The Mantle EcoFund deployment includes investment into venture studio LiquidX, backing Valent with Selini Capital, and support for on-chain asset management platform Range Protocol
Mantle EcoFund, an ecosystem venture fund established by the Mantle community through DAO governance to help fuel the growth of Mantle with a catalysed capital pool of $200 million, announced the commencement of its fund deployment and liquidity support provision, beginning with LiquidX, an application layer-focused venture studio building web3 companies, Valent, a decentralised money market exploring the frontiers of liquid staking derivatives finance (LSDFi) and real world assets (RWAs), and Range Protocol, an all-in-one on-chain asset management platform and ecosystem.
The Mantle Network is a newly launched Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer-2 (L2) scaling solution, and a new DAO proposal, MIP-26, has been freshly passed by the Mantle community to allow for up to a combined US$60M in USD stablecoins, 30k ETH, and 120M MNT in liquidity provision for EcoFund-invested decentralised applications (dApps), with each individual allowance being up to 10M USDx, 5000 ETH, and 20M MNT.
Mantle EcoFund Invests In LiquidX to Help Catapult Web2 Phenoms Into Web3
The first of the three initial recipients of Mantle EcoFund investment is venture studio LiquidX. One of the strategies the fund has adopted is to work with venture studios anchored by founders with strong web2 background. The fund’s investment into LiquidX demonstrates its commitment to help catapult web2 phenoms into web3.
“LiquidX excels as a builder and solution provider in the liminal space between web2 and web3, and at the intersection between gaming and DeFi,” said David Toh, partner of Mirana Ventures, Mantle EcoFund’s operator. “The Mantle core team will be a close partner of LiquidX to help build apps that will bring the next millions web2 users into web3.”
“We focused our round on onboarding strategic investors that can bring value to the companies we are building,” said Chris Sirise, co-founder of LiquidX. “We’re excited to have Mantle onboard and look forward to working closely with their ecosystem team to build consumer applications that are fun and will onboard the generation of users.”
Mantle EcoFund and Selini Capital Join Hands in Backing Valent
Mantle EcoFund is also joined by its strategic venture partner Selini Capital in an investment in Valent, a decentralized money market that is on a mission to chart the future of DeFi with explorations in LSDFi and RWAs.
“Selini is delighted to join Mantle EcoFund for the first time in investing in Valent and supporting it at the ground level,” said Jordi Alexander, chief investment officer of Selini Capital. “We look forward to bringing our combined expertise and capital into the ecosystem and to support Valent’s growth.”
“We are thrilled to have Mantle EcoFund and Selini supporting our exploration of newer DeFi use cases,” said Rahul Agarwal, core contributor of Valent. “We look forward to breathing new life into DeFi with our next-gen solutions that boldly go where few have gone before.”
Mantle Greenlights Liquidity Support for Range Protocol
Following the passage of MIP-26, Mantle EcoFund will also begin to provide liquidity for selected projects, starting with on-chain asset management platform Range Protocol.
“The liquidity support will be a timely boost as we look to offer average DeFi users easy access to professional automated trading strategies to enhance their yield,” said Siddharth Lalwani, CEO of Range Protocol.
These projects demonstrate Mantle Ecosystem’s growing momentum, as it has also seen adoption across Mirana Venture’s portfolio companies. Tsunami, EigenLayer, iZUMi Finance, Clique, Solv Protocol, CharmVerse, SynFutures, Lootex, etc. have all either deployed or are planning to deploy on Mantle.
