Mantle to target Asia first with ‘onchain neobank’ UR

In one of the latest attempts to provide an everyday financial product powered by blockchain technology, Mantle is launching what it calls an “onchain neobank” — and it’s targeting Asia as its first market.

Dubbed UR, it will offer a bank-like experience and a debit card using Swiss multi-currency accounts and the Mantle Network, a so-called layer 2 blockchain built atop Ethereum.

Tim Chen, global head of strategy at Mantle, likened UR to “Revolut on the front-end and DeFi abstracted away on the back-end.”

“Everyone’s trying to find product market fit, and real-world use cases onchain,” Chen told DL News.

“You need to find net new capital, net new users, and to do that, you need to build products that these users are familiar with and comfortable with. … You’re not going to onboard your parents by telling them to sign up for a brokerage account, much less figure out how to do Metamask.

But if you tell them, ‘It’s neobanking,’ people get it.”

Mantle is entering a crowded market in which scores of companies are attempting to meld traditional financial services with crypto, and the outsize yield it offers.

Several crypto-first firms now offer credit or debit cards, including Ether.Fi, Gnosis, and Coinbase.

And fintechs with large, established user bases are muscling into crypto. On Monday, retail trading platform Robinhood said it would launch its own blockchain.

Chen said few if any of these companies offer a bank-like experience in which customers can receive their salary, convert it to crypto, and then spend that crypto as they go about their daily lives, all in one application.

While stablecoins give people an alternative to their own, often volatile currencies, getting them and using them is often difficult.

“You can save, but you can’t spend, because when you take that money off of a wallet, you have to go through brokerages, which oftentimes in these countries are banned,” he said.

“The ultimate experience that we want to achieve as a core loop is a world where anyone can sign up for an account, ultimately get your salary in fiat deposited to your account, and easily be able to trade out of it, easily be able to earn stablecoin yield.”

Mantle began as BitDAO, a cooperative investment firm backed by venture capital firm Founders Fund and crypto exchange Bybit, among others. It eventually pivoted to building its own technology, including the Mantle Network blockchain; a so-called liquid staking token, mETH; a crypto index fund; and now UR.

UR is expected to debut in late July. Crypto transactions on UR will settle on Mantle Network. In order to offer a more familiar, bank-like experience, it uses Swiss multi-currency accounts.

The idea for UR came out of Mantle’s attempt to study how the non-crypto-curious could be convinced to use crypto-based products, Chen said.

As part of that study, it saw the greatest opportunity was in “non-dollarized countries,” according to Chen.

“These countries see saving stablecoins as a Godsend, because [their] currency is not as strong. What we found with Western users, especially Americans, we care about rewards, yield.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.