Stablecoins are flooding onto Mantle, and you can almost feel the buzz in the air. Over the past week, the total market cap of USD-pegged tokens on Mantle jumped from about $532 million to $653.6 million, a 22.9% surge that speaks volumes about where capital is looking for yield and efficiency right now.
So what’s behind this flood? First off, Mantle quietly stashed 101,867 ETH into the newly established Strategic ETH Reserve. At today’s Ethereum price of roughly $3,620 per coin, that’s about $369 million in collateral keeping the protocol solvent and its incentive programs well-funded. It’s one thing to promise a treasury; it’s another to deliver a nine-figure pile of ETH that can backstop everything from hackathons to liquidity mining.
That backstop has energized traders and builders alike. Mantle’s native token, $MNT, is up almost 20% in the last 24 hours, trading around $0.87 with nearly $613 million changing hands in a single day. For perspective, that kind of volume would get you noticed on almost any chain, not just a Layer-2 still carving out its niche.
And it’s not just speculation. On-chain metrics paint a clear picture of real usage: total value locked across Mantle’s DeFi apps ticked higher, DEX volumes have picked up, and daily active addresses are surging. In fact, Artemis Analytics data shows that daily address counts are over 134,000, a 1,600% increase in a month, which suggests this isn’t just traders parking dollars; people are actually building and transacting on Mantle.
Layer-2 Shakeup
Of course, no rally runs in a straight line. Some analysts warn that profit-taking could drag MNT back toward $0.65 in the short term, while others see room to run toward $1 as on-chain activity keeps climbing. Whether you’re long or watching from the sidelines, it’s clear Mantle has grabbed a spot near the top of the Layer-2 leaderboard, at least for now.
What comes next will be the real test: can the team deploy that ETH war chest effectively to seed new dApps, or will it sit idle? Will builders choose Mantle over the likes of Optimism or Arbitrum as congestion on the Ethereum mainnet, and on some rollups, starts to pinch? If today’s liquidity influx and token pop tell us anything, it’s that Mantle has the market’s attention. Now it just has to keep it.
