Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
What is Mantle?
Recorded: Dec. 11, 2025 Duration: 1:05:48Space Recording
Short Summary
Mantle is making waves in the crypto space with its strategic partnership with Bybit, focusing on Real World Assets (RWAs) and launching innovative projects that bridge traditional finance with blockchain technology. The platform's growth is fueled by new yield opportunities and a robust tokenization service aimed at institutional clients, setting the stage for significant market expansion.
Full Transcription
This is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Health.
The U.S. Department of Health and Health and Health.
The U.S. Department of Health and Health and Health. Thank you. I'm Thank you. Hello, everyone. do
gm gm gm everyone thank you so much for joining tuning in slightly earlier than usual. We are a little bit later on the day, but, you know, sometimes we change things up,
considering obviously not everyone lives in Europe.
So sometimes we have to change it up and we are actually very happy to change it up,
considering today we were at Mantle.
Mantle is one of these, I would say one of these layer 2's which actually
is cooking. They actually are cooking things up, essentially a layer 2, which is, yeah, I would
say getting more and more in the spotlight, and we're going to talk a little bit more about why,
but before we do that, I would love to introduce Josh, the head of product of Mantle. Josh,
how are you doing? Hey, how's it going? Can you hear me? All right.
Josh Manning Yeah, I could hear you pretty good.
I would love before we go into like all the nitty gritty of what you guys have been building and
more importantly, how fast you guys have been growing. I would love to learn a little bit
more about you. I would love to learn a little bit more about you. I would love to learn a little bit more about your background, how you get into Mantle, maybe what you have done before Mantle,
and all that great stuff. Yeah, sure. So, hey, everyone, this is Joshua here. Yeah, so I lead
product and Mantle network. And yeah, I think we'll cover more about what Mantle and Mantle is.
And yeah, I think we'll cover more about what mental net note is.
But I think we're most famous for being very close and closely associated with Bybit, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
So that's really a huge, exciting part of our journey.
For me personally, I've been in, you know, I'm a computer science guy by training. So,
you know, I did computer science in my education. I ended up in banking for about five to six years,
you know, close to seven. And I was in Citibank. So I did the whole thing of going through many different departments.
Eventually spent most of my years working for the commercial bank in the digital banking innovation kind of department.
So I kind of witnessed the whole transformation of banking towards fintech.
And then, of course, the wonderful discovery of stable coins and
cryptocurrencies and defi uh came later uh and i was always a kid who was a fan of bitcoin because
i read a white paper um i you know every one of us enjoy p2p software including like file sharing solutions like uh bit or and uh you know
when you're a kid you're used to to listen to good music is where you would discover stuff
using p2p stuff right so um you know when you discover this like idea of a token or some
concept of value and asset that can't really be destroyed by p2p software you kind of like
thought that okay this is a really good interesting experiment but it was only until like after many
years uh working in a bank and then really looking at the problem that i realized like oh my god this
is a this is a macroeconomic geopolitical uh yeah financial system systemic problem that we have today and it's all intimately linked to
you know financial crisis and how central banks need to react to the whole situation and actually
like bitcoin and everything else in cryptocurrency is correlated and related to it and that's how i actually
discovered the whole journey it became very clear to me in covet especially uh where you know the
the crisis of of uh air covet you know and the sharp crash in asset prices and the huge
in asset prices and the huge very swift rebound uh that came immediately afterwards was a clear
sign of like a very different kind of time and situation we're in uh where uh i think what what
i would say liquidity liquidity is the main reason and driver for markets and pricing then you know underlying productivity and there are people
were indoors everyone's indoors so like nobody's actually producing a lot of like no one's producing
anything right other than the guys that work from home no no one no one's in the factories no one's
no one's manufacturing stuff but yet like by the end of 2020 you know the stock market
is higher than than before and you know you know a stock market is supposed to you would think that
assets and stock markets and real world assets are supposed to price productivity but no they
actually price liquidity so um there was just more liquidity in the system. And then from there, I was like, okay, what do I have?
I have computer science background.
I'm a product manager in banking.
Let me cross over into DeFi.
So in the day, I was Citibank, you know, middle manager,
working through digitization projects.
At night, I'm a hackathon participant at Eve global
polka dot L's on every other like chain like working through airdrops you know you know playing with DeFi and really understanding it because obviously from where DeFi was and where
and where banking and traditional finance was is so different right but um obviously you know it's like
it's a journey and the industry is is on a journey and i could see that it was on a journey um because
of uh the yeah you just reading history right so if you read the history of like traditional finance
it was also a wow west you know it was very very unsophisticated it was also a, a while, while West, you know, it was very, very unsophisticated.
It was extremely rudimentary.
Um, and then it became more and more professional and liquidity grew and grew and eventually
retail, you'll get better and better served and traditional markets today are so, so efficient.
Right.
So it's like we're just seeing
that whole process of traditional financial infrastructure and applications that probably
evolved for over the last 200 years but we see that kind of development in defy and and in crypto
uh for the last 10 years right so pretty freaking amazing um and the opportunity that led me to
dig in deeper into the technology that's how i actually um told myself hey wait i need to really
understand the technology i've got computer science background so i i dive deep uh and polka dot was
one of the best places to learn technology um the founder was a CTO, ex CTO of Ethereum,
and really all around first principles
moving and understanding engineering.
And that's where I got a very, very deep analysis
over how blockchains work
and then how they actually can scale
without losing decentralization and compromising in a roll up centric architecture.
And eventually that led me to down the route of becoming quite quite in a unique position to understand architecture,
the depths of that, as well as the depths of like markets.
And that's where I got into mental because I think mental was
represents the perfect blend between someone who is been there in
traditional and financial markets and someone who also is defy crypto native
quite kind of like a irresponsibly degen to some to irrespectively long to some
extent about and bullish and hodler hodling of this industry and I think like.
We we've gone a big cycle and now we're reaching the point where we're really talking about hey it's like it's almost like traditional financial applications 2.0.
Which means taking any real asset that's out there any financial asset and putting that on chain and that's the process
We're in right now where the competition is really tough the the there is a like an ongoing competition and land grab
Both in traditional financial players as well as web 3
Native players like mental ourselves
Trying to grab the opportunity of bringing traditional financial assets and solutions on
chain while the traditional guys are trying to bring the web three versions on chain so it's
like it's like either they move from the left to the right or we move from the right to the left
but everybody's trying to grab each other's market share right now and that's the kind of situation
we're in um and it's pretty interesting and I think like I'm pretty much like here for the ride.
And I think it's a very exciting time ahead.
No, absolutely, absolutely.
And I love the backstory.
I think that's, yeah, I love it.
I love to see that you sort of saw what's going wrong
and saw that how the current financial system
has some absolutely, well, it just has a lot of things which kind
of backfire all the time.
And unfortunately, it's something which we only get sort of, well, we only see it when
actually things go wrong significantly.
Obviously, we have seen it in 2008.
We are about, well, this is a little bit of a subjective point of view but we think i think uh as hlc we think
we will see it very soon again um what i'm wondering about is
um in simple terms right what is mantles like how would you sort of describe mantle to someone
who is completely new to crypto yeah Yeah, sure. So Mento, the easiest and most
understandable way is Mento is a network.
It's a layer-through network, but that's less important.
It's a network that uses its native token, M&T, as gas.
It's Ethereum compatible, so everything you could otherwise do in ethereum
you can do on mental uh and it is uh also a very very large treasury so you know to run this network
and behind it there is an extremely large treasury we have I believe I can't I can't I haven't
looked at the latest numbers but I believe it's at least 3 billion worth of
treasury so what it means that as a M&T holder you have the right to vote on
many types of proposals and these proposals help to further the growth of
the mental ecosystem and drive value and value capture for M&T and behind that token and the
value that there is there's at least three to four billion of uh treasury funds and it's um you know
it's not only M&T that's in the treasury it's quite well there's quite a decent diversification
into stable coins and majors bitcoin uh rep type of bitcoin and um emm cme which are like
uh staked versions of eve as well uh and various stables and earning positions um so it is almost
like uh it's a network but it's also probably you think of it like the first ever autonomous business organization to drive
value for Web3.
Awesome, awesome.
And another like you to be to give the last numbers because of the ring, you guys have
the biggest treasury.
It's 3.6 billion at the moment, largest on-chain treasury that is. The next one, which is come second is Uniswap with a small 2 billion.
So yes, you guys have a significant treasury.
Another thing you said earlier was like, hey, one thing which is also pretty, which helps meant obviously a lot is the differentiator
that you guys are often highlighted with Bybit, right? It's like, hey, specifically, I would say
in the last six months, the integration with Bybit and for the ones who do not know what Bybit is,
Bybit is like a centralized exchange, one of the biggest centralized exchanges.
Definitely Bybit has gone from arguably a tier two exchange
to a tier one exchange in the last 12 months,
grew very fast, very quickly.
My question to you is, right,
what is the biggest sort of selling point here?
Considering, hey, you guys are being more and more integrated in Bybit?
Why is it such a big thing for Mantle?
Yeah, so definitely Mantle is a good network.
It's a separate organization from Bybit. But there have been been very strong relationships even from the very origin of uh mental so mental was originally known as bit
dow and bida was actually just purely uh uh if you remember the 2016 2017 era and it's
decentralized autonomous organization so it was the idea that you had you you through to a set of
smart contracts you can and through governance proposals can drive value of a business
organization which i just described earlier uh and by bit played a significant role in the early days of BitDAO and therefore have a huge kind of relationship and potential to support and be a strong partner of Mentong.
And that's the strong relationship where if you see the native token M&T, the one that's used for gas on Mentor Network, network uh mnt has tremendous utility across every product line in bybit today uh from let's say the
basics of uh spot spot trading they're paying your fees in mnt or perhaps trading there are
significant discounts from 25 to 10 percent and there's also holding advantages of M&T for VIPs it's a lower
threshold to achieve the VIP threshold there's also OTC capabilities for M&T
through Bybit there's also a lot of yield generation opportunities to by
bit with M&T where if you lock up your your mnt you also can get airdrops from launch pads
launch pool um and there's many more utilities uh including uh if you want to buy it at a discount
and hold it for long periods of time there's also a discount by capability uh so pretty much
discount by capability so pretty much a to some extent the utility extends deeply across all by
bit verticals and it's really because uh mental and mnt is a strong relationship with the private
ecosystem uh what's also very clear in the public is the advisors
of Mental today are the C-level
and head-level executives at Bybit.
So Helen, who is the co-CEO of Bybit, is an advisor
and the head of SPOT, Emily, is also an advisor of Mental.
So what that means is we are completely two different separate
organizations i'm i am i'm working for mental however our objectives and our vision is
completely aligned to achieve a larger picture for that will make sense for for growth and for
distribution really to improve the user experience and the
value we can bring to users that are common between us. So that's really very exciting, right?
Yeah, and I would say in the past, the relationship is less intimate and less close,
less intimate and less close.
But now the vision and the objectives are very aligned so that we can do a lot more.
And that's where it goes into probably the topic that we are deeply focused on now, which
is realware assets.
And it will be the category that will define us in the long run and our ability to work in this
cd5 manner in order to achieve better user experience better utility for web3 users
yeah absolutely let's talk uh i let's before um before we go more into bybit it's very interesting i'm gonna be honest i have one more
more question before we go to the rwas because let's be fair you guys just posted i think
i might be wrong two two or three days ago like the oh big rwa report a lot of uh also i would
say a little bit of a growth report on how Mantle is growing. So we will absolutely go there. One thing which I've seen a lot on CT,
but also one of the things I've seen a lot on different sort of channels is a
lot of people make the parallel between BNB and Mantle,
whereby BNB is obviously a little bit of the sort of vehicle for Binance.
And people asking themselves,
will Mantle be like some sort of like the vehicle for Bybit whereby Mantle will play a sort of centralized role of Bybit and even, you know, maybe expand
that role even further?
Sir, could you like explain the question a little bit more?
I couldn't catch it.
Sure, sure.
So if you look into Binance, for example, right, bnb the bnb as the not the uh not the uh layer one but the
actual asset is bnb is being used for everything right uh binance is essentially pushing bnb
everything everywhere where they can and it's being placed at the forefront. We all sort of do this because you said like, hey, Bybit and Mantle, our visions are aligned.
We are the relationships which we have is very intimate and intimate right now instead
of like a couple of months ago, a year ago.
The question essentially is, will we see something similar of Mantle whereby Mantle will essentially
be placed into the forefront of Biobit and
integrated wherever it can within the Biobit ecosystem?
I mean, I will let the whatever has been already shown to speak for itself, right? I thought it
should be obvious that whatever we have shown as the utility of M&T across
by all the vertical survival, isn't that what I mentioned earlier?
I was just wondering, is there anything you're thinking you wished for that isn't already
available?
I mean, for example, is there a possibility, for example, that Bybit, sorry, that Mantle will, for example, be a layer one?
Very similar how BNB is doing it, whereby you guys will set up your own ecosystem pushed with a Bybit as a centralized exchange.
Very similar how Binance is doing that right now, right? Whereby they have been pushing very hard
for projects to come on the BNB chain.
It allows you to open some dorms
within the ecosystem of Binance.
Then obviously they have supported Binance Alpha
for the smaller projects, that kind of stuff.
Whereby it's essentially get,
essentially the wall integration of BNB
and Binance essentially one.
Can we can we expect something similar of Mantle whereby
you could even go as far whereby BNB and Binance, there's no real borders anymore?
Well, I would love to see something similar with Mantle and Bybit.
But the question is, is that even within the plans, even in the strategy right now?
I mean, I will let the work speak for itself, right?
I think it's really quite obvious that the work itself is very intimate.
On the question on L2 versus L1, right?
This is a very interesting question.
I think it might be just more a public perception question than the reality right from a technology perspective um it doesn't really make a significant difference because uh really if you ask me mnt is mnt as an asset it's a really
attractive asset uh because we we are now two we we do not inflate the MNT supply. So it's really a token that has zero inflation.
It has been emitted.
It's fully diluted.
Valuation is already realized
from its circulating to its fully diluted.
It is completely, probably, arguably,
the most fair token there is available
um and without without being an l1 there is no need for inflation on its social supply it's very
very interesting uh now i would say that you know the you know all these major decisions and all
that like this is really up to the full vote
and the confidence of M&T token holders.
And, you know, there's nothing really off the table, right?
Because it's a governance token
and we can drive value for M&T
as long as it makes sense.
And really, I think the relationship with Bybit is so closed
and, you know
that it really opens up a lot of opportunities uh on all areas right so um and because of that that
that really gives us the strong advantage over yeah you know when you talk about tokens or whatever
it's about the distribution is the combined distribution between metal and vibrate that we can really really uh enable um and yeah i i would say uh
you know in terms of the the current implementation is really you know very deep and um yeah it's
pretty pretty successful no absolutely let's be. It has been very successful. I'm looking forward to how
that will go forward. I'm very excited to be really frank because I'm going to be honest.
I'm not sure if I'm surprised. That's maybe a little bit of a big word. But I am pretty
astonished with the growth of Biobit in the last 12 months. I did not expect it at all.
I'm going to be honest.
I'm very happy that it happened, to be really frank.
Competition within the exchange industry is very much needed.
At some point, we just had Binance and we had Coinbase and Coinbase didn't list anyone.
So they just had Binance and that's not a good that's not a good environment
not just because of binance but just it's never really a good environment whether it's just one party which is really big so i'm very surprised i'm looking forward on how um yeah that will go
forward um i'm gonna move the bybit um topic a little bit on this side considering a time would
love to a little bit uh love to love to learn a little bit more about the RWA side of Mantle.
Considering you guys have just put a research or article out which was about two or three days ago,
I'm going to pin it in a little bit so for the audience you can see it.
And essentially you guys have called it like the RWA era, right's like hey mantle is focusing on uh rwas you guys have been
let's be fair to 2005 you guys have been focusing very much so on define um and maybe you can walk
us through a little bit what it means the rwa era and more importantly what the sort of audience can
expect of mantle in 2026 considering RDWAs and so forth.
Yeah, so just to give more context, if you think about real assets, basically traditional assets
tokenized, the total addressable market there is basically multiple times larger than the total
crypto market today including stable coins including uh you know uh including all the
majors in crypto uh you know the you you're in you're underneath 10 trillion. But the total
addressable market for
real world assets, you know, as
traditional financial assets is
hundreds of trillions.
So you are multiple
times in total opportunity.
In reality, I think
the projection will be in the
tens of trillions in the
next five years within in within this you
know within a cycle of time and it is extremely extremely huge and why would that be the case
right i i would say you know there are many reasons uh primarily one of the reasons is excess financial excess there are
regions and demographics that may not be able to access these assets in group pricing or in good
ways that um you know they'll be treated fair fairly uh the second potential reason is operational
efficiency when these assets are on chainchain, they're composable,
they can be used for all different kinds of purposes, they can be accepted as collateral,
which otherwise was very difficult to do in traditional methods without automation.
And therefore, it creates a lot more opportunities and the final reason is uh to
to me i think that the third reason is is more critical which is the regulatory environment has
really been much clearer to enable this to happen so it wasn't that there was no technology that
was ready for this rather it was the regulatory kind of uh you know the
worries of being you know you know retroactively sued or retroactively targeted in the event you
you act uh poorly um you know with regulatory clarity on what can or cannot be done it really enables your ability to yeah really uh innovate drive
new real assets on chain and yeah bring more and more of the innovation uh from the outside world
inside uh the crypto world oh and if i had to add on to the regulatory environment, one other critical part is the stablecoin bills as well.
The stablecoin bills give more clarity to what is money in a basic sense of what stablecoins are,
helping people have assurances over the accounting practices of what stablecoins should be valued as.
And the regulatory environment gives more comfort to even uh you know potentially
you might even see in the future banks issuing stable coins uh and therefore it's like no
difference like it's close to bank deposits as uh as you can in fact one will argue is even better
than uh bank deposits uh i can i can talk a little bit more about that in the future but um yeah this the stable coins are a great kind of vehicle uh
looking forward as a not not just as a technology but the regulatory environment help people see it
differently uh and therefore gives more guarantees of of safety and security over the asset from a legal perspective.
And for all this, stablecoins as the denominator of everything else,
in other words, the denominator of everything else,
meaning everything else can be a pair to stablecoins,
it then creates the markets that traditional
financial players can then finally be comfortable enough to engage in blockchain so with all these
combined together it really creates a great opportunity for uh distribution and for uh
you know origination of these assets.
Yeah, I do agree. I feel like there has been significant steps being made in regulation,
which makes, well, allows us to sort of innovate in,
well, in an industry,
which there's not often being innovated with and not always financial
innovations are even good. I mean, look at today's the sort of financial
innovation between Dan and CDP were not great. So it's very hard to innovate, I
think, in the financial industry and doing it the right way. I feel stable
coins absolutely is a great way to sort of get access, like you also said, like make it very accessible, give people finally access to USD, specifically in countries whereby
their currencies are highly inflated or significantly suppressed. And talking about
like Mantle, like Mantle is an ecosystem, right? And Mantle is like a RWA ecosystem.
What sort of core components are currently available in terms of RWA systems on
mantle? Yeah sure so I would say this right so I think it's not just the fact that you know you
have you have a good business model and you have a treasury you have funds and you're the ability to deploy and drive assets but rwas
and all these real assets they are they there's a higher bar in order to create them right if i
create like uh some random uh nft token or uh you know even d5 you know it's fully permissionless there is no regulatory kind of requirement uh and i can just tg this
like you know instantly um you know like a meme coin right but rw is the the reality is that
when you originate rbba you need to think you need to think about many things firstly you need to
think about the legal jurisdiction in which you issue the token in other words how how do you actually custody the underlying
assets and when I say custody I don't mean token custody I mean financial
custody so traditional financial custody qualified custody and how then you can
then create the token and what the token represents
the token may not necessarily represent uh this gets gets into wheat the token may not represent
the underlying asset it may represent um a legal vehicle that and an ownership share in the legal
vehicle which owns the underlying physical asset uh and you have to do all these structuring in place and then when you distribute
it you also have to think about it we know the type of KYC requirements the legal requirements
the jurisdictional requirements of the users that are buying and purchasing and actually
when you think about all this that's really where adoption is is being limited and and really if you
think about it why we are confident that this is the way we can drive value well we have one of
the best kyc applications working with us by bit by bit is a kyc application right so every user if they trade large size they have regular
their regulated institution in order to enable the the kind of regulated activity of trading
in the relevant jurisdictions they distribute and in doing so um you know can think of us like we
are the factory and warehouse and they can be the distributing point and one of the major distribution point and this solves a chicken egg problem in industry where
You know people these these asset issuers of of traditional financial
Institutions that want to bring the assets on chain
They they obviously the idea, you know earlier i talked about it like they are in the
trillions so when they come to an industry that is you know four or five trillion in size it you
know it's it's it's a growth market but it's not very big and they're looking for big players to
work with them right so you know they're looking at layers of measurable size, of equivalent size.
And that's where our ecosystem can bring that kind of partnerships to life, right?
So kind of examples we give is like money market fund.
There's a money market fund from Qatar National Bank as the asset issuer.
And the underlying custodian is done, instead of chartered.
And this money market fund has
institutional participants it's called qcdt and really some of the great use cases is
institutional traders can hold this as collateral in bybit while they take all their different
positions where the leverage of spot uh and you know they
can do use it as a part of their margin account uh and they can earn the underlying t bill which
is like four or five percent rate of interest which is pretty good right your collateral is
growing at four five percent while you're still taking trades so you know you're like you if your trade works you're
winning on that side if your collateral is growing you're winning in that side you can do and and
this is such a great use case uh and not not just that we also wait um you know the qcdt and the
team we're working towards um opening this up into a permissionless type token where then even like you can participate this
kind of opportunities in DeFi vaults where you can take advantage of these tokens and yeah
potentially even where you know putting up the consideration as collateral for Bybit as well
so that even retail users can enjoy this type of use cases so this is just one of many examples but we're
also working with other asset classes so as I just talk about money market fans
and like T bill products that that to me is like low-risk debt market products
but we also we're still looking into higher yielding products so for example uh uh we're having um rv coming into our ecosystem
and being driven into earn vaults uh that can drive a lot more attractive use as well
and through that you know because of the supply rate we could do even to
leverage looping um some other stuff that potentially will come down the pipe is like
high u-bearing rwa backed uh stables that can create all these uh wonderful exciting
looping opportunities to generate even more apy um and all these benefits once again we're hoping
that it drives distribution even into by bit right so that we can have more
and more uh different uh you know ways that people actually actually don't even need to
sign transactions and they can perform these actions you know on chain uh without without
even signing uh through through by bit right so as one of the distribution mega distribution
partners that we have so if you think about that that's tremendous use cases that's that's that's um down the pipeline to really grow
the ecosystem um and achieve net new uh things in the industry right because um you know bringing
more and more of these traditional players in with their traditional assets will only lead
traditional players in with their traditional assets will only lead more and more uh demographics
to be attracted to crypto right so you know yeah i've spent probably five years trying to educate
my mother about what bitcoin is i think we can give up at some point right but if i told her that hey you know there's there is basically a way to earn on
property or to earn on property rentals at eight percent and you know just give me ten thousand
to do it you know it's a way easier conversation or to to earn like t-bill rates with additional
promotional incentives of five% like yeah it's
much easier to talk about that than to talk about how bitcoin works no that makes a lot
of sense and um i'm wondering right uh i'm because you guys have well have gotten this
incredible institutional uh focus and i would say even a success. Like, is it just like the sort of regulation
which allowed you to do that?
Considering if we look, for example,
one year ago, that institutional sort of facing
focus wasn't really there yet.
So what really changed for Mantle?
Is it like technology?
Is it like the Biobity Partnership?
Is it maybe regulation or maybe something else?
The institutional focus?
Yes.
Yeah, so I would say Mento and the talent of Mento have been very investor-focused.
They understood the mindset of the whale uh
even from day one i think like a lot of people within bybee are tremendously intelligent
i could really see through like you know how we can really help users if you think about
it like we really want everybody to become like a you know to operate like a whale in
a sense like we want everybody to be even if you're a retail person
you have the best pricing you have the best opportunities to unyields that you know in
traditional finance you couldn't access uh you know if you wouldn't or will right so you know
i i think we've always thought that way um but i think over time, I think what we're really focused on, right,
and it's not that we're saying that, hey, you know, we don't want the retail user,
but rather it's about understanding that the tremendous opportunity
that's going to come down the pipeline of real assets requires us
to figure out our discussions with institutions
and getting these products that are much more lucrative much more attractive and down the
pipeline even to the end user and the retail uh on the street right so to us it was actually just
connecting both sides right and i think if you ask
me that's really the mission or the purpose of blockchain in disrupting financial services
blockchain basically cut out the middleman and give you the power of the wheel power of the
you know institutional investor but yeah in crypto right and and i think that's what we're
really trying to do uh uh and and yeah it's gonna be i i i think initially everything that's new is
gonna be very kind of like hard to use but then over time you see rates come down, you see costs come down,
sometimes even exponentially, just like the gas fees that we are seeing.
Nowadays, gas fees are so low.
And yeah, I think the best person that is being served is actually retail in crypto.
That's interesting.
That's a very interesting statement.
What makes you think DARE served the best, like the Reto user?
Yeah, so currently, obviously, there's so many challenges.
But I think in areas like DeFi yields and the way the composability and the competition with every DeFi player
around yields and vaults.
And given how different earning opportunities have, at the same time, it's very easy to
pull out your capital.
And it makes it so, one would call it perfect competition.
So it makes it very, very ruthless, makes it very competitive, such that I think really the retail gets the best on that.
We also see it even in exchanges, right? So like, you know, even, even, you know,
Bybit's growth has been tremendous,
which is really amazing.
But throughout that growth cycle,
competition over spreads and, you know,
fees in trading, you know,
keeps going very lower and lower.
And the competition is, is getting intense
and more and more intense.
Um, but the good thing is that in general volumes in, you know, over the last decade
or so has all gone up.
Right.
So in far, far, far matches the, the, the compression of, of spreads, which is expected.
It's very natural in a financial market that
is evolving and maturing.
So this is what I mean by like, you know, the retail is getting better and better served
and people are getting better services all the time.
Gotcha.
That makes sense.
That makes sense.
And I tend to agree. I think to agree that more and more, you know, more and more players within the market, significant players, let's put it that way, are understanding that retail is very important and they have to be served and they are getting more and more access to DeFi in a very sort of easy way, which is good because at the end of the day, obviously the Web3 market is still
pretty small.
There's a big road ahead, but making it accessible for everyone, coming back to your point earlier
you made, right?
Like, hey, if I have to explain Bitcoin to a family member, that's going to be pretty
hard.
But if I'm telling them, hey, this is a good opportunity and it works, well, you can just
deposit your money and hey, that's going to
have, you can start farming yield just like your bank account.
That's a much easier conversation to have.
Obviously, this is a little bit on the short hand, obviously there's risk involved and
so forth.
But if you can sort of make it in a way where it's like a familiar experience for the end user, for Web2 users, it's much easier to get them into Web3.
One thing I'm also wondering a little bit about, one thing you guys also have set up also for the institutional sort of focus, like a sort of a tokenization as a service platform, if I'm not mistaken.
I think it came out in September, October. So
it's very recently. And while you guys have talked about it quite a bit,
and I'm wondering, considering obviously we have talked about retail, sort of what retail wants,
I'm wondering what does institutions want? It's like a tokenization as a service. What is their
focus? How do you sort of make sure they feel comfortable with, for example, doing tokenization as a service, what is their focus? How do you sort of make sure they feel comfortable with, for example, doing tokenization specifically, like you also said in your,
like also what you have said is like, hey, it's so early. It's not that easy to use currently.
Yes, exactly. So tokenization as a service is really like addressing all the frictions that institutions have so you
know on your left hand side i think your great assets are with institutions on the right hand
side like you know supply and demand right so on the left hand side you would say it's supply so
uh these institutions have great assets that well you know the the world would otherwise want and
need um but they but on the right hand side the you know to get to meet
the demand of the world uh in crypto um they need to understand how the legal structures need to
be replaced for these tokens to be accepted in a certain way and what can the rights of those
tokens be and therefore they need legal opinion they They need general technological norms.
You know, it's like, how would one do something in this way?
And, you know, a lot of these traditional players,
they have no web tree knowledge.
And also they don't have like technical knowledge.
They don't have the technical resources as well.
And so what we can bring
is uh that education to them but i think it goes beyond that right you know any other player can
do that right there yeah tokenization uh businesses out there that could very well
solve those issues for you but it's also that you're speaking to a player that has strong distribution partner right um
many of these traditional financial institutions like think think of the guy behind the desk in
the traditional financial institution like i because i used to work for for for uh city bank
and i used to help innovation like if they're going to introduce a project they want it to be successful so how can
you make it successful from the get-go well you need to have a partner of equivalent size and
distribution to your size i used to work at city so if i'm looking for a partner that that will be
of the size of citibank you know to do a deal i better be talking to someone that's of that size right of that
distribution of that opportunity and in crypto we don't have many of those players right so that
gives us a tremendous advantage with vibit that we can have those conversations and that not only
it says hey how we can do things but also uh what we can bring together in a joint manner and that together makes it
interesting and it's not just uh financial institutions it's even uh national organizations
uh uh you know traditional financial exchanges many of all those natures that are thinking about innovation and are thinking
of ways that they need to touch tokenization.
We are the very natural partner for these type of activities to happen.
That being said, that's exactly why it needs to be done.
Interesting.
I'm going to be done. Interesting. I'm going to be honest.
That sounds like there's a lot coming up ahead without speculating too much.
But I would love to learn a little bit more about the future.
Considering we're going slightly but surely to the end of the spaces.
What can we expect of Mantle in 2026? Yeah, I would
put this to everyone, right?
So regulation is being
clearer on
what crypto can do
and what
traditional
assets can be tokenized.
And it's not can, it's how
and it's like
what
jurisdictions, places in which the distribution it's not can it's how and it's like you know what under what what uh jurisdictions other
what places and in which the distribution makes it better and better and all that is coming down
the pipeline uh and that's actually expanding the opportunities it's not just like regulation
it's not a bad thing regulation is a good thing because what happens is when when regulation comes in
it gives assurances and it gives you the question to expand your distribution right so
i just want to highlight that you know it's not just web3 and crypto side you know we represent
web3 and crypto going down the route of targeting traditional financial assets and traditional financial
distribution uh the traditional financial players are doing the opposite as well so like you if you
see for example nasdaq is exploring tokenization and trading on nasdaq uh with the sec uh so they
are exploring exploring the other side right like moving from their
side of the island to our island the crypto island and what you will see you know is
something that I'm expecting is the confluence the the merging of crypto and web 3 and traditional finance into unified experiences for trading for for financials financial
uh for your daily financial life like basically these two sites are going to merge tremendously
uh to the point where i think uh then um you know one cannot really tell the difference eventually
and don't need to, to be honest.
And that's the world that I think, that's the roadmap I think we're going on, right?
We want extremely, like, indifferent UX.
It shouldn't, the UX shouldn't feel like, oh, this is very unique to Web3.
Oh, there's private keys, public keys.
No, it's a very indifferent UX and UI in which people are really looking for the best
yield opportunities, the best distribution.
And, you know, both sides of the coin, the traditional financial players and the Web3
will fight it out.
Of course, I'm confident that the web3 will fight it out of course i'm confident
that the web3 side will win and that's mostly because uh blockchain is a much more operational
efficient environment to work and operate in you know i used to come traditional miners
so it just gives us some sense if you trade a stock it takes t plus two days you know at least
two days before you can move the stock token you know sorry it's not token the stock asset
from its real ledger the national ledger it takes two days one day to clear the trades, in other words, confirm the matching of orders.
And another day to actually settle, in other words, move the tokens, or in this case, stock certificates.
And, you know, in that kind of world, for a guy who operates crypto, we almost think that this is an atomic step.
crypto we almost think that this is an atomic step right and it's like instant right but you
And it's like instant.
know if you look at transfer finance that's the world they're playing in that's that's how it is
and the world we are living is more efficient and both sides are going to collide uh looking into
this year i i think our industry has a path forward to win. Absolutely.
And I am very excited for Mantle, I'm going to be honest,
maybe a little bit biased there.
I'm personally not from, I'm personally very excited.
Obviously at HSC, we are very excited too.
We would love to, yeah, we, like I said earlier,
we are very excited to see the competition.
That is good per definition um we also very we are also
very interested to see how you guys will sort of constant constantly on board new institutions
um doing essentially like also like you said like a little bit of the crossover
they coming to us you going to them essentially um so I'm really looking forward on how that will all play out.
For like a retail user, right, which might be not as familiar with crypto
or might not be familiar with Bybit or Mantle, which I found very,
well, obviously, yeah, well, it can happen, but it's very unlikely at this point,
considering how big Bybit and Mantle has become.
What is like a logical step for them to sort of get some,
you know, be either community member or maybe get like,
maybe dip their first toes into the RWA ecosystem of Mantle?
What do you suggest?
Where should retail users go to as a first step into the ecosystem?
Yeah, I totally would say like like if you're, for example, if you're a Bybit user,
then definitely check out all the avenues of the interweave M&T, right? And then put a little bit
of the M&T on mental chain and play around with all the different applications. That's a way to get your toes wet and your feet wet.
And once once you're, you know, you know, thinking about being part of the ecosystem, definitely there are many avenues.
If you are a content creator, we do have sort of like every now and then KOL bounties in which you know you can produce content
and you know shout out like for different projects in the space if you are interested in uh being a
builder uh there's an ongoing hackathon with hack quest you just need to probably google the word
hack quest and uh mental and there's a there is a very attractive reward it's almost I think
hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of prizes to be won in the next two to three
months building up different projects of course we have we are very intimately
interested in RWA as a category there's you know so that's if you're a builder
if you're a user yeah look forward to some of the big launches that will come up with X stocks, with Aave, which has been announced but not yet fully launched. opportunities as well and if you you know if you're far too lazy to even use
these operation on chain which I understand yeah you will see a lot of
these opportunities on by bit as well as certification so you know we are
working more and more to bring on chin you to buy bit as well so more and more
of that stuff they also show up a baby as well so more and more of that stuff they also show up and bybit as well so uh long story
short there's like so many ways you can interact uh with the applications uh and you know just
just so you know like i live you know i live in and breathe rwa so and i i actually um spend my stable coins using uh you know a card solution called ur which which
only operates on mental you can check it out as well um so i have uh i i believe it's a it's a
it's a it's a mastercard solution i believe i couldn't remember is it be some master but uh
where you know it changes your stables into uh
you know i'm based in singapore so i'm you know spending in simile hall and uh you know i i i i
live quite literally completely on chain yeah wow that's very cool that is very cool i love to hear
that i love to um yeah i think that i think that's only something which will be
more and more of the norm in upcoming years uh i think you made some really good points on uh
settlement times uh which are in threat fire still pretty long and it went from t plus two to t plus
one and t plus one still meets 24 hours so that's's pretty still pretty. Well, it sounds for us, it's
very long because we can send money to each other within seconds. But in ThreatFi, like
T plus one is pretty normalized at this point. So there's a lot of things whereby I think
blockchain and particularly blockchain in terms of efficiency can make huge leaps. That
being said, considering we are at the end of the spaces, Josh, I would love to give
you the last note here.
So if there's anything which we have not been talking about or something you would like
to put an emphasis on, well, this is your chance considering the stage is yours.
Yeah.
So I've been in space for, you know, like
Four or five at least five years now
Professionally, but I've been in crypto for like a decade and I've seen the cycles and I think you know Everybody's always looking at a price action and obviously the price action
More recently more recent of date has not great uh and sentiment has been low right um but i've never been
more excited about the future of you know if you think about it right if you just you know if if
you can imagine if it was a year ago from the date i am sitting right now uh if someone had told me
that did you know that there will be etf make like huge ETFs, there will be DATs that will be driving so much value that there will be legal clarity over real assets.
There will be competition between traditional exchanges and crypto exchanges trying to touch real world assets like even a year
ago from today i would be shocked about how our industry has evolved or have come to be i would
have estimated that this conversation would have taken me uh would have taken the industry at least like three to four years right but this is happening
as we're speaking uh and you know the total addressable market on that level is huge so
you know you know if you pull yourself back just think of from a hindsight of a year
it's already so much and i think we this this this is a level of optimism we have to retain
uh if not like you know you will lose out you totally lose out uh not staying here for the
long run yeah yeah it's crazy it's absolutely crazy what have been done in this last year
see what have been done in this last year whereby there are so many things going on
and so many sort of, you know, like, you could say upgrades and updates on the ecosystem
as a whole, but also as like, you know, as Web3 as a whole, whereby finally we have the
clarity, finally we have an idea where we should go essentially
whereby this was significantly harder earlier let's be fair like without any regulatory clarity
it just gets very hard um i would love to thank the audience uh for sticking for us with for an
hour uh thank you so much and i'm really looking forward to hosting you all tomorrow when we have another project, which is called Trader. One of the, well, very,
very interesting, I would say, very interesting perplexes. And obviously, Josh, I want to thank
you. Thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate you considering I know you
guys have been, oh, that's really frank. You guys have been insanely busy. So I'm very glad that
you made some time for us. I really, really appreciate that. And yeah, I would
love to have you again someday. I would love to have you again to talk about all
that, all that progress which you guys have made.
And hopefully when we do this sort of a look back,
it turns out you guys did it maybe even more than that.
I would love to do that.
For now, I say goodbye to everyone
and I will speak with you hopefully very soon.
And thanks again, Jas, for your time.
I really, really appreciate you.
Thank you. I Thank you.
