Mantle (MNT)

An investment DAO slash ecosystem support. Ethereum optimistic rollup L2.

"Aims to promote and propel the mass adoption of open finance and decentralized tokenized economy."

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: early 2021
• Testnet release:
• Mainnet release: "Initially launched in July 2023, Mantle V1 Alpha faced challenges due to the absence of EIP-1559, leading to high fees and variable block times. These issues were addressed in March 2024 with Mantle V2 Tectonic, which transitioned to Optimism's OP Stack Bedrock and integrated EIP-1559, resulting in efficient transaction processing." (Messari 5-8-2024)

History

• ByBit spinned up the BitDAO concept (8-3-2022). Made a move to become Mantle and lets people migrate their BIT tokens 1:1 to Mantle.

Audits & Exploits

• No bug bounty program for BitDAO was found. Although a Gnosis Safe program exists, BitDAO does not share its bug reporting (2-5-2022).
• Had its 'final' Mantle audit report on 18-7-2023. With lots of declined risks. One such example: "Privilege Related: Burned sequencer fees can be spent normally due to the burner address can be set to any address"
• All audits can be viewed here (19-7-2023).
• Scored 78% on DeFi Safety (2-5-2022):

"BitDAO uses a direct implementation of the Gnosis Safe, which was formally verified here. A single audit before deployment was found here. However, we would like to note that this audit only covers ERC-20 compliance for the BIT token, and does not cover the treasury contract or other contracts. However, Gnosis Safe contracts were also extensively audited as seen here."

With the comment:

"As a 1:1 implementation of the Gnosis Safe contract, BitDAO inherits much of its process quality. In spite of this, the team sets itself apart from its sourced protocol through dedication to communication and transparency. Indeed, BitDAO is a direct copy of the Gnosis Safe treasury contract which we have diffchecked. This traceability is especially important for a protocol that mainly utilizes a 1:1 fork, as their users still need to comprehend how the protocol works, and this information is often missing.

Even so, BitDAO finds ways to distinguish itself from its sourced protocol. Most notably, the protocol clearly labels its treasury contract as upgradeable and also details its ownership parameters. Although upgrade capabilities need to be provided, this is a good first step.

In the future, we would love that BitDAO acquires its own bug bounty program. Even if Gnosis has its own, bug reports are not shared between both teams, and this is crucial for futureproofing.

In addition, with BitDAO's governance phase 2 being worked on, we would like to see timelocks becoming a larger part of the protocol to safeguard the upgrade mechanisms."

• Got an audit by Peckshield (6-2021).

Governance

Admin Key

From a critical thread:

"they removed the "hard part", i.e. Slasher and slashing conditions. Their system is also permissioned. Since there is no slashing and system is permissioned, it's "just" a typical DAC - a permissioned set of nodes promising to make data available." (9-8-2023).

• From their docs (13-7-2023):

"The centralized sequencer on Mantle Network produces L2 blocks by including transactions in them in the order they are received by the nodes. It also publishes updated state roots to L1.

We include can additional sequencer module referred to as Threshold Signature Scheme(TSS). This module consists of a set of whitelisted node operators who sign blocks and contribute to multi-party signatures that help improve the correctness of off-chain transaction execution results. In the event that an N of M threshold is not met, the sequencer may re-sequence a batch of L2 blocks, or transition to a backup sequencer."

• From DeFi Safety (2-5-2022):

"BitDAO clearly identifies its treasury contract as being upgradeable. Ownership is MultiSig clearly indicated in this location. BitDAO's pause control is not documented or explained. BitDAO's timelocks are not currently in-effect."

DAO

• From their website (21-7-2023):

"All decisions, from launching new initiatives, to transferring and recalling treasury resources, assigning and modifying powers to operating teams, and implementing corrective actions, are subject to proposals and voting by $MNT token holders."

Treasury

• Mantle has a diverse treasury, dominated by BIT and MNT (21-7-2023).
• BitDAO Treasury will hold 30% of total BIT tokens.
• From The Defiant (8-3-2022):

"According to Open-Orgs, BitDAO currently has $1.8B in it, making it the second largest treasury of any publicly viewable treasury on Ethereum, following that of Uniswap and just ahead of those of Ethereum Name Service, Lido, and Gitcoin. BitDAO holds the No. 2 spot largely thanks to its governance token, BIT, which accounts for about $1B of that treasury. That treasury also grows at a pace of roughly $2M per day without diluting BIT holders. The real revenue stream into BitDAO comes from its association with ByBit, the exchange. It’s been putting about 2.5 basis points from its volumes, the lion’s share of its profits, into the BitDAO treasury. In exchange, ByBit controls 60% the BIT supply, according to the litepaper. One of its first investments was a swap with FTX for its FTT token, with a 3-year lockup. With so much money available, the other core idea in BitDAO is autonomous entities. Instead of trying to invest $2B directly through DAO governance, the current plan is to make very large commitments to autonomous entities that can make whatever investments they want in a specific area."

BitDAO holds 3.36M FTT with the agreement not to sell before Nov 2024, likewise Alameda eld 100M BIT with similar agreement.

Token

Launch

• BitDAO raked in $365M from its governance token sale (17-8-2021).

Token Allocation

• Fixed supply of 10,000,000,000 BIT tokens (10-2021). BitDAO Treasury will hold 30% of total BIT tokens. Bybit owns 60% of the supply, with 45% being locked for 3 years with unlocking.

Utility

• From their website (21-7-2023):

"All decisions, from launching new initiatives, to transferring and recalling treasury resources, assigning and modifying powers to operating teams, and implementing corrective actions, are subject to proposals and voting by $MNT token holders."

• From a proposal/announcement on their forum (22-8-2022):

"$BIT will represent: the protocol value of BitNetwork, value and governance control over the existing BitDAO treasury and initiatives, exposure to BitDAO ecosystem partners, the Bybit contribution, and continued use cases across on-chain and off-chain platforms."

• Governance (8-3-2022).

Mantle Technology

• BitDAO code can be viewed here. From DeFi Safety (2-5-2022):

"BitDAO is a 1:1 implementation of the Gnosis Safe contracts. At 595 commits and 9 branches, these contracts are robustly developed." Whitepaper can be found here.*Virtual Machine: EVM

• MantleDA powered (21-7-2023) by EigenDA technology:

"Data availability is enabled via DA economic game theory involving rewards and stake slashing. Based on internal evaluations, this translates to a 30-70% cost savings compared to on-chain L1."

However, EigenDA is not live yet, so "they removed the "hard part", i.e. Slasher and slashing conditions. Their system is also permissioned. Since there is no slashing and system is permissioned, it's "just" a typical DAC - a permissioned set of nodes promising to make data available." (9-8-2023).

• Development language used: Solidity (15-7-2023)

Implementations

• Built on: Ethereum and the OP Stack

How it works

• From the docs (20-7-2023):

"Let's go over the process of transaction handling to better understand how each module works.

1. Users send signed transactions via an available RPC node.
2. The Sequencer receives transactions and pack them into blocks. The DTL (Data Transport Layer) service syncs this block data. Verifiers sync the L2 block data from the DTL.
3. The batch submitter fetches updated state roots and sends them to the Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) module to be verified and signed. Verifiers can also fetch the state root data and confirm their validity.
4. Once TSS nodes establish the validity of the updated state roots and sign off on the rollup batches, the batch submitter publishes the state root data to the State Commitment Chain (SCC) contract on L1 Ethereum.
5. The rollup transaction data is stored on Mantle DA. Verifiers can fetch this data at any point and verify its validity. This action is performed when issuing fraud proof challenges.
6. Mantle DA nodes also post the validity certificates to L1 guaranteeing liveness and availability with each new batch.
7. In case the state root validity is challenged with a fraud proof, L2 data is posted to the contract on L1 to perform the execution and check state transition validity."

Oracle Method

• From DeFi Safety (2-5-2022):

"BitDAO does not need an Oracle for its sole Gnosis Safe treasury contract."

Their Other Projects

Game7

• From The Defiant (8-3-2022):

"[BitDAO] has committed $500M to Game7, a DAO committed to building out the gaming ecosystem in blockchains, but it’s giving the funds out in $100M chunks, Allen explained. BitDAO won’t decide on each grant Game7 makes with the funds, but it can decide not to make further contributions if the partnership isn’t working."

Mantle

• Seems to have created L2 Mantle, which in return now holds the BIT treasury.

Roadmap

• Can be found here (20-7-2023).
• From a proposal/announcement on their forum (22-8-2022):

"BitNetwork (temporary name for BitDAO Protocol) will be a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions including an optimistic rollup and zk rollup built using an iterative modular chain approach, and supported by BitDAO’s native token $BIT."

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Full team can be found [here].

Funding

• From Decrypt (17-6-2021):

"BitDAO took in $230 million in a funding round led by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Thiel-founded Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Dragonfly Capital. Other funders include Brevan Howard Asset Management co-founder Alan Howard and Synthetix's Kain Warwick. Singapore-based crypto exchange ByBit is also contributing regular revenue from its futures contracts trading, which could inject hundreds of millions to the fund."

• Babylon; part of their $70M pre-launch round (30-5-2024).
• Took part in the Range Token raise for UMA of $2.66M (16-7-2021).
• BitDAO raked in $365M from its governance token sale on SushiSwap’s MISO platform in August, selling BIT to over 9,000 people (17-8-2021).

Partners

• According to its website (8-3-2022):

Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, Pantera, Dragonfly Capital, Alan Howard, SushiSwap, Spartan Capital, ByBit, Kain Warwick, Polygon, Jump Capital, Peak Capital, Amber, Fenbushi, NGC Ventures, Longhash Ventures, Kronos and a couple other ones.

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