Everything You Need to Know About Mantle Network Airdrop Farming
Airdrop season is in full swing—and many of the best places to farm an airdrop are on the L2s and new chains that are proliferating everywhere.
One that has not been getting quite the attention of others is the Mantle Network. Despite the similarities in name, Mantle is entirely different from Manta Network, which we also covered recently.
Let’s take a closer look at Mantle and how you can earn there. Mantle’s first season of airdrop farming ends on Jan. 15, with more seasons to come, so if you want to earn, it’s best to get a move on!
What Is Mantle
Mantle is an Optimistic rollup that aims to scale Ethereum while being compatible with the mainnet EVM. This means that all the smart contracts and tools on Ethereum mainnet will also work on Mantle, with minimal modifications. As a Layer 2, Mantle’s transactions are secured by Ethereum mainnet validators, but they go through in a compressed block, saving transaction fees for users and developers. Mantle claims an 80 percent reduction in gas fees and over 500 TPS on its chain.
Like many other L2s trying to tempt users into interacting with their ecosystems, Mantle offers incentives for performing various activities on their chain, including trading and staking. These incentives have attracted plenty of people—and their money—to Mantle, which (as of this writing on Jan. 9) currently has over $128 million in total value locked on the network and has a 24-hour volume figure of over $38 million, according to DeFiLlama. Here’s a step-by-step on how to get started.
Getting Into Mantle
First, you need to get set up on Mantle Network itself—and for that, you’ll need an invite; here’s one with unlimited uses, courtesy of helpful analyst sangados.
Connect your wallet, and the site will prompt you to add the Mantle Network. Now, you will be minting a free Soul Bound Token that serves as your Mantle Journey Profile.
When you tap the Mint button, the site tells you you need some of Mantle Network’s native currency—$MNT—to mint your SBT. You can buy this with fiat, bridge $MNT from ETH L1, or purchase from an exchange.
If you bridge any token—ETH, $MNT, etc.—from L1 onto the Mantle Network, you’ll also get a small bonus of $MNT.
Once you’ve acquired some $MNT, go ahead and mint your SBT—you’ll receive 100 Mantle Journey points for doing so. Accruing these points is how you earn an airdrop!
The next thing to do is connect your socials—go to your profile on the Mantle Journey page and do so. The app checks for your Twitter account’s age and reach to prevent people from spamming the site with loads of throwaway accounts to farm the airdrop.
That will get you 100 journey points. You also get 10 points for connecting your email and 200 points each for referring up to 10 people to Mantle with your personal referral code. (Each person you refer also gets 100 points when they sign up.)
Transact To Earn
The primary way to accrue Journey Points is to transact on the network. One of the most accessible routes to this is to use Butter Exchange. This DEX received over $4 million in seed funding from Mantle, plus $10 million in stablecoins, 5,000 ETH, and 20 million $MNT tokens to support the liquidity pools on their DEX.
You earn in multiple ways by swapping or providing liquidity on Butter Exchange. You’re accruing points towards Butter Exchange’s upcoming $BUTTER airdrop and earning Journey Miles on Mantle itself. Swapping also gives you some free plays in Butter’s pretty fun fishing game, where you can win prizes in the form of $MNT tokens, $BUTTER, or Journey Miles.
Have some ETH you want to stake? Put it in a liquidity pool on Mantle and earn rewards–and high yield.
This is a helpful tip for anyone who has stacked some value anywhere on ETH and wants to lock it in by converting it to stables without paying exorbitant fees on ETH L1. Butter also has perpetuals and all kinds of pairs for trading—including Mantle meme tokens like MantleInuCoin.
This is the simplest way to grind for points, but there are plenty of other options, many of which are advertised on your Journey home page.
For example, one app that offers native rewards, as well as Journey Points, is Okapi, a tool currently in beta that provides on-chain attestations (like reviews proofs that you own a particular account on social media).
Okapi is currently offering its second “Safari” airdrop campaign. If you follow the instructions here, verify user badges for Butter Exchange and two other exchanges—Minterest and KTX Finance—and write reviews for those sites, you accrue extra Journey Miles from Mantle and direct protocol rewards from Okapi.
NFTs On Mantle
As part of its incentive structure, Mantle also has upgradable “Citizens of Mantle” NFTs, which you can purchase on Mintle.app or Element Marketplace. At the time of writing, these NFTs are a very reasonable 53 $MNT at the floor price. To earn upgrades for these NFTs, which were released a few months ago when Mantle moved out of testing and deployed onto ETH mainnet, you can participate in Moonshot quests. The Moonshot quests, based on Galxe, are sponsored by Mantle ecosystem partners such as Minterest.
Another notable Mantle NFT is Mantle Cowboys, which also comes from the Mantle team as part of the incentive scheme. Mantle partner Element Marketplace is an excellent place to earn Journey Points, $MNT, and Element’s upcoming $ELE token; listing and trading the Cowboys and other NFTs earn you parts of both airdrops.
Season Alpha Ends Soon
This sprawling ecosystem has been around for months but is just coming into its own as it emerges from testnet into a broader market that is heating up. The current Journey campaign, called Season Alpha, ends on Jan. 15, so there’s still plenty of time to stack rewards before the next season begins.
Remember, this airdrop farm rewards you for activity on and off-chain, so there’s plenty of opportunity to earn even if you don’t have much liquidity. Basic crypto administrative tasks like taking profits and locking them into stables, trading meme tokens, or flipping NFTs can just as quickly happen on Manta as on ETH L1. And they’re cheaper, too. Twenty million $MNT will be made available to participants in Season Alpha, and that shower of money will likely turbocharge the already busy ecosystem, which currently hosts over 144 applications.