Manta TVL Surges Ahead of 50 Million Airdrop to Beat Base

Manta Network trumps Coinbase’s Base network as the fourth largest Ethereum layer-two scaling solution. The new network, launched last September, has accrued $840 million in total value locked (TVL) and is offering 50 million tokens in a MANTA airdrop.

The surge in usage was likely driven by a new bridging feature introduced in December, coupled with the potential for airdrops for users using the ecosystem.

How Manta TVL Catapulted With Staking

Manta offers 4-5% yields for Ethereum and USDC deposits. Depositors get free tokens in an upcoming airdrop. Users can also re-stake ETH on a special “EigenLayer,” and use their deposit receipts within the Manta ecosystem.

Manta is built on zero-knowledge proofs. The mainnet went live on September 10, 2023, and reached a peak transaction speed of 5.88 transactions on December 22, 2023. Now, the 30-day transaction count is around 4.52 million.

Furthermore, the total value locked on the network started moving upward in mid-December. L2Beat says the TVL consists of $208 million in canonically-bridged tokens and $631 million in externally-bridged tokens. The amount locked has surpassed the $754 million present in Coinbase’s Base network.

Users can make themselves eligible for a MANTA airdrop by bridging ETH and USDC to the network. A total of 50,000,000 tokens will be disbursed. Binance recently said it will launch five MANTA trading pairs on January 18, 2023.

Read more: Best Upcoming Airdrops in January 2024

How the Manta Ecosystem May Fare

Manta is a zero-knowledge blockchain that uses Ethereum as a base layer. Zero-knowledge blockchains can tell Ethereum whether transactions are valid without revealing details about the transaction.

Rollups are a scaling solution for Ethereum that gained popularity in 2023. They are often expensive to run. Additionally, they only send compressed bits of data to the main chain.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, expects the rollup ecosystem to continue diversifying in 2024. Also, the technical nuances of different rollups will benefit the future of Ethereum.

“One of the inevitable consequences of [the rapid expansion of the Ethereum layer 2 ecosystem] is that we are seeing a trend of layer 2 projects becoming more heterogeneous. I expect this trend to continue…”

Many projects use zero-knowledge proofs that will be worth watching in 2024. These include Polygon’s zkEVM, Linea, developed by Ethereum infrastructure provider ConsenSys, and Mantle Finance. Furthermore, upcoming Ethereum upgrades, including a full implementation of so-called proto-dank sharding, will make roll-up transactions cheaper.

Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to Layer-2 Scaling Solutions

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