What Happened to MANTRA?
With the tailwind of RWA and violent market manipulation, MANTRA once attracted significant attention from investors. However, a dramatic price collapse not only posed challenges of price volatility for MANTRA but also exposed its complex “black history,” leading to a crisis of trust and governance challenges.
OM Plummets Nearly 90% Overnight; Conflicting Accounts from Project Team, Exchanges, and Investors
The collapse of OM’s market capitalization worth tens of billions was triggered by a storm of intertwined factors. In the early hours of April 14, the price of the MANTRA token OM suddenly dropped sharply. According to CoinGecko data, the price of OM plummeted by 89.2% within the past 24 hours.
In response to OM’s flash crash, the MANTRA official explained that the chaos was not caused by the team, the MANTRA Chain Association, core advisors, or MANTRA investors dumping tokens, as the tokens remain locked and are subject to the announced vesting period, with token economics unchanged. They cautioned against clicking on any fraudulent links or impersonated MANTRA accounts. Furthermore, the official noted that the incident occurred during a period of low liquidity and may have been due to negligence from the exchange or market manipulation. The timing and depth of the crash indicated that account positions were suddenly closed without sufficient warning or notification; this occurred during a low liquidity period on Sunday night UTC (early morning Asian time), suggesting some negligence from CEX or possibly intentional market positioning.
Binance confirmed in its statement that OM had experienced significant price volatility recently, and preliminary investigations indicated that this was triggered by “cross-exchange liquidation.” Since last October, multiple risk control measures have been implemented for OM, including reducing leverage levels. Since January this year, Binance has added a pop-up warning on its spot trading page for OM, reminding users that substantial adjustments had been made to its token economics, increasing the token supply. Binance stated it would continue to monitor the situation closely and take appropriate actions to protect users and maintain market integrity.
OKX also noted in its announcement that significant changes had occurred in OM’s token economics model since October 2024, and that multiple on-chain addresses with similar operations had made large deposits and withdrawals at various exchanges since early March. Given the market risks, OKX has adjusted its risk control parameters and warned users that recent market risks are high, and changes in some token supplies may lead to price volatility. A risk warning has been added to the OM token page. Meanwhile, OKX CEO Star stated that this is a significant scandal for the entire crypto industry. All on-chain unlocking and deposit data has been made public, and collateral and liquidation data from all major exchanges may be investigated. OKX will prepare all reports.
Although MANTRA has attributed the responsibility to the exchanges, on-chain data points to a more complex picture, raising community concerns over potential internal selling and market manipulation.
According to Spot On Chain monitoring, 19 wallets suspected of belonging to the same entity, which were created in March, transferred 14.27 million OM (approximately $91 million) to OKX at an average price of $6.375 within three days before the OM crash. Meanwhile, The Data Nerd reported that in the past three days, five wallets had deposited a total of 24.4 million OM (approximately $143.94 million) into OKX. Among them, four wallets followed the same operational pattern: withdrawing from Binance last month and then depositing into OKX; the other belonged to Laser Digital.
Additionally, Lookonchain has monitored that since April 7, at least 17 wallet addresses have deposited a total of 43.6 million OM tokens (worth approximately $227 million at that time) into exchanges, accounting for 4.5% of the circulating supply. Simultaneously, five hours before the OM token crashed, a wallet that had been dormant for a year transferred 2 million OM to Shane Shin, founding partner of the investment institution Shorooq Partners, which is suspected to be affiliated with MANTRA. This wallet received 2 million OM at a price of $12.58 million, but its current value has plummeted to just $1.57 million.
However, Laser Digital, a strategic investor in the MANTRA Chain project, responded that there is no connection between Laser and the recent price drop of OM. Claims on social media linking Laser to “investor selling” are incorrect and misleading. Laser has not deposited any OM tokens into OKX, and the mentioned wallets related to OKX do not belong to Laser. Laser’s core OM investments remain locked, and there is no interest in putting pressure on the tokens or undermining the project’s stability. Transparency is vital.
The investment institution Shorooq Partners also issued a statement clarifying that the drop was not due to hacking or team selling but was triggered by large-scale forced liquidations, which subsequently led to panic selling during low liquidity periods. Shorooq emphasized that its position as a long-term equity investor has not changed and publicly disclosed the relevant wallet addresses to demonstrate transparency.
The project team, exchanges, and investors are each maintaining their positions. The deeper trigger for this crash may stem from MANTRA’s recent adjustments to its token economics model. Recently, an announcement from MANTRA indicated that a community proposal would unify OM as a native token of the mainnet, abolishing the dual-token strategy, but this also brought technical challenges. Consequently, the team decided to discard the original ERC-20 OM and establish OM on the MANTRA Chain as the standard version. Simultaneously, MANTRA announced that the supply of OM would be doubled from 888 million to 1.777 billion and introduced a 3% annual inflation rate to incentivize staking. Although this move aimed to support ecological growth, the significantly increased circulating supply and unlimited inflation mechanism were seen as undermining investor confidence.
It is worth mentioning that despite the significant drop in OM, large-scale token sales continue. Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) recently monitored that the MANTRA DAO staking wallet sent 38 million OM (approximately $26.96 million) to Binance’s cold wallet.
Early Scam Controversy and the Risks of High Control and Narrative Traps Behind the Surge
MANTRA’s predecessor was MANTRA DAO, established in 2020, initially focusing on staking, lending, and asset management services. However, MANTRA DAO was considered a scam under the guise of popular labels like DeFi and Polkadot in its early days. According to reports from Wu Says Blockchain and Hive Finance, the core team and advisors of Mantra DAO had questionable backgrounds, including identity fraud and even a history of scams, with significant controversy surrounding founder Calvin Ng’s connections to the online ### website 21Pink. At that time, the project itself had not yet realized its technology and functions, but Mantra DAO relied on marketing strategies and false partnerships to attract investments.
Moreover, MANTRA had also faced legal turmoil due to internal disputes. In early 2022, RioDeFi filed a lawsuit against MANTRA DAO, accusing it of issues related to ownership, management rights, and asset misappropriation. RioDeFi claimed that it founded and developed MANTRA DAO in 2020, but the core team of MANTRA DAO (including co-founder John Patrick Mullin and others) stopped financial reporting after 2021, misappropriating assets and controlling the project without authorization. MANTRA DAO contended that, as a DAO, it was governed by OM token holders, rather than being owned by RioDeFi. In August 2024, the Hong Kong High Court intervened, ordering key figures of MANTRA DAO to disclose financial records in response to accusations of asset misappropriation and unauthorized control. This case became the world’s first judicial review of DAO ownership and governance.
In 2022, MANTRA DAO announced its official rebranding to MANTRA, initiating a brand restructuring, indicating its attempt to transition from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a broader blockchain ecosystem. Since 2024, MANTRA has also gained attention due to OM’s strong price surge. CoinGecko data shows that in 2024 alone, OM soared by over 168.8 times. Meanwhile, DeFiLlama data indicated that OM’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) once reached $15.39 billion in March this year, but has since dramatically fallen to $1.25 billion. However, in stark contrast to its high valuation, OM’s total locked value (TVL) has remained low since 2023, only maintaining at a few hundred thousand dollars.
The project’s high control and the narrative hype surrounding RWA are considered significant reasons behind OM’s rise. On one hand, according to crypto analyst Mosi, the MANTRA team holds 90% of the “circulating supply” of OM tokens, with the actual market circulation accounting for only 5% of the fully diluted valuation (FDV). However, the high control strategy also laid the groundwork for concentrated chips and weak liquidity. According to HashKey Capital member Rui, MANTRA operates as an OTC platform, with the off-exchange trading reaching at least $500 million over two years, employing a model of “new OTC tokens absorbing old OTC sell-offs,” until the final unlocked tokens “OTC remain inactive” burst.
On the other hand, MANTRA has frequently made moves in the RWA arena, releasing a series of positive signals, including establishing a $109 million ecosystem fund, collaborating with the UAE’s DAMAC Group to tokenize $1 billion in assets, introducing Google as a validator and infrastructure provider to launch an RWA accelerator, and tokenizing Dubai’s MAG Group’s $500 million real estate assets.
The involvement of Middle Eastern capital marked a turning point in MANTRA’s development. According to ArkStream Capital Founding Partner Ye Su, in 2023, when OM’s FDV dropped to $20 million and was nearly abandoned, an intermediary facilitated a Middle Eastern capital acquisition, retaining only the CEO position. This Middle Eastern capital possesses numerous luxury homes, resorts, and other physical assets, subsequently packaging OM as a real asset tokenization (RWAfi) project. Ye Su stated that under high control, OM achieved the highest price increase on Binance in 2024, realizing a 200-fold growth, and the team is still promoting OTC business.
Public data also shows that MANTRA co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin, co-founder Jayant Ramanand, CTO Matthew Crooks, and other senior executives have all left the company. Furthermore, financing backgrounds indicate that in March 2024, MANTRA announced it had secured $11 million in funding led by Shorooq Partners. Shorooq Partners is a leading venture capital and alternative investment management company based in Abu Dhabi, focusing on tech startups in the MENAP region (Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan). After announcing the investment from Shorooq Partners, MANTRA launched an incubator at the Dubai World Trade Center, focusing on RWA tokenization projects in the Middle East and North Africa.
Overall, the unresolved shadows of early controversies, the highly controlled token economics, the behind-the-scenes manipulation of capital, and the momentum driven by the RWA narrative have collectively contributed to the multiple annotations of this crash tragedy.
This article is a collaborative reprint from: PANews