In-depth Analysis of Manta Pacific’s Meteoric Rise in TVL: Comprehensive Coverage of Development Strategy and Ecosystem

Manta Pacific Introduction
1. Manta Pacific Alpha (Ethereum L2)
2. Manta Pacific Alpha II (+ Celestia DA)
3. Manta Pacific Beta (+ Transition to zkEVM)
4. Manta Pacific Mainnet I (+ Universal Circuits 2.0)

New Paradigm Activity
StakeStone and Mountain Protocol
1. StakeStone
2. Mountain Protocol

Ecosystem Data and Project Overview

Conclusion

About Us

The highly popular Blast recently saw its futures prices on Aevo rise from a low of $3.5 to $15.5 within a week, before falling to $7. This indicates that the L2 mode focusing on native yield has gained recognition in the market.

Can Manta, which also utilizes New Paradigm to introduce native yield, surpass Blast? Let’s take a look at the advantages of Manta and the additional profit opportunities for early adopters compared to Blast.

Manta Network is a modular blockchain designed for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications. Manta Network was created by an experienced team of founders from prestigious institutions such as Harvard University and MIT.

Manta Network has received investments from top Web3 investment funds, including Binance Labs and Polychain Capital.

Manta Pacific is an Ethereum Layer 2 specifically designed for ZK applications. It is currently based on the OP Stack and fully compatible with the EVM environment and Solidity programming language.

In the future, Manta Pacific will implement zkEVM based on Polygon CDK. It will also utilize Manta’s Universal Circuits to provide ZK-as-a-Service and low gas fees through Celestia’s modular data availability.

Manta Pacific provides a perfect environment for supporting ZK applications. Solidity developers can achieve ZK functionality without the need for cryptographic knowledge or learning a new language by calling the SDK or API.

(Note: Manta’s Universal Circuits is a zero-knowledge proof (ZK) circuit library designed for general scenarios, providing ZK-as-a-Service for Solidity developers. With just a few lines of code, developers can enable ZK functionality in existing applications, including compliant DeFi payments, Web3 social identity verification, and full-chain game shuffling. Through the Universal Circuits on Manta Pacific, developers can easily deploy EVM-native ZK applications.)

Manta Pacific launched its Alpha version of the mainnet on September 12, 2023. It is currently the third-largest OP Stack L2, following Optimism and Base. Once fully transitioned to zkEVM, Manta Pacific may become the largest Polygon zkEVM-based L2 network.

From the roadmap of Manta Pacific, its future development will be divided into four different stages:

In the current version, Manta Pacific is based on Ethereum’s Optimistic Rollup and uses Ethereum’s data availability (DA). It utilizes Manta Network’s Universal Circuits to enable developers to quickly build and deploy ZK-related applications using Solidity and the Universal Circuits SDK.

Therefore, all existing Ethereum smart contracts can seamlessly adapt to Manta Pacific while opening up new application scenarios based on ZK, such as verifiable DID/KYC, ZK-based fully on-chain games, and collaboration between DeFi and decentralized identities.

In this stage, Manta Pacific will achieve data scaling and significantly reduce gas costs for user interactions with dApps within the Manta Pacific ecosystem by integrating Celestia’s modular data availability (DA). Celestia’s costs have a sublinear relationship with Ethereum’s gas prices and are much cheaper than the current Ethereum costs.

In this stage, Manta Pacific plans to fully transition to zkEVM and utilize Polygon’s ZK provers.

The final stage of the network architecture will be to use Manta’s Universal Circuits for built-in ZK features to support a wide range of ZK applications, combined with Validium services and Celestia DA, as well as zkEVM and Polygon CDK to achieve scalability.

In the last stage, Manta Pacific will officially launch its mainnet. For the Manta Pacific mainnet, Manta Pacific will further upgrade the Universal Circuits to achieve lower gas costs and unlock new application scenarios with novel ZK technologies.

From the roadmap of Manta Pacific, it will become the first L2 to transition from Optimistic Rollup to Validium with zkEVM, which is implemented using Polygon CDK. It significantly reduces gas fees through Celestia DA and increases security through Ethereum consensus and cryptographic proofs of on-chain activities. It can be said that it is a forward-looking L2.

Recently, Manta launched the New Paradigm liquidity incentive activity within its ecosystem, similar to the Blast liquidity staking introduced earlier. Users can stake their funds to receive future token airdrop rewards.

However, compared to Blast, New Paradigm has the advantage of a rich ecosystem and a shorter break-even period. Users can receive token airdrops as early as January 2024, while Blast’s airdrop may not be available until May. In comparison, the capital utilization in New Paradigm is much higher than Blast.

1) The expected rewards for the activity include the following:

New Paradigm has five sources of income, including fixed income, NFT incentives, and the stacking of DeFi’s unique composability within the L2 ecosystem.

1. After cross-chain transfer of ETH and USDC to the Manta ecosystem, users can earn approximately 5% interest even if the assets are idle.
2. Participating in the activity by staking assets allows users to receive future MANTA token airdrops.
3. Participating in the interaction with projects within the Manta ecosystem provides opportunities for potential airdrops from those projects.
4. After staking ETH and USDC, users can use the obtained Stone and wUSDM to participate in projects within the Manta ecosystem, such as lending projects, to earn the provided project returns.
5. Profit obtained through restaking of stETH (optional, subject to the availability of Eigenlayer Restaking Cap) to earn additional income.

(Note: After depositing ETH, it will be converted into Stone, and after depositing USDC, it will be converted into wUSDM. If there is no GAS for subsequent interactions, third-party bridges such as MiniBridge can be used for cross-chain transfers to the Manta network to save GAS fees. Participation in the activity requires depositing funds through the activity page to receive blind box fragments. However, GAS is required for subsequent interactions in the Manta ecosystem, which can be done through third-party bridges: https://minibridge.chaineye.tools/)

The specific steps are as follows:

1) Cross-chain transfer ETH or USDC to Manta Pacific for deposit, earning income and box fragments. The deposit period is open until January 2024.
2) Users will receive STONE and wUSDM on Manta Pacific within 24 hours after depositing. The earliest token airdrop of MANTA can be claimed in January 2024 through NFT.
3) 69 days after the distribution of MANTA token rewards, users can redeem ETH and USDC with STONE and wUSDM.

For detailed strategies on maximizing income, refer to Biteye’s tutorial on “Manta New Paradigm Participation Best Strategies.”

In New Paradigm, the income source for staked ETH comes from the StakeStone protocol, while the income source for staked USDC comes from the Mountain Protocol. Now let’s introduce these two key protocols in the Manta ecosystem:

StakeStone is a full-chain LST (Liquid Stake Token) protocol dedicated to building a decentralized all-in-one staking protocol and a cross-chain market for LST liquidity. It provides easy staking services for stakeholders and is backed by Hashkey Capital. It has obtained a security audit from Secure3Audit.

Users can deposit ETH to receive STONE. For example, if User A deposits 100 ETH in exchange for a certain amount of STONE and the value of 1 STONE becomes 1.04 ETH after one year, User A can withdraw 104 ETH from StakeStone using 100 STONE.

When users deposit ETH into StakeStone, they will immediately receive STONE. At the same time, the received ETH enters the insurance contract and waits for deployment. After deployment, the ETH in the treasury contract will be sent to Lido to exchange for stETH, which will be stored in StakeStone’s strategy treasury.

In the future, stETH may be deposited into Eigenlayer for re-staking to earn more income for STONE holders.

Currently, the total amount of ETH deposited in StakeStone is steadily increasing, with a total of 225,498 ETH, approximately $515M.

Mountain Protocol is an institutional-grade compliant and regulated stablecoin protocol supported by US short-term government bonds. It has received investments from Coinbase Ventures and has been audited by well-known auditing institutions such as OpenZeppelin.

The stablecoin USDM issued by Mountain Protocol is backed by short-term US government bonds, which are one of the safest assets in the world.

The main reserves behind USDC and USDT are also US short-term government bonds. According to the risk rating report from Bluechip, USDM has the same risk rating as DAI. Therefore, Mountain Protocol has both security and compliance as important features.

In New Paradigm, users deposit USDC and automatically receive wUSDM (Wrapped USDM) on Manta Pacific, similar to Lido’s wstETH.

During the New Paradigm activity, users can consider earning additional interest by using wUSDM in other protocols. Like any other ERC20 token, wUSDM can be used to interact with various smart contracts, decentralized applications, and wallets on L2.

According to DefiLlama’s data, the current circulation of USDM has reached $136M, which has greatly increased after cooperating with Manta.

According to L2 Beat’s data, the TVL of Manta has reached $559M, surpassing Linea, Starknet, and other popular L2 networks, ranking sixth.

From the on-chain data, the number of transactions in the Manta ecosystem has reached nearly 7 million, and the total number of wallet addresses has reached 446,454. There has been significant growth in on-chain activities over the past three months.

There are currently more than 200 ecosystem projects on Manta Pacific, and most of them have not yet issued tokens. It can be foreseen that the New Paradigm activity has brought a large number of new users to Manta and deposited a significant amount of funds on the chain. These funds will continue to circulate within the ecosystem and interact with projects in the Manta ecosystem, gradually cultivating loyal users on the chain.

Below are introductions to some key ecosystem projects on Manta:

1. QuickSwap: QuickSwap is the largest DEX in the Manta ecosystem in terms of trading volume and one of the largest and most well-known DEXs in the Polygon ecosystem.

2. iZUMi Finance: iZUMi is a multi-chain DeFi protocol that provides Liquidity-as-a-Service (LaaS). It innovatively proposes a discrete liquidity automatic market-making model and has raised over $50M in funding from investors such as IOSG Ventures, Distributed Capital, Hashkey Capital, and BIXIN Ventures.

3. LayerBank: LayerBank is currently the largest lending protocol in the Manta ecosystem. The protocol has been audited by Peckshield, and its TVL has reached $265M. It is deployed on Linea and Scroll, but the majority of TVL is currently distributed in Manta.

4. Symbiosis: Symbiosis is a cross-chain DEX and liquidity protocol. It has raised $2M in funding from investors such as DWF Labs, Shima Capital, Binance Labs, Dragonfly, and Amber Group.

5. PacificSwap: PacifiSwap is a DEX protocol based on the ve(3,3) model and developed based on the Pancake Swap model. It uses the innovative CLAMM algorithm.

6. AsMatch: AsMatch is an online dating application based on zero-knowledge proof (ZK). Users can swipe left or right to match or not match with other users. They can also fill in the ZK Proof Key of zkSBT in the app to verify on-chain behavior and identity. It falls under the Social category in Manta.

7. Orbiter Finance: Orbiter Finance is a decentralized rollup bridge for transferring Ethereum native assets. It provides infrastructure for Layer 2 and is one of the largest cross-chain bridges, with $3.2M in funding from Starkware and Amber Group.

8. Minibridge: Minibridge is a bridge optimized for small-value transfers, with low fees and fast confirmations. It has been rated as the most popular bridge by users on dappsheriff and offers a 50% discount on fees during the New Paradigm activity. MiniBridge is an award-winning team from Ethereum Shanghai 2023.

With the approaching issuance of MANTA tokens in 2024, the airdrops brought by MANTA tokens will undoubtedly further contribute to the L2 discourse in the first quarter of 2024. Additionally, with the integration of Manta and Celestia in the next stage, the dual characteristics of modular blockchain and ZK EVM can bring unique advantages to Manta.

Therefore, in this stage, with most projects in the ecosystem yet to issue tokens and the strong background of Binance’s investment, the level of capital inflow is much smaller compared to chains like Zksync. Participating more in interactions within the chain, increasing asset returns, and taking advantage of future airdrops from ecosystem projects can be considered a highly cost-effective operation.

Biteye is a leading Web3 research community in Asia, generating forward-looking investment research content and tools through community and AI-driven methods to help community members explore the Web3 rabbit hole.

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Blast
Manta Pacific

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