Mantle Founder: The Crypto Market 5 Years From Now | E67

So Red Bull has been a very successful team before the current kind of Max Verstappen dominance. They won four World Championships back to back with Red Bull Racing. The Formula 1 team is the subsidiary of the marketing department of a fizzy drinks company, and then they're able to beat luxury cars, premium brands that have been making great cars.

The first kind of incarnation of Mantle was called...

Yeah, so my name is Igneus. I'm now the public face for Mantle. In my previous employment, I was head of communications at Bybit. I also dabbled in sponsorship deals and regulatory work. And yeah, it was in 2021 we actually saw the opportunity to have a bit on the Red Bull Racing car, and it took months of negotiation and back and forth. But yeah, we were extremely gratified to see the brilliant, bright color of the Bybit logo on the winning car in Singapore. So yeah, in terms of sporting records, that's as good as you would get in really any sport.

Yeah, it just happens to be one of the days that... so we needed to, according to the register of marriage, there are only several days available. It was during COVID times, so we looked at it and I was like, 'Oh, 15th of March. What is one sure way of ensuring I will never forget our anniversary? I'll pick this date.' Because you think otherwise you would forget it. I won't, but you know, it's kind of like I still have all my mental faculties, knock on wood, but you know who knows, in 30 years maybe my memory is not as good.

I think one thing that I really learned from crypto is that it doesn't matter how much you think you know. When you talk to different groups, crypto is actually not one industry. You have different groups of people working on different things. When we actually talk to developers, a lot of times the terminology and the words they use, we need to go read some GitHub and look at things to even understand. So I think yeah, one thing that even though there are a lot of big egos in crypto, it does benefit one immensely if they just go in with a lot of humility, because you realize that we're not that special, right? We're not that different. And I mean, I think overall, it was terrible obviously, but it's probably a net plus for the industry because you have all the bad actors out, plus you have people who are survivors who are much more humble and realizing that they don't know things, as you say, right?

So first of all, anytime there's a new kind of technological announcement, I always like to pay a lot of attention to it. I've been experimenting a lot with the likes of Midjourney and Sora. I'm not as graphically or visually tuned as I am with words. I find the ability for Midjourney and Sora to do what they do just fascinating. And paying a lot of attention when the first Bitcoin white paper came about, it really just kind of puts you into a different paradigm, a different way of thinking. These are things that are always done. You always took for granted that even since the Roman times, the state mints the coin. Yeah, just another tangent because I really like to go on tangents. I really like to talk about Roman stuff. Mint and money, they actually are cognates. They actually came from the same word. So what happened was that the great white marble building back to back is the city church of Rome. It still has the word SPQR on it, and that is the original mint. So Moneta actually means to warn, to kind of warn someone of something. So that word actually gave us words like remonstrate and monster and so on. So monster, demonstrate, even demonstrate, and money and mint, they all are related. They are all cognates. It's just a very interesting thing to see. You don't actually need the state and a government to actually have that. You can basically through the consensus of... taking the human out of the equation, that is the foundation of this money value system. If you look back at history, maybe that would be an interesting one. What's been done for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is the same as what is being done now, right? You have a central bank or government or whatever equivalent it was in the past who are basically emitting debt and printing money to finance wars and economic crises. Before it was probably more wars and growth. Maybe you want to go a bit into that. Maybe you have a few examples, right? Because you like to talk about the past.

It's just very well-run and has a very good product. It doesn't matter how you think of different exchanges. For retail, of course different people have different needs, but when you actually talk to seasoned traders who are trading serious size, high-frequency traders, all of them would say Bybit's product ever since the beginning is the best. Even when FTX was really under ascendancy, everyone just really didn't like the product because they famously only had six engineers. Either through word of mouth or because they were already generating so much liquidity, it just makes it a lot easier for everyone else to trade on it. So it really does a lot of things right, but the core of it is the product is really good and the risk engine everything is done with a lot of thought and deliberate decisions.

Yeah, I think in a way, because there were other people who did it before, like FTX obviously had a... they won four World Championships back to back with Vettel, and they're one of the most successful brands. And when you think about it, they're actually kind of the perfect embodiment of the crypto spirit. Because Red Bull Racing, the Formula 1 team, is the subsidiary of the marketing department of a fizzy drinks company. And then they are able to beat Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, luxury cars, premium car brands that have been making great cars for racetracks and passengers for decades. And then this upstart subsidiary of the marketing department just decided, 'I'm going to race cars,' and then they are almost the most dominant car on the track. The system that we have for financial economy health is rotten, and we need something that is out-of-the-box thinking. The way a fizzy drinks company decided, 'Oh, we're going to enter into the highest echelon of elite car racing and we're going to make a name for ourselves out of it.' How do you think this was possible? Just a question of means?

We walked at Bybit. We were moonlighting, moonshining on the side project and received a lot of support. So Bybit actually contributed more than a billion dollars worth of ETH and stablecoins to BitDAO because they really believed in the vision. BitDAO is a vision to really create changes in the Web3 world and to really accelerate mass adoption through a non-corporate structure. A lot of early partners of Bybit bought into the idea. Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, Founders Fund, Pantera, Spartan, Dragonfly, so on and so forth. So BitDAO managed to raise hundreds of millions and then received the... it was a fund initially. Yeah, it was. It basically acted as an investment DAO, even though it had much loftier ambitions, but it manifested as an investment DAO. But we kind of felt that for the everyday user, for the everyday Web3 enthusiast, you're never going to capture people's imagination with an investment DAO. It's great, but it's kind of like, who is excited about all the VCs, right? Absolutely. So we needed to make something that we are actively contributing instead of just signing checks. Looking at the lessons we learned from the last cycle, we really thought Ethereum has better scalability. So we were trying to do something that has the same or comparable level of security as Ethereum but really allows it to hyperscale. With blobs nowadays, you have a lot of cost savings, but back when we didn't have it, we so what is a very good way of doing it? Actually, we got acquainted with people from EigenLayer. EigenLayer is capturing a lot of people's attention. It's the premium restaking layer, the largest. The latest round they raised from a16z, one of the most recognized brands in crypto VC funding. They raised $100 million from a16z alone in the last round. They didn't even need money from anyone else. And they had this product called EigenDA. Ethereum layer 1, because you're still competing with all the other transactions that want to be fit in the block. And EigenDA does it in its own DA layer, which really allows a significant cost reduction. But because EigenDA is backed by EigenLayer's staking, you are actually renting security from Ethereum stakers themselves. It really allows you to bootstrap security, bootstrap liquidity. It's like when you need a car, you get ride-sharing, or Netflix, or Uber, or Grab, because we're in Singapore, for liquidity and security. And Mantle is also interesting in the sense that the same block. This is good when there's not much traffic, but when there's a surging activity, you see gas prices go to hundreds of dollars. Same for Solana. It's all monolithic. Whereas we actually build it in a Lego kind of way. We take the best of everyone. So execution on Mantle is done on Mantle, consensus finality is done on Ethereum, and then data availability is done on Mantle DA powered by EigenDA technology. We're able to take the best of everything. And what it further does is when we need to change the code, when we need to have an upgrade, like we did yesterday with the Mantle V2 technical upgrade, we only need to change the parts we need to change. Everything else can stay the same. For Ethereum, they've been working on this... you need to carve a new wood block. You can't just sand some words off. Whereas a modular chain is more like movable type, like the Gutenberg Bible. You can just rearrange the letters and then you can just print it. That makes it a lot more agile. We are able to adapt to the latest technology, we are able to adopt the latest advancements, and we are able to have the latest innovations in a very agile manner. And another thing that Mantle excels at is because Mantle inherited the large treasury from BitDAO. I think it's more than $3 billion now. And the treasury itself is more than $3 billion. Yeah, it's the single largest on-chain treasury, even bigger than Ethereum itself. So of course we're going to have... we're just starting the boom market. There's going to be some dips here and there, so everyone is going to be doing great. But inevitably, to be real, a bad market will come eventually. And what you're able to do to consolidate and build when the bad market comes is hugely important. When you have a large treasury at your disposal, and Mantle has a larger treasury than basically all the other L2s combined. On the Mantle Network, we also have this Ethereum staking protocol called Mantle LSP, and the token is METH, which is a great name. We've been totally abusing Breaking Bad memes, like 'I am the danger' and 'Say my name', so on and so forth. Mantle Staked ETH was launched only in December, so it's less than three months, and it's already the fourth largest, breathing down the neck of Binance Staked ETH. It already leapfrogged Frax and Coinbase's staking in the past. Within the first three weeks, we already leapfrogged Coinbase Staked ETH. And the average market yield for Ethereum staking protocol is about 3.6%, and Mantle is offering about 7.2%. So the level of enthusiasm is just great. People really love METH.

Oh yeah, yeah. Because we have three... people love METH. We have 270,000 ETH in the... it's the biggest kind of gateway drug into METH. But when people actually start to use it, they really feel the UI, the UX is just so smooth. It's also because we had the benefit of hindsight, building only after the first generation of liquid staking protocols were done. Now there's a lot less friction. Remember the early days of Lido and Rocket Pool? You couldn't even withdraw because the merge hadn't happened. So when you put ETH into the Beacon Chain, you couldn't actually withdraw afterwards. And then METH was started after the merge, after all the kinks were ironed out. So it's about $2.4 billion in total value locked. If the main way to get people addicted to Mantle is incentives, how do you make this grow and sustainable at the same time? What was the plan there? You said you're just on the neck of Binance. How do you ever overtake Binance? And I don't know who is the second one. Rocket Pool. Okay. What's the plan there?

So first of all, of course you want to use some kind of incentive to lure people in, to attract people. But once they come and really like the product, it makes it a lot easier. You know, ride-sharing, it's like Singapore, it's all Grab. They're not giving those incentives anymore. We will try to give it as long as possible. The benefit of having a large treasury is that the whole Mantle ecosystem is built...

With this word 'supple'—a lot of Silicon Valley people like to use it. We see others building at breakneck speed but they are fragile. For Mental, we build deliberately, think in much longer terms. There was a recent meme from Dune: 'We make our plans in centuries.' Not necessarily centuries, but definitely multiple bull cycle plans.

Consolidation evidently. Having a lot of layer twos is actually a social proof that we're on the right track. You need enough suppliers to build through bull and bear cycles. When the bear comes, who is in a good position financially? Mental has always separated budgets and has a lot of support from EOS and partners, as well as technological support from Bybit. We also contribute a lot to the codebase.

I won't say all of them will fade away; they need to find a niche. We don't see anyone challenging Ethereum's supremacy. Solana and Avalanche are doing great but they cater to slightly different audiences. They are not Ethereum killers.

The industry is still so new that people compare Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana. In 20 years they will be doing very different things. It's like evolution—you wouldn't compare a human and an elephant. Already we see divergence in audiences: Solana has a great meme coin culture, Ethereum has more whales and the greatest number of developers. Layer 2 has become Ethereum post-EIP-4844; it's how people with less capital interact with Ethereum. For user experience, smart wallets will abstract away the complexity.

This is a completely valid criticism. It shouldn't be on users to figure that out; the user experience should be better. The best minds are working on it—smart wallets, account abstraction. Bybit has a capital program investing in intent-based protocols that find the optimal routing, like using AI to figure out the best path.

99.99% of people came to this space first for speculation. Then they look around, find something they like, and stay. Meme coins capture people's imagination and bring them in. Price goes up and memes attract attention. It's like gambling but fun. Studying psychology, people gamble for the excitement, not always to win. Meme coins are storytelling and community—a human need for warmth and belonging. Don't let anyone chastise meme coins as dumb.

Bomb—great stuff. It launched less than 48 hours ago, already over $1 billion market cap. How to explain? You can't explain; it's the power of Solana. Many meme coins are launched by very smart people. Segue to Puff the Dragon—the first meme coin on Mental. Very cute, great world-building, UI/UX. A lot of work and heart put into it, like a work of art. They have chapters planned. I'm not personally involved but bullish because of dedicated, passionate people.

Something doesn't need to start fully formed. Like medieval paintings of Jesus—they depicted him as fully formed. Renaissance babies look more realistic. Success requires grit and stick-to-itiveness. Anything successful has hard work behind it.

EigenLayer is on-demand liquidity and security for blockchains, like Uber for security. New projects can tap into Ethereum's security without needing huge capital. It lowers the threshold for innovation, abstracting away two of the biggest barriers. It opens the door for a Cambrian explosion of new protocols.

Ethena is a synthetic dollar built on centralized exchange funding rates. Most people still trade on CEXes. Funding fees are paid every 8 hours to keep perpetual contracts anchored to spot price. During a bull market, most are long, so shorts collect high funding fees. Ethena captures that yield and gives it to holders. It's a way to generate yield from the immense money flowing through CEXes.

I think they have a plan. Since we're at the start of a bull market, they can make so much now that it sustains them through a bear market.

Intelligence is multi-layered. IQ tests measure certain things, but there are people with perfect pitch who can play music by ear. Language masters like Shakespeare, Dante, and Cicero shaped modern languages. Dolphins can master thousands of human words but not vice versa—are they smarter? True intelligence might be how a species adapts to its environment. The idea that humans are the only intelligent species is assumptious; we define intelligence by our own standards.

There could be life in our own backyard—moons of Jupiter and Saturn like Europa and Enceladus have warm plumes under icy shells. The reason we haven't seen aliens is like scooping a glass of water from the ocean and saying there are no fish. If they can travel light years to us, they are so advanced that nothing we have is of interest to them, not even crypto.

Full bull market. We're before the Bitcoin halving and already hit all-time highs. If history rhymes, Bitcoin will at least double or triple from here. Very excited.