Whales have become active: Lighter and Mantle have shown record activity among large holders in six months.
Over the past week, the altcoin market has witnessed an event that cannot go unnoticed by a keen analyst. Two projects — Lighter (LIT) and Mantle (MNT) — have recorded a surge in large transactions, reaching their highest levels in the last six months. This is direct evidence that institutional players and large holders (so-called "whales") have begun to show increased interest in these assets.
According to on-chain analytics data, which I regularly monitor, 86 transactions worth over $100,000 each were recorded for the LIT token. This is an absolute six-month record. This surge coincided with a sharp rise in the LIT price: on Monday, the asset appreciated by more than 20%, reaching $2.6 — a high since January. Over the week, the increase amounted to about 37.9%.
The reason for this hype is obvious: the Lighter team has revised the project's tokenomics. Last month, a token burning mechanism was implemented, reducing the total supply of LIT, and a staking yield of 6% per annum was established from a pool of 250 million LIT. Whales have evidently assessed these changes as fundamentally positive.
A similar picture is observed in the Mantle ecosystem. On-chain metrics show 37 large transactions with MNT (also over $100,000), which is a six-month high. Whale interest here is fueled by the growth of the tokenized real-world assets (RWA) segment. In a recent report, Mantle reported historical highs: the total value locked in DeFi exceeded $1 billion, of which $90 million came from RWA solutions.
The market capitalization of stablecoins on the Mantle network reached a new all-time high, hitting $955 million (annual growth of 120%). The network currently supports 155 tokenized stocks and has a treasury of over $1.8 billion. However, the price of the MNT token itself remains dependent on the overall market conditions: it fell by 2% over the day to $0.431, although it showed a 1.4% increase over the week.
My expert conclusion: The activation of whales in Lighter and Mantle is not a coincidence, but a clear market signal. In the case of LIT, we see a reaction to a competent tokenomics update, and in the case of MNT, to the fundamental growth of the tokenized asset ecosystem. However, it is worth considering that the MNT price is still closely correlated with Bitcoin and overall market sentiment. If the bulls maintain the initiative, these projects could become leaders of the next rally in their niches.