Mantle (formerly BitDAO)

Mantle is a DAO built around one of the largest treasuries in crypto, and the clearest example of the mega-treasury archetype in the directory. It began as BitDAO, a 2021 treasury DAO seeded by the exchange Bybit that raised and warehoused a multi-billion-dollar war chest, then reinvented itself as a product organisation: in 2023 the community voted to merge BitDAO's governance and treasury with the Mantle Network Ethereum layer-2 and rebrand the whole thing "Mantle." Today MNT holders govern a treasury running into the billions and a stack of on-chain-finance products built on top of it.

From BitDAO to Mantle: the 2023 merger

BitDAO launched in 2021 as a pure treasury DAO – capital in, governance token (BIT) out, and a mandate to fund web3 builders. What made it unusual was scale: it accumulated a treasury of over $2.5 billion at merger time, dwarfing almost every other DAO.

In mid-2023 the community passed BIP-21, “Optimization of Brand, Token and Tokenomics”, authorising a merger of BitDAO's governance and treasury with Mantle Network – an Ethereum L2 that BitDAO had itself funded. BIT was rebranded to MNT and converted 1:1, and the treasury (including "almost $300 million" in stablecoins and "over 270,000 ETH") passed to the unified ecosystem. The move turned a passive treasury DAO into an operating one: instead of only funding outside builders, the DAO now runs its own chain and products. It is the mirror image of a pure venture DAO like The LAO, which invests but never operates.

The mega-treasury archetype

Mantle's defining feature is the size and composition of its treasury. It is consistently ranked among the largest DAO treasuries tracked by DeepDAO, running into several billion dollars. That scale is also its central risk, and a live illustration of the concentration problem: a large share of the treasury is held in Mantle's own MNT, so its dollar value swings with the token's price and much of it can only be realised by selling the asset whose price the sale would move. The DAO diversifies into ETH and stablecoins for exactly this reason, and the tokenomics formally separate non-circulating Treasury Holdings from the Budget Treasuries that fund day-to-day spending.

Governance: one token, one vote, off-chain

Mantle is governed by MNT holders on a straightforward token-weighted basis – one MNT equals one vote – with proposals decided by off-chain Snapshot voting rather than on-chain execution. Of the ~6.22 billion MNT minted at launch, roughly half sits in the Treasury and half circulates. Spending is gated by process rather than by code: MNT transfers from Treasury Holdings to a Budget Treasury must be authorised by a Budget Proposal before any funds are distributed, and execution is carried out by the ecosystem's operators rather than enforced by the vote itself.

This is the standard large-treasury pattern – a big, buyable, token-weighted electorate deciding off-chain, with a human execution layer between the vote and the money. It is powerful at Mantle's scale, but it also means voting power tracks capital, and the gap between "the vote passed" and "the funds moved" is filled by trust.

From treasury to operating stack

The merger reframed the treasury as fuel for products rather than an end in itself. Three pieces stand out. Mantle Network is a modular, OP-stack Ethereum layer-2 – the same Optimism lineage many rollups share – with MNT as its gas token. The mETH Protocol is a liquid ETH staking and restaking product that has grown into one of the larger liquid-staking protocols by TVL, putting the DAO in direct competition with Rocket Pool and Lido. And the Mantle EcoFund is a DAO-established ~$200M venture vehicle that co-invests alongside outside VCs to seed projects on Mantle – a governance-created fund in the spirit of a venture DAO, but pointed inward at its own ecosystem.

How Caper approaches this

Mantle shows what maximal treasury scale looks like: billions of dollars, an off-chain token-weighted electorate, and a trusted execution layer that moves the money after a vote passes. A caper deliberately occupies the opposite corner. Its treasury is a protocol-controlled vault inside the contract, moved only by a typed, on-chain proposal (a PAYOUT or INVEST), so there is no gap between the vote and the transfer for trust to fill – the passing vote is the execution.

And where Mantle's weight is one-MNT-one-vote – capital that anyone can buy on the open market – a caper brings an earned, non-transferable element into governance. A member's voting weight grows with vote tokens earned only by casting ballots – a buy, a sell or a transfer earns none – which are soulbound records that can never be moved between accounts, and that a buyer cannot acquire except by voting. The same earned weight sets a member's exit share of the treasury.

This is not "your bag doesn't count" – held stake t is a multiplier, so capital still matters – but it does mean a well-funded buyer starts from a blank record: a purchase mints no v at all – it comes one per ballot cast – and none of it can be bought from the members who already hold theirs. Mantle buys scale and an operating business the DAO governs; a caper trades that reach for a treasury no one has to be trusted to move and an influence factor that can only be minted to the account that earns it – buyable by anyone at the published rate, takeable from nobody.