This $3 billion layer-2 treasury is 6x richer than Ethereum Foundation

Many Web3 projects have seen their treasuries being slowly drained in this extended bear market. With investors’ interests cooling off, net capital vanishing from holders’ hands, and private funding reaching its lowest levels since early 2020.

However, the Mantle Protocol was able to accrue over $3 billion in its treasury, being the richest among all others, including the Ethereum Foundation, with $512 million — according to data retrieved by Finbold on September 28, from DefiLlama.

Notably, while the Ethereum Foundation is mostly holding Ethereum (ETH), Mantle has a more diversified Treasury, from which DefiLlama classifies as:

• Majors (BTC, ETH): $440.83 million
• Own Tokens (BIT): $1.19 billion
• Others (MNT, USDC, USDT, etc.): $1.15 billion
• Total excluded own tokens: $1.83 billion
• Total treasury: $3.02 billion

What is the Mantle Protocol?

Despite being associated with the BitDAO (BIT) token by DefiLlama, the Mantle Network has Mantle (MNT) as its native token used for governance, on-chain fees, and staking rewards. Nevertheless, the association occurs due to the network being incubated by the BitDAO community.

Interestingly, the Mantle Network is described as a rollup layer-2 blockchain for the Ethereum ecosystem, similar to Polygon (MATIC), Optimism (OP), and Arbitrum (ARB), totally compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — which makes it possible to bridge ERC-20 tokens to Mantle.

As with other competitors, this protocol intends to offer more scalability to Ethereum’s led Web3, more efficiency to smart contracts deployment, and affordability to decentralized app developers.

The $3 billion treasury operations are deemed transparent by the team, with on-chain monitoring and reports.

Funding for Mantle and BitDAO treasuries

2023 has been one of the worst periods for fundraising — either looking at public sales (IDO/ICO/IEO), or private rounds data.

This phenomenon has presented a challenge for new projects to surge, or for old projects that have used their previously raised capital relentlessly, to be able to keep their treasuries and fund their activities.

However, both the BitDAO Community and the Mantle Protocol were able to keep their treasury healthy, being the richest in the whole Web3 space, which could offer advantages moving forward.

Moreover, BitDAO (BIT) was one of the most successful cases of fundraising in the crypto market. Raising $230 million in a single private funding round, over $379 million with its IDO, and $14 million in an IEO on Bybit. All that happening respectively in July, August, and September of 2021. Data is from CryptoRank.