Mantle 2025 Livestream Recap: Bringing Crypto into Everyday Finance, AI to Become a Key Tool
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Mantle 2025 Livestream Recap: Bringing Crypto into Everyday Finance, AI to Become a Key Tool
Looking ahead to 2025, Mantle will continue driving the integration of blockchain with DeFi, AI, gaming, and consumer applications.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Mantle
On January 22, 2025, key contributors from the Mantle ecosystem gathered for a live Twitter Spaces session to deeply discuss recent developments and outline Mantle's strategic priorities for 2025.
Jordi, Mantle’s Chief Alchemist, hosted the event alongside distinguished guests including SoHan, Partner at Mirana; YZ, Product Lead at Mantle; Yaxi, Co-Founder of Bybit and Capital Partner at Mirana; VEER, BD Lead at Mantle Network; Joshua, Product Lead at Mantle Network; Edmund, Lead of mETH Protocol; Zuki, Growth Lead at Ignition; and Thomas, CEO of Ignition.
The discussion covered key topics such as the design philosophy and innovative differentiation of Mantle’s newly launched enhanced index fund, developer incentives and ecosystem development, and the integration of Mantle’s technological innovation with AI—helping the community gain clarity on current and upcoming milestones within the Mantle ecosystem.
Below is a summary of the livestream. Full text available for reading.
Launch of New Enhanced Crypto Index Fund
Kicking off the session, Jordi introduced the newly announced enhanced index fund. He explained that while this fund resembles traditional financial products like the S&P 500 index fund, it has unique characteristics designed to serve both crypto-native investors and traditional finance (TradFi) participants by offering an accessible investment vehicle and a bridge into the crypto market.
Product Design Philosophy
SoHan from Mirana elaborated on the product's underlying vision: "We believe there is massive unmet demand for diversified crypto exposure. As regulatory conditions improve, more TradFi investors will enter crypto—but they face challenges in token selection, asset management, and secure custody. This product gives investors beta exposure to the crypto market. While we've traditionally focused on alpha, the beta market is actually far larger."
The fund will initially include four assets: BTC, ETH, SOL, and USD, using a rules-based rebalancing strategy to ensure transparency and low costs. It is primarily targeted at institutional-grade crypto-native and traditional financial investors. Designed for simplicity, it enables easy access to crypto markets—especially for TradFi users who can now invest similarly to how they would in traditional stock funds, benefiting from institutional-grade security and custodial protections.
Differentiating Innovations
YZ, the product lead, highlighted additional innovations from both user experience and regulatory perspectives. One major driver is making crypto asset access easier and more compliant.
Beyond providing market exposure, the fund also features yield-generation capabilities—an entirely new concept for most traditional finance users. "This is a key differentiator and what sets us apart from similar offerings in the market," he said.
He emphasized that this is only the first product under Mantle’s broader “innovation” strategy, with plans to launch more funds enabling various forms of TradFi and traditional fund participation in crypto. "We envision expanding to include combinations of more mainstream and emerging tokens, further diversifying our product suite."
Future Goals and Ecosystem Value
When discussing future objectives, SoHan stressed that the primary goal is achieving significant Assets Under Management (AUM). The team aims to reach $1 billion in AUM within the next few months. Mantle Treasury’s involvement lends strong credibility, helping attract institutional investors. "In traditional finance, large investor bases signal trustworthiness—Mantle Treasury’s backing will help establish that confidence."
Additionally, projects invested in by the fund—such as mETH, bbSOL, and sUSDe—are deeply integrated with the Mantle ecosystem. Therefore, any AUM inflow directly benefits and reinforces the growth of the Mantle ecosystem.
Vision: Bringing Crypto Into Core Financial Life
Mantle’s ambition extends beyond investment products—to seamlessly integrating blockchain technology into everyday financial life. Jordi invited Yaxi, Co-Founder of Bybit and Capital Partner at Mirana, to share her perspective on Mantle’s long-term vision.
As a loyal supporter of Mantle, Yaxi believes Mantle is one of the few teams in the industry with a genuine long-term vision, consistently delivering value to the space. While blockchain already shows clear advantages in financial services, true "daily finance" adoption still faces gaps—such as the divide between TradFi and crypto finance, and interoperability issues between fiat and crypto accounts. These are precisely the problems Mantle aims to solve.
Through innovations like the new index fund, Mantle envisions creating a seamless platform capable of managing both fiat and crypto accounts—allowing users to effortlessly combine traditional and digital assets, enjoy on-chain yields, and use their crypto holdings in daily life. This integration lies at the heart of Mantle’s mission.
Jordi added that Mantle seeks to bridge the decentralized on-chain world with centralized traditional finance—but this requires deep understanding of both domains. Mantle has always prioritized building and applying crypto-native technologies, positioning itself to drive this convergence meaningfully.
Developer Incentives and Ecosystem Building
Jordi then welcomed VEER, BD Lead at Mantle Network, to discuss ecosystem development. VEER stated: "We have a $4 billion treasury and a top-tier product team—the possibilities are limitless." From its early focus on DeFi, Mantle has evolved into a modular yield chain with growing liquidity, now shifting toward bringing crypto into everyday use.
Building financial applications remains critical—they form the foundation upon which gaming, culture, social, and consumer applications can thrive together.
Mantle is also actively advancing the convergence of ecosystem innovation with AI. "We’re hosting a major hacker house focused on building AI agents, which will spark further innovation in crypto." Over the past three years, Mantle has run the Sozu Haus program to identify high-potential founders and early builders—visionary, energetic individuals committed to long-term impact. VEER firmly believes: "Mantle is the only blockchain capable of realizing every possible idea. There are no limits to what we can achieve."
Technological Innovation and Integration with AI
Joshua, Product Lead at Mantle, shared insights on the network’s technical strengths. Mantle provides powerful asset tools that empower developers to innovate and build within the ecosystem.
From a network performance standpoint, latency has been drastically reduced—by operating as the world’s largest L2 ZK, basic transactions settle in seconds, with finality achieved in about an hour. In terms of bandwidth, integrations with Eigenlayer and AI-driven optimizations have significantly increased throughput, supporting up to 200x more transactions than Ethereum—enabling global-scale payment and transaction capacity. These advancements lay a solid foundation for mass adoption.
mETH Protocol
Edmund, Lead of mETH Protocol, shared that the team is exploring collaboration between mETH and AI-integrated DeFi applications—one of the main goals for this year. The focus is improving user experience to make mETH more accessible. The team plans to leverage DeFi AI apps to streamline the entire user journey, enabling better yields through mETH and cmETH.
Another objective is integrating with vetted protocols—users can expect to see mETH deployed across various DeFi AI platforms over the coming year.
Bybit, one of the closest partners, currently allows users to stake ETH into cmETH with over 9% annual yield and offers OTC services for ETH-to-cmETH conversion, resulting in a seamless experience. The team will continue working closely with Bybit to enhance cmETH usability and enable users to earn higher returns securely.
Ignition FBTC
Zuki, Growth Lead at Ignition, explained that FBTC’s core mission is to bring yield to Bitcoin holders—a feature long missing from the market. Despite multiple Bitcoin scaling solutions, the Bitcoin network itself does not natively support yield generation. This gap presents a significant opportunity, especially as both retail and institutional investors hold increasing amounts of BTC.
FBTC currently boasts $1.4 billion in TVL, 117,000 holders, and 32 use cases—making it a gateway asset for earning yield on Bitcoin across multiple platforms safely and consistently. Deployed across seven chains—including Mantle, Ethereum, BNB, Base, and Arbitrum—the team is actively collaborating with both established and emerging players. Backed by Mantle and Antalpha Prime, with Mantle bringing deep expertise in on-chain ecosystem development and Antalpha Prime being a leading force in advancing the BTC ecosystem, Zuki expressed confidence: "We plan to onboard more supporters and participants to ensure FBTC’s security and foundational liquidity. We look forward to 2025, when Mantle’s ecosystem and the wider crypto world will elevate Bitcoin and FBTC to new heights."
MantleX
As head of MantleX, Jordi described it as Mantle’s initiative in the AI domain—an effort to participate in the societal transformation driven by artificial intelligence. The team is already in discussions with several well-known teams to deploy AI agents on Mantle. He expressed strong confidence in driving Mantle’s evolution toward AI.
In 2025, MantleX plans to leverage cutting-edge AI advancements to build AI-powered applications on-chain, empowering agents with financial management and autonomous operation capabilities. MantleX will operate an AI fund and co-develop numerous practical agents. Ultimately, Mantle aims to enable AI agents to fully autonomously manage MantleX in the future.
Q&A Session
1. How will BTC-Fi evolve in 2025? Will it follow a path similar to RWA? Is it still early-stage or becoming mature? Where do we stand today?
Zuki:
Since Bitcoin is the native asset of crypto while RWA is not, I believe BTC-Fi is still in a very early stage. Currently, people mostly generate yield using native tokens on Ethereum or other chains. Bitcoin is only beginning to move on-chain. That said, we’re seeing innovative yield options emerge, such as Babylon Staking. More yield opportunities for Bitcoin holders will follow. RWA-Fi can actually support BTC-Fi’s growth—there’s no reason these two can’t converge. Bitcoin could serve as the base asset combined with RWA products. So 2025 will be a pivotal year for both. We hope FBTC contributes significantly to both BTC-Fi and RWA-Fi.
Thomas (CEO of Ignition):
We may be entering the second phase of BTC-Fi. Speaking from an institutional custody perspective—which might bias my view—I believe adoption hinges on three factors: liquidity, capital efficiency, and utility. Infrastructure has improved dramatically compared to the last cycle, especially around Bitcoin. Yield opportunities are greater, liquidity stronger, and legitimacy higher. Combine these with favorable macroeconomic trends, and I expect a very strong year ahead.
2. Is it possible to claim all cmETH rewards directly on L2 without interacting with L1?
Edmund:
It would actually be quite challenging. All cmETH rewards come from restaking protocols—we don’t yet know whether these protocols intend to deploy only on L1 or are open to L2 as well. We’ll do our best to engage with them and ensure smooth user experience. Ideally, some protocols will deploy their native tokens on Mantle so users can claim rewards directly on L2. However, getting *all* protocols to do so is difficult because cmETH itself aggregates multiple restaking protocols. We’ll try our best, but if not feasible, users may still need to go to L1 to claim.
Conclusion
The Mantle team is highly confident about the future, especially as blockchain converges with AI. Mantle is delivering faster, safer, and more innovative blockchain solutions for global users. Looking ahead to 2025, Mantle will continue driving integration across DeFi, AI, gaming, and consumer applications. With momentum from projects like mETH Protocol and FBTC, Mantle is creating new opportunities for developers and users alike. As technology advances, the Mantle ecosystem is poised to thrive across an ever-expanding range of real-world applications.
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