We are excited to announce that Mantle has agreed to stake $10 million worth of $MNT from Mantle Treasury as an initial commitment to Lagrange’s state committee deployment for Mantle Network.

This proposal has passed by the Mantle Economics Committee vote in accordance with MIP-28. Lagrange’s state committee acts as a light client for optimistic rollup state that can be safely consumed by cross-chain applications without waiting for the seven day finalization window to conclude. Instead, optimistic network state can be safely used for cross-chain applications within minutes of it being written to the L1. The state commitments are enhanced by explicit crypto-economic security guarantees provided by the capital staked by the state committee nodes. Mantle’s commitment to seed the state committee initially with $10M worth of $MNT provides a robust collateral base that application developers and users can leverage for fast, secure cross-chain messaging.

Indeed, the development of an effective light client for Mantle Network state with deep, explicit crypto-economic security guarantees represents a new paradigm in optimistic rollup interoperability, enabling fast secure message passing and leveraging of Mantle Network state without the negative externality risks of fund loss due to hacks or bugs that have plagued previous authority-based quorum approaches.

This stake also highlights Mantle’s continued commitment to pushing the boundaries of optimistic rollup capabilities in collaboration with cutting edge companies such as Lagrange and EigenLayer. Mantle was the first L2 to use EigenDA for off-chain data availability, even using a custom implementation of EigenDA, Mantle DA, on Mantle Mainnet for months ahead of EigenLayer’s own mainnet deployment slated for H1 2024. In a similar fashion, Mantle will be deploying Lagrange’s state committee using a bespoke implementation from the Lagrange team that enables $MNT staking. Once EigenLayer’s mainnet is live, the state committee will be migrated over to an AVS implementation that enables dual staking with LSTs such as $mETH.

Users and developers can derive several key benefits from the state committee deployment. For users, their staked $MNT can either be used to run a state committee node or delegated to a state committee node to earn native $MNT yield from cross-chain protocols consuming the committee’s secure attestations. Developers can leverage state attestations from the committee in a number of ways, including fast asset bridging and myriad other use cases enabled by fast access of L2 state on Ethereum L1, other L1s, and other L2s such as on-chain access to asset prices on Mantle Network, cross-chain portfolio optimization and rebalancing, cross-chain borrow/lending, governance participation using assets on Mantle Network in other ecosystems, and many more. Many of Mantle’s ecosystem partners, such as Axelar, Polymer, and LayerZero, plan to use the state committee to streamline their essential protocol functions. For more information about how state committee works, and its benefits to Mantle Ecosystem, check out Lagrange’s discussion post and article on the topic.

The state committee deployment will proceed in several phases. A testnet deployment that developers can begin to use for testing will be deployed in February 2024. Once fully audited and tested, a permissioned mainnet deployment will be established in April 2024. This deployment only allows whitelisted participants to run nodes and will have no slashing enabled for $MNT stakes to minimize risks to $MNT stakers during this ramp-up period. Finally, slashing and permissionless joining of the state committee network, as well as eventual migration to AVS will proceed once the relevant systems are main-net ready and battle tested (estimated June 2024 for slashing/permission-less joining).