Manta Pacific Accelerates, TVL Touches $316 Million

Manta Pacific Accelerates, TVL Touches $316 Million

Manta Pacific's Total Value Locked (TVL) has been on a rapid ascent recently, driven by a campaign to accumulate reward points for next year's airdrop.

Manta Pacific is surging, with TVL reaching $316 million. Image: Project's Twitter

Over $383 million has flowed into Manta Pacific, the layer-2 blockchain of Manta Network, attracting considerable attention from the crypto community.

Source: Dune Analytics

This breakthrough has propelled Manta Pacific's TVL by a staggering 1,250% this month alone, securing its position as the 7th largest layer-2 blockchain by total locked assets in the crypto market. By contrast, the project's cross-chain bridge solution attracted only about $28 million just three months ago.

TVL fluctuations for Manta Pacific from September 2023 to date. Source: L2Beat

Manta Pacific ranks in the top 7 layer-2 blockchains by TVL size. Source: L2Beat

TVL is a metric tracking the amount of cryptocurrency locked in smart contracts of one or all DeFi protocols operating on a specific blockchain. However, this figure is often unverified on blockchain explorers like Etherscan, hence not a standardized measure for assessing a project's credibility. Nevertheless, achieving a nine-figure TVL like Manta's is no easy feat.

Manta Pacific's appeal stems from a recent campaign launch on December 14, promising an airdrop of 50 million tokens to early adopters. The value of these rewards cannot yet be determined as Manta has not yet released the tokens to the market.

Operating similarly to liquid staking platforms, users lock ETH into Manta to receive an equivalent amount of STONE tokens. By January next year, STONE will convert into airdrop tokens. During the waiting period, users can utilize STONE to enhance their airdrop chances across other protocols within the Manta Pacific ecosystem.

Additionally, the project rewards users with Box Pieces weekly, which when combined into a complete Box, unlock tradable NFTs on platforms like Element. Collecting all 6 types of NFTs rewards users with a rarer NFT named "The First Modular L2," further increasing future airdrop opportunities.

Manta is not alone in deploying this concept; several other projects are also attracting users with similar reward accumulation mechanisms, such as Swell, which surpassed $245 million in TVL this morning, and Blast, a layer-2 blockchain that attracted $650 million within just one week of its launch.

Originating as a layer-1 blockchain built on Substrate infrastructure within the Polkadot ecosystem, Manta Network announced the deployment of its mainnet for the Manta Pacific layer-2 in September this year. It switched from Optimism's OP Stack to Polygon's CDK solution just one month later.

p0x labs, the development entity behind Manta Network, successfully raised $25 million in Series A funding in July, valuing the project at $500 million.