Mantle grew out of the transformation of BitDAO — founded in June 2021 by Bybit exchange co-founders Daniel Yan and Ben Zhou, BitDAO became known as a DAO with an enormous treasury (second only to the Ethereum Foundation's, excluding its own token). The Mantle project, an Ethereum Layer 2, was first outlined in 2022 by Jordi Alexander and Arjun Krishan Kalsy, with BitDAO's backing.
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January 2023: the testnet launches.
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May 2023: the BitDAO community votes with near-unanimous (roughly 100%) support to rebrand the entire BitDAO brand and token as “Mantle,” under a “One Brand, One Token” principle — unifying governance, treasury, and product.
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July 17, 2023, 6:00 UTC: the BIT token converts 1:1 to MNT; the 3 billion unconverted BIT tokens are sent to a burn address, reducing fully diluted supply from 9.2 billion to 6.2 billion.
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July 2023: Mainnet Alpha launches; August: the Mantle Liquid Staking Protocol (mETH) alpha version.
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March 15, 2024: the “Tectonic” (V2) upgrade — EIP-1559 support, a fixed 2-second block schedule.
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A $200 million ecosystem fund: $100 million from the BitDAO treasury, $100 million from external investors (Pantera Capital, Spartan, Dragonfly Capital).
Mantle has no single, publicly identified founder — it operates as a DAO-governed network, with key decisions voted on by MNT holders.