From General L2 to on-chain Financial Stack: In-depth Analysis of Mantle's Transformation and the 10 Billion Ecosystem Blueprint

The former Ethereum universal Layer 2 network Mantle underwent a profound strategic transformation in 2025, transitioning into a modular ecosystem focused on on-chain finance. Its core upgrades include migrating to the OP-Succinct ZK Validium architecture, reducing finality time to approximately 1 hour, decreasing withdrawal time to 12 hours, and ensuring data availability through EigenDA. Within the ecosystem, a staking and re-staking stack composed of mETH and cmETH manages over $1.07 billion in underlying assets, making it the most important capital cornerstone. At the same time, through deep integration with mainstream CEX, institutional-level tokenization services, and a total locked-up value of $242 million in DeFi, Mantle is building a new paradigm of on-chain finance that serves institutions and emerging capital markets.

Strategic Transformation: From General Execution Layer to Modular On-chain Financial Ecosystem

In the increasingly competitive Ethereum Layer 2 space, Mantle made a key strategic pivot in the first quarter of 2025. It no longer positions itself as a generic scaling network competing homogenously with numerous rivals, but instead clearly shifts to building a modular on-chain financial ecosystem. At the core of this transformation is bridging the disconnect between liquidity, staking yields, applications, and collateral systems in the current on-chain environment, providing a unified environment where capital can flow more efficiently and cohesively for institutions and mature DeFi users.

This new narrative is specifically embodied in a framework of six major pillars, aimed at building scalable infrastructure for on-chain finance. Under this framework, Mantle has launched a series of landmark products over the past year, gradually realizing its vision. For example, the on-chain index fund Mantle Index Four designed for institutional investors, and the smart currency application UR that brings fiat banking services into the ecosystem. Furthermore, the establishment of its research and incubation department MantleX focuses on utilizing AI agents to more effectively deploy treasury funds and conduct on-chain research, showcasing its forward-looking technological layout.

Therefore, understanding today’s Mantle cannot simply be seen as a faster copy of Ethereum. Its ambition is to become a meticulously designed “financial city,” which not only includes an efficient road system (network), but also incorporates banks (staking protocols), exchanges, asset management companies, and a range of financial services, all of which share a unified economic and security foundation. This unique positioning allows it to stand out among many Layer 2s that focus on transaction speed and gas fee competition.

Evolution of Technical Architecture: Moving Towards ZK Verification and EigenDA's “Liquidity Chain”

Supporting Mantle's grand financial vision is its continuously iterated technology stack that pursues optimal balance. Its architectural evolution has gone through three stages, culminating in a key upgrade to OP-Succinct ZK Validium in September 2025.

Initially, Mantle V1 adopted a modular design similar to Optimism's OVM framework, but had issues such as transaction fee fluctuations and unpredictable block times. The subsequent V2 Tectonic upgrade migrated to OP Stack Bedrock, introducing the EIP-1559 fee market and a fixed 2 seconds block time, significantly improving the network's predictability and user experience.

However, the most groundbreaking change comes from the deployment of OP-Succinct ZK Validium. The core of this upgrade is:

1. Transition from Fraud Proof to Zero-Knowledge Validity Proof: Utilizing Succinct's SP1 zkVM to generate concise ZK proofs for each batch of transactions, directly verifying the correctness of state transitions mathematically, eliminating the lengthy 7-day challenge period, reducing finality time to about 1 hour and withdrawal time to about 12 hours.
2. Using EigenDA as the Data Availability Layer: The storage and availability assurance of transaction data are managed by a distributed, economically secure network of node operators on EigenLayer. This significantly reduces the cost of publishing data to the Ethereum mainnet, while ensuring data recoverability through technologies such as erasure coding, achieving an optimized balance between security and cost.
3. Maintain EVM equivalence and low proof costs: The execution layer is still based on the OP Stack, ensuring full compatibility with Ethereum development tools and applications. The succinct proof system keeps the proof cost for a single transaction at a very low level (around 0.002 USD), ensuring the economic sustainability of the network.

This set of technological combinations has earned Mantle the title of “Liquidity Chain” in its promotion—its goal is not to handle the most social or gaming transactions, but to provide a secure, efficient, and fast finality dedicated environment for value storage and financial activities.

Complex and Collaborative “Financial Lego”: A Comprehensive Overview of Mantle Tokenomics

The uniqueness and complexity of the Mantle ecosystem are most prominently reflected in its meticulously designed multi-token economic model. These six core tokens are like financial Legos, each fulfilling a specific function, while also interlocking and supporting each other, collectively driving the operation of the entire on-chain financial machine.

MNT is the cornerstone of governance and utility for the entire ecosystem. As the native Gas Token and governance certificate, its total supply of 6.2 billion tokens is fully circulating, with no unlock pressure from teams or investors. The value capture of MNT is deeply tied to the prosperity of its ecosystem, especially strengthened through deep integration with mainstream CEXs. This integration goes beyond simple token listing, extending to trading pairs as a pricing currency, transaction fee discounts, VIP rights multipliers, and even collateral for institutional clients. In October 2025, the circulating market value of MNT reached a peak of 8.7 billion USD, reflecting the market's initial recognition of its new positioning.

mETH and cmETH constitute the “capital ballast” of the ecosystem. mETH is Mantle's liquid staking Token, managing $790 million in ETH assets by the end of 2025. It adopts a non-variable base model to accumulate returns by continuously enhancing the exchange rate. More innovatively, cmETH allows users to “re-stake” mETH, thereby earning additional risk-adjusted returns from re-staking networks like EigenLayer and Symbiotic on top of the Ethereum staking rewards. mETH and cmETH combined manage over $1.07 billion in underlying assets, providing a solid liquidity foundation and security guarantee for the entire Mantle ecosystem.

In addition, COOK is the governance token of the mETH protocol, aimed at capturing protocol fees and value; FBTC is a cross-chain Bitcoin asset designed to bring Bitcoin liquidity into the DeFi ecosystem; MI4 is an on-chain index fund share token aimed at compliant investors, managing approximately $173 million in assets. These six major tokens together weave a sophisticated network covering governance, stake, yield, Bitcoin assets, and traditional financial entry.

Ecological Development: Institutional Adoption and DeFi Liquidity Progress

With a clear strategy and a solid technical and economic foundation, Mantle's ecosystem achieved substantial multi-dimensional growth in 2025, particularly in institutional services and on-chain financial applications.

Real-world assets and institutional tokenization have become highlights. Mantle has launched an end-to-end “Tokenization as a Service” platform, providing a one-stop solution for institutions looking to compliantly bring assets on-chain. The platform has attracted significant issuers, such as Ondo Finance, which deployed part of its short-term government bond token USDY (approximately 29 million USD) on Mantle. At the same time, World Liberty Financial also announced plans to issue its dollar stablecoin USD1 on Mantle. These collaborations mark the beginning of traditional financial assets innovating using Mantle's infrastructure.

In the field of Decentralized Finance, Mantle's liquidity shows a centralized but healthy development trend. By September 2025, its total locked value in DeFi will reach $242 million, with approximately 66% concentrated in the two main decentralized exchanges, Merchant Moe and Agni Finance. This concentration is not necessarily a bad thing in the early stages of the ecosystem, as it helps to form liquidity depth and attract more protocols and users to join. In addition, lending protocols like INIT Capital and Lendle are also steadily developing, providing users with a variety of earning and leverage tools.

At the user entry and experience level, Mantle has launched the Mantle Passport wallet based on multi-party computation, reducing user barriers with social login and recoverability. At the same time, by collaborating with gaming platforms to host incentive activities, it actively explores user growth avenues beyond finance. These initiatives together outline an ecosystem that serves both professional institutions and is committed to optimizing the on-chain experience for ordinary users.

Future Roadmap: Consolidating Leadership Position in Financial Infrastructure

Looking to the future, Mantle's roadmap continues to revolve around its core mission, aiming to solidify its position as a leader in on-chain financial infrastructure. Its plans primarily focus on three key areas:

The continuous evolution of infrastructure is fundamental. The plan includes the deployment of self-developed RETH and REVM execution clients, which are expected to double the transaction execution speed; and to promote research on “chain abstraction” to optimize cross-chain asset transfers and user experience, making complex multi-chain operations seamless for users.

Expanding the Depth and Breadth of RWA and DeFi is at the core of the business. Mantle will continue to drive its TaaS platform to attract more traditional asset issuers; and cultivate the developer ecosystem through global RWA hackathons and other activities. At the same time, it will promote the deeper integration of mETH and cmETH into a wider range of DeFi protocols, unleashing the financial vitality of its massive staked assets.

Strengthening Distribution and User Reach Channels is the growth engine. In-depth cooperation with cryptocurrency trading platforms is expected to deepen further, embedding MNT and Mantle ecosystem assets into more financial products. The smart currency application UR, as a compliant fiat deposit and withdrawal channel and asset management interface, will strive to cover a broader range of regions and user groups.

In summary, Mantle has successfully transformed from a “tool” to a “platform.” It is no longer just another blockchain pursuing faster and cheaper transactions, but has built a new on-chain financial frontier characterized by liquidity as its lifeblood, institutional-grade services as its framework, and a multi-token collaborative economy as its nervous system. As the narrative of Ethereum Layer 2 gradually shifts from competition in technical performance to competition in ecological value, Mantle, with its first-mover strategic positioning and already scaled ecosystem, has occupied a uniquely advantageous position. Its experiments may be defining the shape of the next generation of blockchain financial infrastructure.