Mantle MNT

Mantle is an Ethereum layer-2 network that began life as BitDAO, a treasury organisation funded largely by the exchange Bybit, and rebranded in 2023 with the MNT token replacing the earlier BIT. It is unusual among rollups for having started with a very large capital reserve rather than needing to raise one.

Technically it is a modular rollup: transaction execution happens on Mantle, but the data availability layer — the part that guarantees anyone can reconstruct the chain's state — is handled by a separate system rather than by posting all data to Ethereum. That reduces costs substantially, which is the point.

That substitution is the trade-off worth naming, because it is usually left out. A rollup that posts its data to Ethereum inherits Ethereum's guarantee that the data will be there; one that uses an external layer inherits that layer's guarantee instead, which is a different and weaker assurance. Whether it matters depends on what you are securing. The other honest observation is that the treasury has been more central to the project's identity than the technology — much of the ecosystem activity has been funded by it, which makes organic demand harder to read.