Thursday ideas are here, let’s roll.

Mantle: The Hidden L2 Gem

The Layer 2 competition will intensify during the next bull run. Arbitrum, Optimism, and now Base will have applications with tokens that will mint new millionaires, which will drive FOMO to insane levels. Mantle will most likely become more discussed due to that.

Mantle’s competitive advantage is modularity. Modularity will become another hot topic, with Celestia and Fuel leading the way. Layer 2 plus modularity equals a double charge for Mantle.

Finally, Mantle is BitDAO’s project, and BitDAO’s other chain, zkSync, is among the most anticipated. All signs point to a Mantle hype.

Here’s what you can do on Mantle’s testnet.

  1. Get some Goerli ETH here and bridge. Alternatively, request funds from the network’s faucet.
  2. Use the network switch in the top right corner of the bridge app to connect to the Mantle testnet.
  3. Create a second account in your MetaMask and send some tokens there.

It’s not much because the network is nascent, but generally, it doesn’t matter what activities you do as long as you do them early enough and the team cares about it.

Iron Fish Incentivized Testnet

Iron Fish is a privacy-oriented chain. Privacy isn’t in the market’s spotlight, and other projects like Tornado Cash are facing immense regulatory pushback, but why not try and get something for free anyway?

Head to Iron Fish incentivized testnet page, sign up and log in. If you went through the holiday special when we deployed a contract, the following steps should be easy to follow. If you didn’t, no worries, it’s not too difficult. It will take you some time, but then it’s mostly hands-off.

The most taxing thing about this testnet is the requirement to run the node constantly. You can use a virtual server provider like Contabo to get a server for under ten bucks, though. 

I highly recommend making some tea and going through this tutorial while setting up your server in real-time. It will take you around 30 minutes.

Install the latest version of Node by pasting the following and pressing Enter:

“curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash” 

Then, close your virtual server’s terminal by typing “exit” (you may be required to do it more than once). Reconnect and paste “nvm install latest && nvm use 18 && npm i -g ironfish”. Everything should work without errors.

Paste “sudo apt install screen && screen -S new” and press Enter. Finally, type “ironfish start”, then press “CTRL + A + D”. You can now close your terminal with the virtual private server (type “exit”). The node will keep running as long as you pay for Contabo fees.

Running a node on its own won’t give you many points. Create a wallet using “ironfish wallet:create” and then “ironfish wallet:use YOUR_WALLET_NAME”. Finally, connect to your virtual server weekly and type the following commands:

  1. ironfish wallet:mint
  2. Ironfish wallet:send (use the recipient address: dfc2679369551e64e3950e06a88e68466e813c63b100283520045925adbe59ca)
  3. ironfish wallet:burn

These commands will take you less than five minutes a week and should give you 140 points each time—pretty good compared to the 10 points a week you get for running a node. Keep in mind that without running the node in the background, the commands won’t be counted.

That’s it for today. These two ideas are pretty time consuming, so I’ll stop there. Thank you for reading.