Parsec Weekly #52
Manta Pacific, the newest L2 on the block
Manta Pacific
Manta Pacific is one of the newer Ethereum Layer 2s to come to market. While the roadmap is still being executed on, in its ultimate form Manta will be a modular L2, using a zkEVM execution environment leveraging the Polygon CDK and Celestia for data availability. This approach is the first of its kind and expected to be highly economical which should reduce gas costs for end users.
Having raised $25m at a $500m valuation in July, Manta is currently undertaking an incentivised bridging program called “New Paradigm”. New Paradigm allows users to bridge ETH and USDC in exchange for STONE and wUSDM and simultaneously earn their share of 50m MANTA tokens. STONE is akin to a native version of wstETH (issued by StakeStone) and wUSDM is a wrapped version of USDM issued by Mountain Protocol. Playing on the recent launch of Blast, the team clearly poke fun at the notion that they are live on mainnet and not just a multisig, which is a fair criticism...
With the New Paradigm incentive program being live from December 14th, inflows have been impressive thus far with over 250kΞ and $125m bridged making for almost $700m in total bridged value:
An interesting second order effect of the New Paradigm bridging program has been the depegging of STONE. It appears that users are bridging ETH to Manta and getting STONE via the New Paradigm bridge, swapping this STONE to ETH via Quickswap, bridging this ETH back to mainnet and repeating the process in order to earn Box Piece NFTs (akin to points or airdrop tokens). STONE wicked as low as 0.75Ξ and has now stabilised around 0.93Ξ:
In order to purchase STONE at this discount, users have to bridge via the regular (non New Paradigm) bridge and purchase STONE at market. Given that the bridging via the regular bridge does not give the airdrop, we can say that the realised APR from buying STONE at a discount and holding to maturity is effectively what the market is pricing the airdrop at. STONE can be redeemed for ETH 69 days post airdrop so if we assume the airdrop to be on January 31st, the expected realised APR based on today’s date and current prices is roughly 28%. I will leave it to the moon mathematicians to determine whether buying STONE at market is attractive relative to bridging ETH via New Paradigm and playing for the airdrop but this ultimately depends on Manta valuation and future New Paradigm inflows.
And yes, in case you were wondering, Manta Pacific is fully integrated into Parsec on both our explorer and terminal products🔭
As always we appreciate your readership, if you enjoyed this article please leave a like and share it around. Have a good weekend and we’ll see you next week!
yes.
Good