Ethereum’s most widely used modular layer-2 blockchain, Mantle Network, is on a wave as its native token, MNT, hit a new all-time high of $1.93 with the release of its much-anticipated mainnet upgrade using OP Succinct.

The update, solidifying Mantle as the largest zero-knowledge (ZK) L2 by total value locked (TVL) at more than $2.5 billion, coincides with the conclusion of Booster Season 3, giving out an incredible 100M in MNT rewards to stakers and ecosystem participants.

At 1.88 as the markets stabilise this morning, down 8.2% over the past 24 hours, the market cap of MNT has swelled to the point that it becomes the 25th largest cryptocurrency, and presents an indication that the month of May will be the month of a layer-2 breakout.

Introduced in 2023 as a solution to the scalability issues of Ethereum, Mantle has developed into a liquidity-oriented chain administered by its community of token holders and with a strong treasury.

The OP Succinct integration is a new type of ZK proofs with faster, cheaper transactions, without compromising the security of Ethereum. It is more than mere technical voodoo; it represents a strategic shift to the real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation and DeFi composability that will attract giants such as the ecosystem of BitDAO and collaboration with Bybit to provide an easy liquidity ramp.

OP Succinct Upgrade: Go to New Heights with ZK

The upgrade, which was deployed on September 29, uses OP Succinct technology of zkEVM to reduce finality time to less than 100 milliseconds, and to triple throughput to 10,000 TPS – a 5x improvement over previous targets. Native ZK rollups can now be used to bridge assets such as staked ETH and RWAs with ease, without the gas wars endangering the base layer of Ethereum.

Mantle Foundation CEO Ben Zhou, in an exclusive interview, said that Mantle is redefining L2 efficiency. And with OP Succinct, we not only go faster, but we are also future-proof. It unlocks $10 billion in potential TVL by enabling RWAs and AI-assisted dApps, and in the process, achieves costs less than 1/10th the price of a transaction.

Initial post-upgrade statistics indicate that after the upgrade, there was a 30% jump in daily active users (DAUs) to 1.2 million, with TVL inflows being made by the protocols such as Mantle LSP (liquid staking), topped at $800 million.

This is based on the modular architecture of Mantle, in which the Mantle Treasury, which receives funding based on sequencer fees and MEV, allocates resources through on-chain votes.

Proposals for new governance in recent years have garnered $50 million in RWA pilots, comprising tokenised treasuries with conventional finance giants. The upgrade also increases cross-chain liquidity hubs such as Cosmos and Polkadot through IBC bridges and makes Mantle a more cross-chain liquidity hub.

Risks of centralisation of L2 have been an old concern, but Mantle, with permissionless sequencer and ZK validity proofs, is the one to face these directly. An after-upgrade audit by companies such as PeckShield assures that there have been no vulnerabilities, which increases institutional confidence.

Booster Season 3 Wraps: $100M Rewards Ignite Fire

It couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment: With the upgrade being activated, Booster Season 3 will be drawing to a close, opening up locked MNT spots and rewarding tiers according to how the stakes are held.

All circulating MNT tokens are eligible to qualify, and short-term lockers (30 days) will receive 5% APY, and long-haul (300+ days) holders will receive 20% yields, amounting to 100 million dollars in total payouts.

Community buzz is electric. On X, the trend of MNTATH among users who celebrate ecosystem tokens such as $APEX and $MOE grew by 50% and 40% respectively, which has increased the same with MNT.

The incorporation of Bybit into Launchpool increased the mania with MNT stakers having the opportunity to earn a 3x leverage to earn $FF tokens, attracting 500,000 additional wallets – a 1,400% growth spurt since August.

A viral tweet by one analyst of Defi stated: Mantle is not hype but execution. L2 dominance unlocked by $100M ( + ZK upgrade) implies $MNT to $2.50 by Halloween. Farming also leads the flood forums, adding Reward Station locks to compounded returns, and unlocks in January 2026, no matter the original conditions.

This tokenomics reward system highlights the tokenomics of Mantle: MNT powers control governance, staking, and entry burns through treasury initiatives. Raised participation by Season 2 – Season 3 performance – clues to the long-term velocity, where users recycle rewards into dApps like Mantle Vaults in order to maximise yield.

Market Reaction: MNT Bullish Breakout of Altcoin Volatility

The ATH of MNT on September 30 was 120 per cent monthly, beating its competitors such as Optimism (15 per cent) and Arbitrum (0). It had a volume of 707 million within 24 hours according to exchange data, and open interest on futures totalled 300 million – an indicator of leveraged gambling coming in.

Momentum is screaming technicians: The token has broken its resistance at $1.91, its RSI stands at 68 (bullish, but not overbought), and its 4-hour chart shows a golden cross. CoinMarketCap analysts suggest that October is a potential breakout, and Ethereum is likely to reach $2.20 given a $3,000 price. Falling to 1.75 is solidly supported by the 50-day EMA, and whales – 10 million MNT scooped last week – are making people optimistic.

Contextually, MNT is aromatic on a turbulent market: the Bitcoin plummets 2 per cent to 62,500 on Fed rate anxiety, but L2 stories are spurred by meme to utility. Base and other peers can look at outflows, and Mantle ZK advantage and treasury support attracted 200 million in new capital in the last quarter.

Greater Implications: Mantle as L2 Liquidity King

The upgrade and rewards spurt comes with layer-2s taking up 40 per cent of Ethereum activity. Liquidity – Mantle has focused on liquidity through its treasury of $ 3.5 billion, providing grants to over 50 dApps, including DEXs such as Kyber and NFT platforms.

RWA integration is a big deal: By Q4, Pilots who tokenise assets with BlackRock-inspired funds could have tokenised $500 million in assets with TradFi yields and DeFi composability.

To developers, OP Succinct reduces barriers: ZK apps now come with AI oracles for predictive trading, with an eye on Web3 gaming and socialFi booms. The sub-cent charge and instant finals give an advantage to the users, undermining the dominance of base layers.

Issues abound: The cost of ZK compute is still expensive, and zkSync is competing intensely. The RWA regulatory nods may speed things up, yet the SEC has yet to provide clarity.

Mantle Horizon in 2025 to $2 and Beyond

With October more than a month away, Mantle lenses on Season 4 increase, and a JAM-type scalability drive. As the wallet growth and ATH stacked to 1400%, MNT represents L2 maturity – utility over speculation.

It is summed up by Zhou: we are creating the liquidity chain of the future. As an investor, it is a bet on the scaling wars of Ethereum, with Mantle being the first. Keep an eye on Bybit expansions and RWA unveils; this has the potential to trigger a $10 billion cap by the end of the year. Mantle is sprinting in the marathon of crypto.

The Polkadot ecosystem is buzzing as the community votes on a radical Polkadot-native proposal for pUSD, a native algorithmic stablecoin which is fully backed by DOT tokens, and is rocketing towards possible approval.

The program, announced by Acala co-founder and CTO Bryan Chen only a few days ago, and described in RFC-155, has already received over 75% support in preliminary votes, with over $5.6 million of DOT bet in support.

With the governance referendum underway on the network, the price of DOT is stable at 3.92, rising 1.8 per cent during the past 24 hours due to increased trading volume. This move would potentially become one of the most significant changes to the Polkadot-based DeFi ecosystem, as it would eliminate the liquidity shortage issues that had troubled the sector, as well as the reliance on external stablecoins such as USDT and USDC.

The interoperable layer-0 blockchain Polkadot, which was started by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, has long identified itself as a cross-chain innovation hub. The network still continues to grow with a total value locked (TVL) of more than 250 million and more than 50 parachains online.

The pUSD proposal comes at a pivotal point, after September saw approval of a 2.1 billion DOT hard cap by referendum 1710, which easily passed with 81 per cent. Analysts believe that this move towards stablecoins is the next logical step in the tokenomics restructuring of Polkadot, which could unlock billions of dollars of on-chain economic activity by the end of the year.

Unpacking the pUSD Proposal: A DOT-Backed Path to DeFi Liquidity

In its most basic form, pUSD is a stablecoin in the form of an overcollateralized debt position (CDP), where users can use DOT to secure collateral to mint pUSD at a 1-to-1 ratio to the U.S. dollar.

It would be created on the Honzon protocol stack – tested in the battlefield of the Acala ecosystem – and deployed on the Polkadot Asset Hub, which would ensure interoperability across parachains. Users were able to borrow pUSD without selling their DOT and retain upside exposure, but receive stable liquidity to borrow, trade, and yield farm.

The logic behind this idea by Chen is simple: the native DOT-supported stablecoin is necessary since the people need it; otherwise, we will bleed benefits, liquidity, and security.

The proposal imagines that pUSD is the asset of choice when paying treasury, as a validator, and converting to OpenGov, and over time, the need to rely on centralised stablecoins is removed.

In the long run, it may even replace DOT inflation as a method to stake incentives, providing predictable payments to the validators, and creating a more predictable economic framework.

This is similar to the vision by Wood of a DOT-collateralised stablecoin of September 10, which focuses on self-sufficiency in the ecosystem. Limiting collateral to DOT only prevents the risk of diversification, but poses a special connection to the native token of Polkadot – a two-sided sword that may enhance the utility of DOT at the cost of exposure to volatility.

The details of implementation will include strong risk parameters: Minimum 150% collateralization rates, automatic liquidation on undercollateralized accounts, oracle feeds of trusted sources such as Chainlink.

The Polkadot Treasury would inject liquidity at the beginning, and governance controls would dynamically adjust the fees and caps. With its approval, it might become possible to deploy within weeks, making pUSD one of the foundations of parachain auctions and cross-chain bridges.

Community Vote Heats Up Amid Acala Shadow and Terra Echoes

The live referendum, which has been active since September 29, must have an 80.4% supermajority to be passed. Voting is open until October 6. Because of heavy stakes for the rich and the poor in the ecosystem, as of this morning, 74.62% of respondents are supporting it. Cautious optimism is manifested in social sentiment on such platforms as X.

Posts emphasise the fact that pUSD has the potential to accelerate DeFi TVL, which is already trailing other competitors, such as Ethereum ($50 billion) and Solana (4 billion). One tweet stated, jokingly, that pUSD was not stable; it was Polkadot’s ticket to DeFi hegemony, where we were to avoid the aUSD ghosts.

Yet, controversy simmers. The aUSD disaster in 2022 is highlighted by critics, who note that a $1.3 billion stablecoin imploded in the market due to a US dollar crisis, wiping out users’ funds and eroding credibility. The revival of Honzon has led to demands that it break with Acala and some calls that the Technical Council should directly govern itself.

And with these commitments, I would vote AYE. In their absence, the danger of making the same errors again is too large,” one of the council posted. Others are referring to the UST breakdown at Terra, whereby a DOT-only support might spill over risks in bear markets.

Supporters respond that the experience of aUSD has strengthened the protocol: Enhanced liquidation engines, diversified oracles and circuit breakers make the systemic threat less critical.

Another major Polkadot runtime, hydration, has even suggested an alternative Polkadot-appchain-optimised stablecoin, but the native-focus of pUSD has continued to place it ahead of competitors.

The speech planned by Gavin Wood on October 1 may influence the change of minds of the undecided voters since it is rumoured that he will support the proposal and discuss the safeguards.

Market Reaction: DOT Price Steady as Investors Weigh Risks and Rewards

The day opened with DOT 3.92 up a slight percentage of 0.1 per cent from yesterday, with a close of 3.85, with a 24-hour volume of 180, high with 22 per cent. The token market cap is 5.8 billion, which has placed it among the 15 leading cryptocurrencies.

Technicals are bullish: The 50-day moving average is trending in an upward direction, and the RSI of 52 implies neutral momentum that is in a breakout stage.

Further forecasts on prices in October differ: Optimists look at 4.50 in the event of pUSD passing with more staking demand and DeFi inflows. Pessimists, however, put a lower limit at $3.60 in the event of a vote loss and cite parallels with post-aUSD fallout.

Overall, DOT is doing better than its peers such as Cardano (flat), and Cosmos (down 0.5%), where utility-driven projects are favoured in altcoin rotation. The trading above 62,000 is viewed as tailwaters by Bitcoin, and pUSD hype has been associated with a 20% quarterly gain by analysts.

Institutional interest has increased: Inquiries about DOT-collateralised products doubled, according to exchange data. In case of pUSD launch, it would draw the attention of 500 million TVL initially, according to the model of the ecosystem, competing with Aave Polkadot deployments.

Broader Implications: Reshaping Polkadot’s DeFi and Interoperability Edge

In addition to liquidity, pUSD will be able to drive the Polkadot parachain renaissance. The network is lagging behind its competition with less than $100 million in assets of stablecoins in play today, according to DeFi Llama.

Native stablecoin would simplify cross-chain swaps through XCM, enhance yield protocols on Moonbeam and Astar and permit RWA tokenisation pilots. Visualise tokenised treasuries being paid in pUSD, or NFT marketplaces being ramped to fiat.

This aligns with the roadmap of Polkadot in 2025: a scalability upgrade by JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) and developing sovereign rollups. The proposal increases network effects, as DOTholders will gain without dilution when the stablecoin mechanics are tied to DOT, as the network grows.

It is a global trend: Chains such as Cosmos and Near are looking into native stables, yet Polkadot governance is a different approach, one that directly empowers the token holders.

Curtains are casting their dark, such as regulatory oversight of algorithmic designs after Terra. However, as an overcollateralized on-chain asset, pUSD will put Polkadot at the centre of a compliant DeFi ecosystem at a time when the U.S and EU are tightening control.

Charting Polkadot’s Future: Will pUSD Ignite the Next Bull Run?

Polkadot is at a crossroads as the clock of the vote runs out. With the approval, DOT may surge to $5 in Q4 and open the unexplored potential of DeFi to the throne of interoperability. The rejection will postpone developments but will trigger improved options, such as the vision of Hydration.

The next big thing in ecosystems: Polkadot Decoded will feature pUSD integrations in October, and parachain auctions will also resume with incentives on stablecoins. To investors, it is a high conviction bet on the infrastructure layer of Web3 – where utility outweighs hype.

Finally, pUSD is not about stability; it is about sovereignty. Polkadot, as Wood frequently tells us, constructs bridges between chains – and now, perhaps, a stalemate below them all. As the community is mobilised, the month of October 2025 will have the potential to redefine the route of DOT.

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2025 – Cronos, a layer-1 blockchain, the cryptocurrency blockchain operating as the backbone of the Crypto.com ecosystem, is signing a strategic partnership agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The partnership, announced late last night, will likely accelerate the institutional tokenisation activities, real-world asset (RWA) integration, and AI-based innovations of decentralised finance (DeFi).

As markets open on this autumn morning, the native Cronos token, CRO, is trading flat, in more volatile markets, at about $0.199 – a minor 0.2% down-step to yesterday’s close. There is buzz among investors as to what this partnership would do to the future of blockchain scalability and mainstream integration in finance.

This is an opportune time for Cronos, which has been steadily gaining momentum since its rebranding and upgrades in recent years. With a user base exceeding 20 million on the Crypto.com platform and a thriving ecosystem of DeFi protocols, NFTs, and gaming dApps, Cronos is no stranger to high-profile integrations.

The AWS partnership, however, takes its ambitions to the next level, as it is a direct partnership with one of the most popular cloud infrastructure providers in the world. Analysts posit this may speed up Cronos on its way to managing billions in tokenised assets, which is where the mainstream finance and the decentralised frontier meet.

Partnering with AWS: Changing the World of Infrastructure Tokenisation

The core of the announcement is the discussion of the optimisation of asset tokenisation – the transformation of real-world assets such as real estate, commodities, or securities into digital tokens on the blockchain.

Cronos and AWS are working together in order to make on-chain transaction data easily available via the Public Blockchain Data service of AWS. This integration enables the institutions to query and describe the use of the Cronos network and promotes trust and efficiency in the tokenisation processes.

Mirko Zhao, the Head of Cronos Labs, said that there was a transformative potential in the statement: The next growth cycle will be characterised by tokenisation and real-world assets.

Cronos is the only distributed project with a liquidity pegged to CRO and a roadmap that links tokenisation and AI to become a single interoperable ecosystem. In addition to AWS, building provides institutions with a secure, high-performing, go-between to modernise traditional and decentralised finance.

The partnership builds upon the earlier partnership between Cronos and Google Cloud that occurred in late 2024, which increased its AI capabilities. Today, when AWS has a large pool of resources, new developers can use advanced systems to develop RWA platforms, sophisticated DeFi protocols, and AI-built applications.

Early adopters will benefit a lot: Selected startups will get up to 100,000 AWS Activate credits to scale pilot projects. This innovation incentive program is meant to reduce the innovation barriers and attract more builders into the Cronos ecosystem.

The advantages are also equally compelling to institutions that are considering entering blockchain. Improved access to data implies quicker validation of compliance, a decrease in the costs of operations, and the strengthening of security measures.

This structure makes Cronos a regulatory-compliant enterprise-ready chain – a rarity among EVM-compatible blockchains – in an age where regulators are increasingly taking a more critical look at such systems.

Aligning with Cronos’ Ambitious 2025-2026 Roadmap

This AWS transaction is not a one-off event but a part of the long-term policy of Cronos. The 2025-2026 roadmap of the blockchain has ambitious goals: the implementation of 10 billion tokenised assets and the acquisition of 20 million users worldwide.

The centre of attention is given to tokenisation and an intention to implement AI on predictive analytics in DeFi lending, automated yield farming, and risk measurement in the RWA markets.

Cronos has already taken the steps in this direction. During the last three months, its overall value locked (TVL) in DeFi networks increased by 15 per cent to $450 million, and its RWA deployments on the chain increased by 25 per cent.

The AWS team acts as a rocket fuel to these measurements as it will offer scalable cloud infrastructure that can support enterprise-grade volumes of transactions. Think of tokenised bonds or carbon credits streaming off desks at Wall Street to blockchain wallets; that is what Cronos is pursuing.

Furthermore, the partnership is also applied to the area of AI integration, where machine learning services provided by AWS may be used to develop smart contracts that will evolve in real-time in response to market conditions.

This combination of blockchain immutability and cloud computing elasticity has the potential to make Cronos stand out among other competitors in the blockchain space, such as Polygon or Avalanche, which have their own cloud commitments but lack the large base of Crypto.com users.

Market Response: CRO Shares Remain Steady in Wider Market Decline

When the news reached on September 30, a buzz filled social media. On X (previously Twitter), hashtags such as CronosAWS and RWATokenization were popular amongst crypto fans, with posts noting how the partnership could result in a 10-billion-RWA project. A well-known blockchain analyst tweeted, Cronos data now going through AWS – this is enterprise adoption on steroids. $CRO to the moon?

However, there has been a dampened reaction in the market. CRO began the day at $0.199, a slight decline from the previous day’s trading price of $0.200. This comes after a turbulent month of September, during which the token fluctuated between a range of $0.15 and $0.22 amid global economic panic, including in the U.S.

Signals by the Federal Reserve on interest rates. Technical indicators are also quite ambivalent: The Relative Strength Index (RSI) is at 39, which is a bearish momentum with an almost oversold sign, which may trigger the recovery.

The volume of trade jumped 12 per cent overnight to $85 million, and that is a sign of greater interest, though the market cap of CRO stands at 6.75 billion to start with, which is in the top 25 cryptocurrencies.

The outlook for the month is promising: Analysts predict that Bitcoin may go as high as $0.21 by mid-October in case it manages to stabilise at a price of more than $65,000. Farther out, as the milestones on the roadmap come into view, some believe that CRO will reach $0.30 at year-end, supported by RWA inflows.

Comparatively, other peers, such as BNB and Solana, have gained by slightly more than 0.5 and 1.2 per cent today, respectively, as the altcoin mood improves. The resilience of Cronos is an indication of its utility-oriented nature; being a utility token on the exchange, a staking reward, and chain fees of the Crypto.com platform, CRO is a stable, organic demand token.

Further Ways RWA and DeFi Can Impact 2025

The Cronos-AWS synergy emerges at a time when RWA tokenisation is gaining momentum. Last month, BlackRock reached its tokenised fund asset under management target of $500 million, and the JPMorgan Onyx platform ran blockchain transactions totalling up to $1 billion. Cronos joins this fray with a gullible, high-throughput chain – which can scale to 2,000 TPS – and currently AWS-supported scalability.

In the case of DeFi, AI enhancements may significantly improve user experiences. Imagine an algorithm that gets the best result across cross-chain swaps or finds fraud in milliseconds. This is not pie-in-the-sky; pilot programs are already being run, and Cronos Labs is soliciting grants on AWS-integrated dApps.

Difficulties are unavoidable, of course. Regulatory obstacles to tokenised securities are massive, and non-EVM chains are yet to be interoperable. Nonetheless, the collaboration solves these with the focus on data privacy and modular architecture.

Looking Forward: Cronos on the Road to Dominate Mainstream

With October in progress, much attention is given to Cronos to record practical victories from this AWS alliance. There are new events, including a developer hackathon devoted to RWA prototypes and a Crypto.com summit with the unveiling of AI-DeFi demos in mid-month. When done correctly, these would trigger a CRO stampede and attract institutional capital that is desperate enough to buy yield-producing assets.

Cronos revitalised is mature in a crypto world marked by hype and hardware, as its approach is quite methodical, by partnering with the likes of AWS. To investors, it is a bet against memes and in favour of actual utility.

This is not only about blockchains, it is about building bridges, as Zhao put it. Cronos is making an early claim with the value of tokenised assets expected to grow as high as $16 trillion by 2030.

Keep watching this story unfold, in the highly changeable environment of crypto, what is today a partnership might become a trillion-dollar fad tomorrow.