Mantle

In May 2023, BIP-21 asked BitDAO voters to choose “one brand, one token.” Mantle became the common name, but the proposal preserved governance processes, approved budgets and general treasury management. It was institutional continuity organized around a network, rather than a claim that the old DAO had vanished.

MIP-24 soon converted that continuity into an investment mandate: USD 100 million from the treasury, a matching USD 100 million target from partners, and an initial capital call. MNT voting could direct capital, but the fund structure also introduced managers, partners and investment execution beyond a wallet ballot.

MIP-22 settled on a one-way exchange of one BIT for one MNT and authorized the core team to sequence listings, migration channels and mainnet. MIP-23 then removed roughly three billion treasury-held BIT from that arithmetic and sent it to a burn address, producing a smaller launch base than full conversion would have created.

In August 2023, MIP-27 exposed the difference between a ratio and a right. Governance paused the service and said conversion was not guaranteed, specifically allowing restrictions on FTX Group-linked BIT. The episode belongs in MNT’s biography because it shows that policy administrators, not only token math, determined access to the migration.

Mainnet Alpha opened on 17 July 2023 with an optimistic modular design and EigenDA-era data availability. The March 2024 Tectonic upgrade moved the execution stack to OP Stack Bedrock. In September 2025, OP Succinct changed the normal proof path again, replacing the standard seven-day fraud-proof wait with SP1 validity proofs and a 12-hour bridge response buffer.

Official documents describe different stages of the data-availability transition. Skadi specifies Ethereum blobs, while the migration notice says Mantle is initiating the move and labels EigenDA current and blobs future. The overview and ZK-risk pages also retain EigenDA. These documents establish the proposed architecture and the disagreement, but not a dated completion of the data-availability migration.

Mantle’s treasury helped create an ecosystem wider than the L2. In December 2023, Mantle launched non-custodial ETH liquid-staking contracts: depositors received mETH, whose value records the staking position. The receipt is tied to deposited ETH and protocol rules; an MNT balance is neither that deposit nor its redemption credential.

MIP-30 later proposed cmETH and COOK, spinning the expanded staking protocol toward its own governance while allocating at least 30% of COOK supply to the Mantle Treasury. That creates influence through treasury ownership of another token. It does not collapse COOK governance, mETH claims and MNT voting into one economic right.

The L1 token itself keeps deliberate administrative flexibility. MIP-22 endorsed an upgradeable transparent proxy and governance-authorized minting once per year, defaulting to zero. Etherscan verifies the public address as a TransparentUpgradeableProxy. “No current inflation” is therefore a policy state, not an immutable absence of mint or upgrade capability.

The rollup has similarly distinct operating actors. A sequencer orders transactions, a batcher publishes data, a Succinct proposer supplies proofs, and bridge contracts enforce exits. The documented optimistic fallback improves recoverability if the proof service fails, but reintroduces the longer challenge model. MNT governance can set direction; users still bear the behavior and availability of each operational component.