A unified API for blockchain data across 150+ chains, Covalent provides 

fast and scalable historical blockchain data, ensuring developers have access to critical data points.

Biconomy & Thirdweb: These platforms offer easy-to-use developer SDKs, simplifying the development process for web3 applications.

Hash Case: Mantle Network partnered with Hash Case to build a testnet faucet, making it easier for developers to access testnet tokens.

Ankr: Ankr provides RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls), helping developers connect their applications to blockchains effortlessly.

Moledao: This builder community co-hosted hackathons, demo days, and boot camps, fostering a supportive environment for developers to learn and grow.

Apart from developer-focused infrastructure, gaming-focused infrastructure was also being brought onto the network - Lync and Particle Network were the notable partnerships in this domain. 

LYNC offers SDKs that enable web2 games to launch a web3 version game 

Particle Network is a Web3 middleware authentication platform with integrations to Unity and Unreal Engine - perfect for games to onboard through SDKs. 

As the mainnet launch approached in July, Mantle's primary focus went to DeFi protocol announcements. 14 DeFi projects announced that they were building on Mantle during launch week. This number went up to 26 in the following weeks, with projects like Gamma and Pendle joining the Mantle ecosystem.

(Gamma is an active liquidity management protocol, and Pendle is a permissionless yield-trading protocol)

Mantle’s latest focus is to expand its roots into the NFT space with Mintle (powered by Rarible) and their Citizen of Mantle NFT mint. Citizen of Mantle is the ecosystem's native NFT collection - created in collaboration with renowned visual artist, Chen Maner

As someone who does BD full-time - Mantle's BD strategy is definitely a great case study in ecosystem building. Looking forward to seeing what's next from Mantle!