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.