coindesk.com
World Liberty Financial ($WLFI), a DeFi project backed by President Donald Trump's family, has acquired substantial amounts of Mantle's $MNT token following last week's major technological upgrade of the network.
$WLFI purchased about 3.54 million $MNT for nearly $3 million USDC for an average purchase price of 84 cents, according to data sources Lookonchain and Arkham Intelligence.
The recent purchase has increased $WLFI's coin holdings, which include tokens like ETH, WBTC, TRX, LINK, AAVE, ENA, and others, to over $340 million. However, the Trump family-backed outlet still faced a paper loss of $111 million as of writing.
$MNT is the native cryptocurrency of the Mantle Network, serving as a utility token for gas fees and a governance token for the layer 2 ecosystem focused on scaling Ethereum.
The Mantle Mainnet hard fork, or backwards-incompatible upgrade, took effect on March 19, activating EigenDA on the network. EigenDA is a secure, high-throughput, decentralized data availability service on Ethereum.
The EigenDA integration is said to boost Mantle Network's scalability without hitting data rate limits, reportedly resulting in a 15 MB/s throughput. In other words, the network can process more transactions per block. Additionally, the upgrade has made the Mantle Network better compatible with Ethereum's impending Pectra upgrade.
$MNT traded at 6% higher on the day at 83 cents at press time, according to data sources CoinDesk and TradingView.