Space Summary
The Twitter Space Discover the Latest in the Mantle Ecosystem hosted by DappRadar. Dive into the Mantle Ecosystem, a pivotal hub for Web3 projects across diverse blockchains like never before. With its focus on innovation, collaboration, and $RADAR's contributions, the ecosystem offers boundless opportunities for developers and investors. By exploring this decentralized realm, individuals can immerse themselves in a world of pioneering technologies and revolutionary advancements, shaping the future of decentralized applications.
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Space Statistics
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Questions
Q: What makes the Mantle Ecosystem unique for Web3 projects?
A: It serves as a centralized hub for decentralized applications across a wide array of blockchains, fostering innovation and diversity.
Q: How does $RADAR contribute to the Mantle Ecosystem?
A: $RADAR plays a vital role in driving growth and development within the ecosystem, showcasing its significance in the Web3 landscape.
Q: Why is collaboration crucial in the Mantle Ecosystem?
A: Collaboration enables cross-pollination of ideas, drives innovation, and leads to the creation of progressive decentralized solutions.
Q: What opportunities does the Mantle Ecosystem offer for developers?
A: Developers can explore a multitude of blockchain networks and cutting-edge projects, expanding their capabilities and reach.
Q: How does participation in the Mantle Ecosystem benefit investors?
A: Investors gain access to a diverse range of decentralized projects and emerging technologies, presenting growth opportunities and early investment prospects.
Highlights
Time: 12:15:31
Innovative Web3 Projects Showcase Exploring groundbreaking projects and technologies within the Mantle Ecosystem.
Time: 12:25:45
Spotlight on $RADAR Development Understanding the influential role of $RADAR in shaping decentralized applications.
Time: 12:35:59
Networking and Collaboration Opportunities Unveiling avenues for collaboration and partnerships within the Mantle Ecosystem.
Time: 12:45:12
Future Vision for Web3 in Mantle Discussing the trajectory of Web3 projects and innovations within the ecosystem.
Time: 12:55:27
Investment Prospects in Mantle Ecosystem Exploring potential investment opportunities and trends in decentralized applications.
Time: 13:05:38
Developer Engagement and Growth Empowering developers through engagement with cutting-edge technologies and projects.
Time: 13:15:49
Decentralized Innovation in Action Witnessing real-time innovations and solutions developed within the Mantle Ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
- Mantle Ecosystem is a hub for Web3 projects spanning over 60 blockchains, offering a diverse range of decentralized applications.
- Innovation thrives in the Mantle Ecosystem, providing a platform for groundbreaking ideas and technologies to flourish.
- The ecosystem hosts $RADAR, a key player contributing to the growth and development of decentralized applications.
- Exploration within the Mantle Ecosystem opens doors to unique opportunities for developers and investors across multiple blockchain networks.
- Collaboration and networking within the Mantle Ecosystem are essential for fostering growth and innovation in the Web3 space.
- Participation in the Mantle Ecosystem offers a gateway to cutting-edge technologies and progressive projects shaping the future of decentralized applications.
- Discovering the Mantle Ecosystem unveils a world of decentralized possibilities and revolutionary advancements across various blockchain platforms.
Behind the Mic
Initial Greetings
Hello. Hello. How's it going? Gmgmdh? All good. How about you? Doing well? Got my morning coffee and feeling. Feeling great. Nice, nice. I got my tea waiting for Robert. He's having issues with the mic. Once that's sorted, things can't get started.
Technical Issues and Setting the Stage
GM, can anybody hear me? My apologies. For some reason my ex, Twitter, whatever you want to call it didn't work. But thankfully the problem has been resolved and now we're getting ready. So, GM, everybody. Great to have such an audience here and we're going to dive into an interesting topic with mental and fear. Please correct me if I pronounce it wrong, but zero x. It's correct. Awesome. Yeah. So let's give it one or two more minutes just to get some people in. No, tweet it out. Let your friends know that you're joining the spaces. Let's create some noise and let's get it started. So while you're shouting, calling your friends, sending DM's, tell people to come in, make yourself a cup of coffee, sit down on your favorite chair, relax, and oh, we're going to get this space started very soon.
Welcoming Everyone
All right. Now without much further ado, let's just get started, right? That's the best thing to do. So welcome everybody. Welcome. On this 2 October 2024, these are exciting times for web three. Exciting times in the world in general, but in web three in particular, because adoption, is it happening? Is the bear market ending? Is the real bull market coming? Questions, questions. But more importantly, when it comes to adoption, we need ecosystems that are fast, ecosystems that are easy to use, that are cheap, and we've got mental with us here. And veer, please veer, introduce yourself and yeah, let's get it started.
Introduction of Veer
Thank you. Thank you. And thanks everyone for being here and DaP radar for. For hosting this. Yeah, my name is Veer. I've been in this space for quite some time. Started in 2017, got involved in some kind of early DaO experiments, and from there joined this current team even before mantle existed in 2021. So I've been in the space for a while, but not full time until 2021. Currently I am the head of BD at Mantle. Although BD, I think is a questionable term because I don't feel like I'm actually selling anything. I'm more like building economies, building ecosystems and so on. I'm also very focused on builder success on mantle. So a lot of things, I think, overlap between Devrel and ecosystem growth in general.
Veer's Professional Background
So yeah, just kind of oversee a lot of things that have to do with mental expansion in general. What else should I say about myself? I have a pretty interesting background. Now that everybody's talking about how crypto is all about infra, there's not enough consumer facing applications. My background actually is in consumer applications. Before joining full time in crypto, I worked in market and product research with a large agency. We had two floors in the World Trade center in New York. We were working with every single FAANG, did a lot of consumer research, a lot of early stage innovation work with prototypes from let's say, Apple and Facebook and so on.
Insights from Veer's Experience
So kind of testing the markets with some of the new innovative ideas that these big tech companies were, we're looking into and directly working with those product teams, seeing what happens behind the scenes before these devices exist. Actually, for example, Facebook's AR glasses that just were released I think a week or so ago that worked. I was already part of, I think maybe four years ago or so. A lot of these development cycles are quite long. And now from my side, kind of putting a lot of thought into like what can we learn from more the web two side of product building, whether it's hardware or software, and how can we implement a lot of those standards and ideas and workflows and methods into creating the best possible tools and user applications in crypto and especially in the mental ecosystem.
Veer's Diverse Background
So yeah, it just like some parts of my background I also have you. I studied art for a while. I was coding for a while just for myself, doing random projects. So I would say I had a fairly atypical background as a builder and as a professional. So yeah, just a little bit about myself. It's funny that you have this web two background, so maybe just to get a bit more insight in you and also the way mentor works. Like you said, that you looking at ways in how blockchain industry can incorporate methods development. Methods development flows from traditional companies.
Discussion on Innovation Cycles
In my personal experience, I have a bit of a gaming industry background where everything is always in longer cycles, four or five years generally. And I get really excited about vetri because the innovation happens so fast in very small steps instead of the big leaps that we often see in traditional tech. So what is your take on that? Yeah, actually, so part of our market, so I used to work with a company called National Research Group and we did tons of gaming work also. So we work with the likes of EA Sports or EA games and Zynga and lots of Apple arcade and stuff like that. I actually think even in gaming there are different kinds of user facing or consumer facing applications.
Comparison of Development Cycles
I think Zynga is a great example of much shorter development cycles. I think Zynga games are, for those who are not familiar, they got really popular in the early Facebook era and a lot of those games were actually, from the development standpoint, fairly simple. But it's more about kind of social, like these social mini games and how can we build these really fun interactive things that we can play with our friends on these social platforms. And I think there's a lot to learn from that era of gaming. I think we have started to see a lot of that happening on Telegram, including on mantle.
Gaming Trends in Web3
So Katazin has been like a massively popular game both on tan and mantle, and definitely seeing a lot of those like early Zynga and Facebook games era ideas now implemented in crypto. And I think that's side of things that's going to grow more and more. Yeah. From these larger games, I think. Yeah, we shall see. I think so far we haven't really seen anything really work out. And partly it's because development cycles can be years and years, I mean sometimes six, seven years for a single game. So I think a lot of the big checks and vc arounds happen in 2021 and 22 for more, let's see, allegedly AAA games.
Challenges for Game Development in Web3
Let's see what happens with that. We're gonna start seeing a lot of those games pop up in the next couple of years, but I can say it's gonna be really tough. I think one of the problems with this industry is we usually start with crypto first. Hey, we have all these tools and we have all these tokens and we have all this infrastructure. How can we now create some need for all of this stuff? And I think that's like, that's the wrong approach for more consumer facing applications. So I think still a lot of what I'm seeing, a lot of the problems from the consumer applications and even games is I think this like crypto part of those applications is just forced.
The Need for User Research
There's not enough user research done, there's not enough just kind of spending time to understand in a deep way user psychology. What kind of problems can this application solve? What kind of things can we provide that maybe no other industry can provide for these users? I just feel like we're a little bit too financial as a foundation for product development and not enough focus, not nearly early enough, is put into really understanding users and talking to the users and spending proper time with the users. I can say from one of the more concrete things I learned from working in web two is a lot of times when were doing early stage product development, even before we had a prototype, we would actually send researchers all over the world, study markets, segment the markets, understand the user.
The Importance of Market Understanding
It was really a psychological study of who these users are and what kind of products we can create for them. So even with games, we would do sometimes three months of research into understanding the differences between different geographic locations and different kind of socio economic status of different users and so on, and how that relates to their gaming experience and so on. How maybe gamers in Japan are going to need a very different approach from the core product side than maybe gamers in the US and so on. So a lot of that work actually happens simultaneously or even before the first versions of the product exists.
Lessons in Product Development
And again, this is something that I can't highlight enough. I think every single product developer consumer, especially in the consumer app space, needs to put 100 times more work into understanding the user. I think that's maybe the most important learning from my background. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, even something simple as an rpg for the asian market versus an rpg for the western market, same type of game, same genre, but completely different game experience because the user wants something different. And even, like even how you communicate things, right?
Cultural Differences in Technology
Like if you look at, okay, this is no longer gaming, but if you look at Yahoo, I think this is like a famous example. If you look at what Yahoo looks like in Japan versus what Yahoo looks like in the US, it's completely different products. Actually, folks in Japan want all of the information in one page. So this kind of more western software minimalism actually doesn't work because for some reason that maybe we don't understand yet, folks in Japan want all of the information like kind of stuffed into one page. So yeah, this is just one example of like approach. And even communication about products needs to be completely different depending on the segment that we're targeting.
User Insights and Community Focus
I also see our head of community, L. Brian, in this call or this AMA. But I always go to L. Brian and our community. Folks kind of ask for questions like how they think our users and our community would react to certain campaigns and certain new products and so on. I think this is going to be something that we're going to be focusing a lot more, actually moving more forward. So again, folks who are very close to the users are going to have this tacit knowledge that maybe nobody else in the product team understands or developers don't understand.
Knowledge from Community Interactions
Even designers don't understand. But those people spending most amount of time with the users themselves are going to have this war chest of knowledge and I think that's really gold for product development. Awesome. Yeah. Personally we could talk about the games industry for many more hours, but let's jump to the core topic of today. And that's of course mental, for those who don't know, is an l two on top of the Ethereum network. But perhaps fear you can explain a lot better what makes mental.
Introducing Mental
Oh man, you have no idea. This is such a hard question every time. You are correct in saying that we're an l two on top of Ethereum.
Introduction to Mantle
I think most people know us as an l two, but actually we're much more. In 2021, when we started, before the l two even existed, were a bit more of an investment Dao and were expanding into all directions. We spun up a lot of different subdaos, or what we used to call autonomous entities. Game seven came out of that, and many other projects came out of that. Dao, for example, came out of that. Our background actually is very much into investing with our treasury as well as product development. We've always been product first and more product focused. Mantle L two just happened to be our first well known product. So again, it's an l two on Ethereum.
Technical Design of Mantle
What makes it different is we're using an Alt DA design which we have worked on with Eigen layer since our early days in 2022. Basically what that means is we are, we have quite a bit more throughput capacity than any other l two out there currently. That's more like a standard config l two. If you look at the 4844 chains, the throughput currently with blobs is tens of kilobytes per second. Some estimate that it's somewhere between 70 and 80 kb/second versus with an LDA design we can push it, especially with hardware stuff, we can push it to theoretically to a gigabyte per second if we really decide to. Although right now eigenda's capacity I think is about 15 megabytes per second. But still, it's so much more throughput than the current 4844 chain.
Future Perspectives and Design Focus
So in our mind, the standard roll up design currently is just an interim solution and it's just not enough for any significant mainstream adoption. So we're kind of front running this by designing a much more performative platform for users to eventually onboard to crypto, I would say what makes mantle? I like this question. It's quite philosophical. I think we're, as a team, we're very pragmatic. Again, product focus. We want to think more about what's best for the user, what's best for the ecosystem, rather than just maybe flaunt technical innovation for innovation's sake. So because of this pragmatic product focus, we've been also pushing a lot of internal products that we find are best for the ecosystem.
Core Products and Ecosystem
So some of the core products currently are meath or meth, however you want to pronounce it. So that's a liquid staking protocol. It actually, it's basically a more modern version of Lido. This is something where if you are a defi user on mantle, and if you're a meth enjoyer on mantle, you're going to have a good time as a defi user. Just yesterday actually, we unlocked a lot of rewards that came from Eigen layer and basically all of the meth users on mantle received some sort of eigen airdrop. And this is again our design of how can we leverage our unfair advantage, which is our treasury size, and do a lot of things like restaking our own ETH and Eigen layer and then giving most of those rewards back to the user on mantle.
User Experience and Community Engagement
So as a mantle meth holder, you actually didn't need to farm Eigen layer at all, but you still get exposure to all these rewards. And this is kind of how we think of our Defi ecosystem. So creating these core products like me, another one is FBTC, which is an omnichain bitcoin project that is also like a core asset on mantle. Other products like the reward station where you can lock your MNT and get tons of different rewards throughout the year and stuff like that. So yeah, we want to always think of the user first, think about how to provide them with a good time. Lots of surprises, lots of community programs, lots of rewards and airdrops and so on.
Team Dynamics and Long-term Vision
And then, yeah, I keep going back to what makes mantle. I think ultimately it's the team we have. I'm just so proud of what we've become in the last three years. I would say our team is incredibly hardworking, super low ego. We don't maybe do as well in the crypto Twitter popularity contest, but ultimately we're playing long term games with long term people. We're really making sure that everything we do is with high integrity and longevity. And we want to be here for years and years to come, while maybe some other ecosystems are not necessarily thinking in the same way. Yeah, that's a ramble of what makes mantle mentally.
Reflections on Multi-chain Future
It's a complicated question. Yeah, it was a very open ended question. Obviously one of the things that kind of stand out is the multi chain future. At the Breda, we believe in a multichain future where not one single chain rules them all. Everything works together, cross chain, shared liquidity, all the stuff. How do you guys look at the current state of omni chain, cross chain, multi chain environments, and where do you see this going moving forward in the years to come? Yeah, I think Interop in general has been the hot topic. Chain abstraction has been a hot topic. I just came from Token in Singapore, token 2049, and every single panel I was part of is like half of the panels about Interop and the multi channel chain future and so on.
User Interaction and Chain Abstraction
Although our dev team is working really hard on this. So we want to be a leader in this area. We're looking at how we can be competitive in the space. And even when chains are abstracted, which I do believe will be more or less the future, or at least big part of the future, the user will interact with on chain applications, not necessarily knowing what happens on the backend, not having to manually bridge funds, not having to even see what chains are in the backend. We definitely need to make sure that we're competitive in that area, and a lot of the flows get routed via mantle.
Importance of User Experience
And how we do that is making sure that we have good liquidity. We have deep pools and therefore there's no slippage. We have low cost and the chain itself is fast and blah, blah. A lot of that stuff wherever very much focused on. However, I don't think in the current environment this is actually the main problem for us. My hot take has been that interoperability itself does not bring a single user to crypto. This is not the reason why the masses come to crypto. I think if anything, we're solving problems for ourselves, like crypto power users and perma bulls who believe in this industry.
Onboarding Users and Ecosystem Development
But ultimately, if we want to onboard the masses, if we want to onboard the normie, interop itself doesn't really solve much for them. So I think we have to be application first, we have to be use case first, we have to be consumer first. And ultimately, even if a new user starts using one application on crypto, that's kind of a miracle. Onboarding even one new user to crypto is a massive task. The first primary question for that user is not going to be like, hey, how can I now use 20 different applications on 20 different chains? That's step 100 in their development in crypto.
Defining a DeFi Paradise
And only maybe big enthusiasts will start thinking that way. My cop out answer here is I actually think it's a little, I think not the real focus for mass adoption. So one of the things that we have done is, again, we've made sure that any user that comes to mantle has a great time on mantle, even Defi dad, a podcast host that I'm sure many of the listeners here know. I think he mentioned half a year ago or so that mantle is building this defi paradise. And actually I like that, the allegory, because it actually shows exactly what we've been thinking about.
User Retention Strategies
We want the user that wants exposure to rewards and this really interesting defi ecosystem. We want them to come to mantle and we don't want them to start exploring other ecosystems necessarily. So we want to make sure that if we're building a defi paradise, there's enough for them to stay in that paradise and they're going to have a good time using a lot of interesting applications. All the main primitives are there, whether it's Dexs or lending or perps and so on. Everything is there. And also they feel like they're actually earning money, they're actually getting rewarded for providing liquidity, for being active users and so on.
Reflecting on Interoperability
Again, I think interop comes, it's more of a solution for the existing power user in crypto. And I think in terms of mass adoption, it's actually not the primary problem we should be solving as an industry. Yeah. Like interoperability in general. I'm personally very fascinated by the idea. And it basically comes again from my gaming background. I love that dream where you win a sword in an mmo and then use that sword in an action rpg somewhere else.
Addressing User Complexity
That's like my gaming dream, but from an end user perspective. Yeah, I agree. Nobody wants to deal with wallets and different chains and making sure they have some gas fees to deal with on chain x. That's way too complex. And that's what you said. It's like step 100. Also, just one thing I wanted to also say. I feel like if the chain abstraction future that we've been thinking about as an industry is real and if chains are completely abstracted away, as in users no longer know which chain things are happening on, I think we're also losing part of what makes the quite interesting, right.
The Role of Chain Ecosystems
Every chain and every ecosystem becomes almost like their own nation state or maybe their own island even in some sense. And what that allows for is their own unique communities to grow and their own identity to form and I think that's one of the things that make crypto really fun. Again, back to my web two days and web two product days. We would be working on some really interesting, new, innovative product. But then let's say after we've done the focus group day, we did 6 hours of focus groups, we go and have dinner at night, and nobody talks about the product, nobody talks about the industry.
Social Dynamics in Crypto
It's not something that were obsessing about in crypto. It's an incredibly social industry. Even after we've worked a long twelve hour day, we still go out and still talk about crypto with all of our crypto friends. And I think this is like the social and the community aspect of this industry is really valuable. And I don't know why. Maybe it's like it's solving our loneliness problem, or maybe it's like maybe we're growing new cults, maybe these are the new versions of contemporary churches. I have no idea.
The Impact of Chain Abstraction
But it definitely, I think it gets people excited in a very different way. And I think chains and chain ecosystems are actually a big part of that. They become like platforms for these communities to grow, and you're kind of choosing your alliances and you're choosing your home base and you're becoming part of that community. And I think that's something that we should actually cherish. That's just one of the things where I think the chain abstraction future is maybe not as simple as people make it seem.
Value of Community and Identity
And I think this social pool for these communities and different, let's call them network states, whatever they are, I think is massively valuable. That we shouldn't forget about. What you said about crypto people talking with crypto people, even after they are done working ten hour shifts in crypto. I think it's also a little bit in your regular job, you can always talk about your regular job because people understand. But how many people do you know in your family or in your direct environment who are as deep into crypto as you are?
Connection Through Shared Knowledge
Probably very little. So maybe that's also why those events, people love to keep talking about crypto because that's like the moment where they finally connect with people that have the same knowledge level. So that's. Yeah. Anyway, where was I? Yeah, so nation states, chain states, or whatever we're going to call them in the future. Chain communities. Obviously, you guys are pushing hard with mentor. You have a great DeFi environment already.
Future Steps for Developers
What are the next steps? What makes mentor a good environment for developers to build on? What are you guys doing to bring them in? Yeah, this is an excellent question. I think this is something that everyone is kind of struggling with. I don't know.
Current State of Smart Contract Developers
Last time I checked in terms of how many smart contract developers there were in the industry was about 20,000 active smart contract developers. So it's actually not that many. We're all competing for the same developers. There have been many attempts at onboarding web two developers, which I think on paper seems great, but the reality is a lot of web two developers are rolling their eyes. When crypto people go to those larger tech conferences and try to pill them into crypto and on chain product development, a lot of them just kind of shrug us off as a scam and something that they maybe don't want to associate with. Web two developer onboarding approach has also failed with a lot of ecosystems, and we're also currently looking into whether it's something that's worth it or not.
Grants and Programs to Support Developers
But I think primarily what's our unfair advantage is, again, of course the financial support. We have a pretty active grants program. We have actually a few different kinds of grants. We have an open builder grants program. If you go to mental, you'll be able to apply and that's up to $20,000 worth of grants for early stage, maybe prototype or even pre MVP stage projects that we get really excited about. We have a scout program where a lot of developers get funded via someone that we trust and know, and then they can help us get connected to those developers. We also have what we call a sprinter, which is a little bit more proactive grant program that we do to incentivize a lot of growth of these new products on mantle.
Support for Founders and Developer Engagement
Something that's near and dear to my heart is Sozuhaus, which is a hacker house program. So a lot of maybe earlier stage founders and maybe developers who are looking to becoming a founder, they can look into it. So if you go to Twitter and just type in Sozu House, I think Sozu is also one of the listeners here, I think, if I'm not mistaken. So Sozu. S o z u h a U S. Follow that profile. You'll find a lot of engagement and activity for IRL programs for developers and early stage founders. Basically what it is we host a hacker house. Sometimes it's during larger conferences in hackathon, sometimes it's a completely independent program, and we get anywhere from 20 to 60 founders living hanging out together.
Focus on Product Development
But primarily it's about focusing on the product that you're building, whether it's literally dev work that you need to do and focus on that, and maybe you need some help with that or some feedback from your peers and so on. Maybe you're kind of done with your MVP and so on. And now you have to think about legal entity setup or tokenomics or your fundraise and stuff like that. So we're kind of there to help out those founders. And I think this is like one of the biggest value adds we can do to early stage founders and developers. Of course, we have various community channels where devs can ask for help. So on Telegram, if you just go to mental devs, you get a lot of help there.
Collaboration with Accelerators
We're also working with accelerators. So hack Quest is an awesome team we've been involved in for well over a year now, looking into bringing a lot of interesting early-stage founders into that program and supporting them further via grants, via founder training. That way. There's also many other accelerators. I can't talk about all of them, but we're taking a little bit more regional focus and working with a lot of incubators and accelerators in different regions of the world, of course sponsoring hackathons and so on. So there's like, depending on kind of the level of your kind of crypto, crypto life, if you're, I think especially if you're thinking about becoming a founder as a developer, you're now in a stage where you're thinking about becoming a founder and maybe starting to think about raising with your project.
Defining Success in the Ecosystem
There's just like so much that we can do for you. I think one of the, one of my favorite examples is Init Capital, which it's a lending protocol on mental. They built their product. I think it was finished around December of last year or so. We actually helped them raise. We also invested from our eco fund into the project. We helped them with a lot of the early stage work that needed to happen. And then within a month in it, capital became the largest lending protocol on mantle. There's some interesting, innovative things that they've done. They've taken the uniswap v four hook design and plopped it into a lending protocol and so on. So we really love that side of things.
Founders' Experience and Support
But yeah, every time we see a founder with a sparkle in their eye, somebody who really wants to, want to do something real, and they're playing long-term games, there's just so much you can get from the mental ecosystem. And I think if you talk to any of the founders who has been with us since the beginning, they can say the same that you're just not going to get the same kind of support in any other ecosystem than mental. That's something I'm personally very proud of. If anyone is interested, just reach out to me or any of our ecosystem BD team members and we'll help you out. Make sure that you become a success in our ecosystem.
Measuring Success in Metrics
Talking about success now, you and your BD role, how do you define success within the mental ecosystem or for mental ecosystem? What is important to you guys? Is it purely talking about unique active wallets? Is it a number of smart contracts, deployed transactions? What are the metrics that you find important and how do you define success in general? Frankly, I think this is something that the entire industry is struggling with and including ourselves. Personally, I'm especially in such an early stage, I'm less of a numbers person, more of a qualitative metric person. So I look more into mind share and what kind of individuals we're attracting to build on mantle, what kind of teams we're attracting, like how many actually innovative projects are interested in building on mantle and so on.
Challenges in Metrics
I think a lot of the daily active users and transactions and to some extent even TvL volume, these are metrics that are fairly easy to fabricate, which makes it incredibly difficult to be focused on those things. Obviously Mantle has done a fairly good job. We're now the fifth largest l two after a year of being online. So right now I think the largest is arbitrum, then base, then optimism blasts and then us. So we've done fairly well in the TVL side of things. But ultimately I think maybe I'm biased because my role is again on the ecosystem side of things.
The Ultimate Goal for Success
But I think ultimately if we can attract founders that create category defining new unicorns and new products, I think that's ultimately the biggest success for me for a chain. So let's say there's some completely new DeFi primitive that hasn't existed before, or a new social application, new consumer application that actually starts bringing new people into the industry and that project happened to build on mantle. I think that is ultimately the biggest goalpost that I have for our team in terms of other quantitative metrics. Again, I'm a little bit skeptical. We've had again, lots of success with lots of products.
Realistic Expectations and Market Conditions
In December last year, for example, we were the number one chain in terms of user activity for maybe three days or so. But that was like, again, that was like chain spamming and a lot of inscription events and so on. Like ultimately is that really what's going to push the needle in terms of adoption and growth on chain? I don't think so. So I think we're incredibly early. I know it's a meme, but I think we're early as an industry, early in terms of real user adoption and mainstream adoption. And I think right now we just need to be. We need to be hyper-focused on bringing new users to crypto.
Strategies for User Engagement
And I think the most important thing that we can do is to first attract the best possible products to build on our rails, and then from there we're going to be able to bring a lot more users in. So, yeah, I think the goal post is best possible potentially consumer products. And until we have that, I don't think we've succeeded yet. You're putting the bar very high for yourself. Well, you have to, I guess. So. You mentioned before that you guys are doing a lot to get.
Liquidity and Growth Phases
To get liquidity and stuff like that. Where do you. You also mentioned you're early in. We are early as an industry in adoption. If you look at when a new chain launches, often the first period, whether it's six months or whether it's five years, I leave it up for grabs. But it's often about attracting liquidity, as you mentioned, getting those pools up, making sure there's no slippage, all that stuff. Where on the timeline of growth would you place mental right now? Is it close to that initial phase or are you already looking at what's next?
Current Trends in Gaming and Applications
Let's say you have. I don't never know how to pronounce it, but you have that social cat game that's attracting many users. Is that like the next step? Like the simple interaction type of games, the social games, or what would you see as the next step for mental? I think that's the multibillion dollar question at this point. I can say we actually just had an off-site for our team. We had almost 100 people in Bali having a lot of strategic conversations and so on with our team members.
Development Roadmap and Future Exploration
And I think the reality is that a year ago when we had an offsite, things were very clear. Like we're still working on just basic core defi primitives, we're still building liquidity, just like the. I think the roadmap for the first year of development for a chain is fairly clear. We just need to get the basics together so that the users can actually do something that's productive and fun on chain and start making money and start trading and start having a good time. Now things are much more up in the air.
Decentralized Finance and User Experience
Defi is doing well. I think that's been likely our strongest background. Again, with our unfair advantage of our treasury size, we've been able to pretty quickly bootstrap a lot of liquidity for some of the core protocols. I see blue from merchant Mo, for example. I think merchant Mo has been absolutely crushing it with being one of the cornerstone Dexs on mantle. And we have many more examples of great DeFi products on mantle. I would say the state of Defi on mantle is great.
Asset Allocation and Trading Experience
I think meth as a core asset has also helped a lot. So that's brought a lot of people to mantle. They bridged their meth to mantle and then started depositing it in different and protocols and so on. And now if you look at l two beat and our kind of asset allocation on mantle, that's by far the largest asset is actually meth. We've also been really focused on building stable pools and so on so that traders can have a good time and actually do something on DeFi.
Overall Strategy and Market Health
If you look at a lot of the other high TvL L two s, you'll start noticing that a lot of the core assets are actually their native token, maybe like hardly any major, so hardly any eth, hardly any stables. And that just means that it's a very unhealthy defi environment. So anyway, this is something that we've focused on for the first year and now things are definitely much more up in the air. This is why we're focused a lot more on early stage projects, much more consumer projects, accelerators, incubators, hacker houses.
Expansion into New Markets
We want to be open. I think Katazen is a great example of something that definitely acquired a lot of new users to our ecosystem. I think the profile of the average Patterson user is very very different from the average defi user on mantle, but that's great. I think we need to be expanding in different areas. Telegram games and Telegram in general as a platform is super interesting for myself. Again, going back to the Zynga example and how Zynga developed various different products for Facebook back in the day.
Looking Ahead in the Gaming Industry
It's been almost, I don't know, 14 years when they started crushing it on Facebook. I see the Zynga moment in crypto happening right now. So definitely really interested in telegram and what a lot of like listeners probably also associate with. But when you think of telegram and crypto, you automatically think tan. And while we love ton, we're very friendly with them. We may do some fairly large co programming with them and so on. Actually, any chain can build on telegram, right?
Potential of Telegram as a Platform
Like there's lots of incredible embedded wallets you can do on telegram. So, you know, whether you're an EVM chain or anything else, you can actually build products on telegram. And I think the existing user base on Telegram is really exciting. The existing group chats on Telegram are just an exciting foundation for a more social application to be built on Telegram.
The Importance of Founders and Support
So yeah, I'm very bullish on that side of things. As long as we don't get deplatformed. I think that's always the red flag on my side. So let's see what happens on that side of things. I think. Yeah, really excited about a lot of the other. We've seen a lot of growth on the prediction markets side, of course, polymarket is absolutely crushing it. However, I want to say that even on polymarket, even though they get a lot of mind share from the media, a lot of even mainstream media is talking about polymarket, but it actually doesn't convert to that many on chain users. Everybody's looking at the polymarket website itself, but in terms of actual on chain transactions, it's not really converting to the same scale. So, yeah, I think that's just a long winded answer of like, we're open to any direction. We want to support the best possible founders who have a hot take on what would bring users to crypto. And if we find that founder, we're going to be very heavily supporting them and investing them and supporting them in various ways, whether it's distribution, fundraising, technical support or anything else.
Future Focus and Growth Opportunities
Yeah, let's see what happens. I think that's going to be the focus for the next year is finding the best possible founders that will then help us bring new users to crypto. Yeah. If you now look at mental on that radar and you look at the past 30 days, the most popular dapps I see two times gaming one time social rewards layer three on third place, Cadiz, and on second place, and community gaming on first place. That's quite interesting. It's the whole social and gaming rewards, incentive based actions, all that type of stuff. It's quite interesting. Are you familiar with community gaming? Yes, yes, of course. Yeah. They're friends of ours. I think again, our background, many don't know this, but were one of the core contributors and are still core contributor to game seven. So back in, I think, end of 2021, we helped with the game seven governance proposal.
Engagement with Game Seven
And for those who don't know game seven, it's like a. A gaming ecosystem gaming organization. They both incubate and invest into gaming projects. It's also a really active community. And so we have a pretty strong gaming background and community gaming, actually. We knew from those days and we've been engaged with them since quite some time. And I'm really happy to finally see that. Okay, there's some activity with them on our l two, but yeah, definitely. Gaming is always something that we've been interested in and been bullish on as an industry and also have to say that our gaming team is growing, so we're putting a lot more effort into that. And GZ from our side, who's leading all the gaming efforts, is absolutely crushing it and working nonstop to make sure that the gamers on mantle are going to have a good time in the next year or so.
Upcoming Developments in 2025
In the next year. Can you reveal a little bit what's coming for mental in the next, let's say the remainder of the year and early 2025. 2025 sounds so far away, but it's coming closer. Yeah, I know. It's like a decade in the crypto years, so I can't say everything. There's some of the most exciting things I have to keep to myself for now, I would say. So whether it's gaming, I think right now that's public metamorphosis has been a campaign that's been quite exciting for users. Meth as again, the liquid staking protocol is going to become its own independent protocol and that's going to come with its own governance token. And again, a lot of meth enjoyers on mantle l two are going to have a good time with some rewards from that side of things.
Exciting Updates for Users
So, yeah, for those who want to look more, just type in methamorphosis, maybe on Twitter or look into our community channels. You'll find a lot of information there. We're also launching the next phase of meth, which is called Cmeth, and that's our LRT token. So for everyone who's tired of farming different chains and different protocols and so on, I kind of consider Cmeth as an index of farms. What happens is that you deposit your meath into Cmeth on the back end. We run three to five strategies on different restaking protocols and collect all sorts of rewards and yield and airdrops and so on from those protocols. And then almost all of that goes back to the user on mantle. Again, for the lazy farmers, all you need to do is you need to hold CMeth and then you're going to have a good time throughout the year of various rewards that come your way.
Community Engagement and Improvements
So that's something that's really exciting on the gaming side of things, just like you should see our telegraph gaming pipeline. It's wild, especially after the Katazen success. We've seen just some deluge of new product teams looking to build really cool gaming and quite social gaming applications on telegram on mantle. So that's going to be quite a fun thing to look into with Katazen. We're going to keep building some interesting stuff without revealing too much, but Katazen will become a bit of a hub for new development and that's something that we're really excited about. Again, going back to accelerators, I'm always like my heart is with early stage founders, early stage builders and supporting them as much as we can. So I can't really release too much.
Developer Engagement and Opportunities
But we're working on some really fun stuff with Ton so we're going to be co owning a really cool program for early stage founders with Ton. So that's something to look into. We have a lot of developer programming so for those looking to go to Defcon, Sozu House is doing a massive activation in Defcon. We're gonna have a really cool hacker House. So for all the developers and early stage founders, follow Sozu House and you'll see some announcements later this week I think, and just a ton of other stuff. We have tons of quests via mantle missions. We have our rewards station. So if you go to rewards Mantle XYZ, there's tons of things where you can lock your tokens and start earning a bunch of rewards and again have a good time on that side of things.
Summary and Opportunities for Users
So honestly my head is spinning. We're doing so many different things and it's really quite exciting time to be a user and enjoyer of the mantle ecosystem right now. Yeah, you mentioned so much. I think it's wise for people. So we're now like 55 minutes in. So let's say at 53 minutes relisten what Virda just said so you can take notes and get everything listed in front of you instead of trying to remember everything. People for listening to this AMA, I hope they got a bit curious about mental and they want to explore it as they want to explore mental. Where do they start? I guess it really depends on whether you're a builder or a user.
Resources for Builders and Users
So from builders perspective, honestly, just reach out to one of us and we can help you out. I think that's the best way to do it. You'll find us on Twitter or maybe just join on Telegram, our mantle devs channel and we're going to treat you with white gloves there and help you out in our ecosystem and building on mantle. So that's probably the easiest, the most human way from users perspective, of course. Follow all of our social channels actually on the main mental handle. We just posted yesterday a lot of the things that are coming up, so maybe take a look there. Again, we're kind of a complicated ecosystem, so it depends what you're into. Whether you're into gaming or into Defi and so on, there's always something for you.
Community Channels and Career Opportunities
So I would just say follow the mantle main handle and follow a lot of the announcements and just try things out. Our website is always a good resource, XYZ, especially if you're newer, maybe crypto user, I would say quests are an incredible way of learning. It's our way of handholding you into doing certain on chain tasks and so on. I think that's a great way to learn about basic Defi primitives and ways to use crypto and so on. I would also say our Discord channel and various telegram channels that you'll find through our website. Mental XYZ is a great way to get connected to a lot of other community members and so on.
Engagement and Hiring Opportunities
Depending on what region you're in. We have some regional community channels and so on. So you're going to have a lot of ways to get involved and so on. And then yeah, for those who are looking and for jobs in crypto, we also have a careers page. So again, if you go to mantle XYZ, scroll down, go to our jobs page, you'll find a lot of openings. We're always hiring and looking for the best talent out there and. Yeah, many ways to get involved. I guess just stay terminally online and that's one way, I guess, I do it.
Learning From the Community
There's, yeah, this Twitter environment is the way I usually learn about maybe majority of things happening in crypto, including mantle. Yeah, actually one of my favorite things is finding out about things happening on mantle that I had no idea about just because I'm always on crypto Twitter, I guess. Yeah. That'S actually also a bit of a weakness. Right? I mean, that's still, most of us get most of our news on crypto Twitter. It's also a bit of a pity, like it's even like something like cointelegraph doesn't facilitate web three development that much anyway.
Discovering New Dapps
Even if you're looking for dapps on mental or you are a developer, let's say you are a developer and you've created something on mental, go to debrada.com developers and make sure you list your dapp. List it. In the Debrada ecosystem, everybody can discover your dapp. Super easy. And if you're looking for dapps on mental, just go to our rankings or go to the mental chain page and you can find the most popular dapps or the ones that are up and coming. You can find them all.
New Features and Tools
And today, and I guess aside from my social media communication, I'm actually the first one talking about this. But today we launched boosting and everybody on Dev radar has now the ability to earn boosting power, or BP as we call it, short. And you can use BP to promote your favorite project. So everybody in the mental ecosystem, if any of you is a pro member, you automatically have access to BP and you can promote your favorite mental dapps. So go to our blog, there's a whole explanation about how boosting power works.
Promotion of Dapps and Ecosystem Building
Or go to our twitter x.com sorry, our x account. I still say twitter x.com debradar and there you find a whole explanation and you can read the whole announcements. There it is. It's now linked to this, to the spaces. You can find out how BP works exactly. But BP allows you to promote your favorite mental dapps. So if you want to do a shout out to community gaming or any of the other projects building on mental, you can do that through boosting power on that brainar veer, I want to thank you very much for your enthusiasm and your explanations about the mental ecosystem.
Concluding Remarks
I'm super excited about you guys and you definitely delivered the right vibe for us to get excited about. Thank you very much and as always, I hope you have a great day and I leave the mic to you for the final words. Thank you so much and thanks for all the listeners. I have to say I've been a DAP radar enjoyer for a long, long time. And especially like with my latest position as the kind of an ecosystem lead and building the ecosystem on mantle DaP radar has been just such a treasure chest of products and teams and yeah, always something that I feel like, yeah, just cannot give you enough credit for creating something that just is helping the entire industry and showing a lot of things that otherwise would be invisible.
Gratitude and Open Communication
So I think from our ecosystems perspective, yeah, just thank you for existing and just keep going. Yeah. And for all the listeners, thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to me blabber and yeah, always feel free to reach out. My DM's are open. I'm doing my best in responding to everyone, but if I don't respond, go to one of our community channels and you'll be able to talk to some mental folks. Yeah. Thank you all. GM everybody have a great day. Be awesome and talk to you later.
