Author: Nancy, PANews
Riding the wave of RWA and aggressive price manipulation, MANTRA once attracted significant investor attention. However, a shocking price collapse not only challenged MANTRA's price stability but also exposed its complex "dark history", triggering a trust crisis and governance test.
OM Plummets Nearly 90% Overnight, with Project Team, Exchanges, and Investors Offering Conflicting Explanations
The collapse of OM's billion-dollar market value is the result of a market storm woven by multiple factors.
On April 14 early morning, the MANTRA token OM experienced a sudden sharp decline. According to CoinGecko data, OM's price crashed 89.2% in the past 24 hours.
Regarding OM's flash crash, MANTRA officially explained that this chaos was not caused by team, MANTRA Chain Association, core advisors, or MANTRA investor token sales. The tokens remain locked and constrained by previously announced vesting periods, with token economics unchanged. They warned against clicking any fraudulent links or impersonating MANTRA accounts.
The official statement also noted that this event occurred during a low-liquidity period, potentially due to exchange negligence or market manipulation. The timing and depth of the crash suggest that account positions were suddenly closed without sufficient warning or notification, happening during a low-liquidity period on a Sunday night UTC (early morning in Asia), indicating potential CEX negligence or deliberate market positioning.
Binance confirmed in its statement that OM recently experienced significant price volatility, with initial investigations showing the crash was caused by "cross-exchange liquidation". Since October last year, multiple risk control measures, including reducing leverage levels, have been implemented for the OM token. Since January, Binance added a popup warning on its spot trading page, alerting users about significant adjustments to token economics and increased token supply. Binance stated it will continue to closely monitor the situation and take appropriate actions to protect users and maintain platform integrity.
OKX noted in its announcement that OM's token economic model has undergone significant changes since October 2024, and multiple similar on-chain addresses have conducted large deposits and withdrawals across exchanges since early March. Based on market risks, OKX has adjusted platform risk control parameters and warned users of increased market risks, with potential token supply changes leading to price fluctuations. A risk warning was added to the OM token page. OKX CEO Star stated that this is a major scandal for the entire crypto industry. All on-chain unlock and deposit data is public, and collateral and liquidation data from all major exchanges could be investigated. OKX is preparing all reports.
Although MANTRA blamed exchanges, on-chain data points to a more complex picture, raising community suspicions of potential insider selling and market manipulation.
According to Spot On Chain, 19 wallets previously tracked as potentially belonging to the same entity, created in March, transferred 14.27 million OM (approximately $91 million) to OKX in the three days before the OM crash, at an average price of $6.375. The Data Nerd monitored that in the past three days, 5 wallets deposited 24.4 million OM (approximately $143.94 million) into OKX. Four of these wallets followed the same pattern: withdrawing from Binance last month and then depositing into OKX; another belonged to Laser Digital. Lookonchain tracked that since April 7, at least 17 wallet addresses deposited a total of 43.6 million OM tokens (valued around $227 million at the time) to exchanges, representing 4.5% of circulating supply. Additionally, five hours before OM's price crash, a wallet dormant for a year transferred 2 million OM to a wallet seemingly belonging to Shane Shin, founder of MANTRA's investment institution Shorooq Partners. The wallet received 2 million OM at $12.58 million, now worth only $1.57 million.
However, MANTRA Chain strategic investor Laser Digital responded that Laser has no connection to OM's recent price drop. Social media claims about Laser being related to "investor selling" are false and misleading. Laser did not deposit any OM tokens to OKX, and the wallet mentioned as related to OKX is not Laser's wallet. Laser's core OM investment remains locked, with no interest in pressuring the token or destabilizing the project. Transparency is important.
Investment firm Shorooq Partners also issued a statement clarifying that the decline was not due to a hacker attack or team selling, but triggered by massive forced liquidation, subsequently causing panic selling during a low-liquidity period. Shorooq emphasized its unchanged position as a long-term equity investor and publicly shared relevant wallet addresses to demonstrate transparency.
With the project team, exchanges, and investors offering conflicting explanations, the deeper trigger for this crash might stem from MANTRA's recent token economic model adjustments. Recently, MANTRA announced that a previous community proposal would unify OM as the mainnet native token, abandoning the two-token strategy, which brought technical challenges. The team decided to abandon the original ERC-20 OM and establish OM on MANTRA Chain as the standard version. MANTRA also announced doubling OM supply from 888 million to 1.7777 billion, introducing a 3% annual inflation rate to incentivize staking. While aimed at supporting ecosystem growth, the significantly increased circulation and unlimited inflation mechanism were seen as undermining investor confidence.
Notably, despite OM's significant decline, large-scale token selling continues. Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) recently monitored MANTRA DAO staking wallets sending 38 million OM (approximately $26.96 million) to Binance cold wallets.
Early Controversy of Fraud, High Manipulation and Narrative Trap Behind Rapid Surge
MANTRA's predecessor was MANTRA DAO, established in 2020, initially focusing on staking, lending, and asset management services. However, MANTRA DAO was initially considered a scam riding on DeFi and Polkadot's popularity. According to previous reports by Wu Blockchain and Honeycomb Finance, MANTRA DAO's core team and advisors had suspicious backgrounds, including potential identity fraud and scam history. Founder Calvin Ng's background was highly controversial, with close ties to the online gambling website 21Pink. At the time, the project's technology and functionality were not yet implemented, but MANTRA DAO attracted investments through marketing and false partnership claims.
Moreover, MANTRA was embroiled in a litigation dispute due to internal conflicts. In early 2022, RioDeFi sued MANTRA DAO, alleging ownership, management, and asset misappropriation issues. RioDeFi claimed it established and developed MANTRA DAO in 2020, but the MANTRA DAO core team (including co-founder John Patrick Mullin and five others) stopped financial reporting after 2021, arbitrarily misappropriated assets, and controlled the project. MANTRA DAO argued that as a DAO, it was governed by OM token holders, not owned by RioDeFi. In August 2024, the Hong Kong High Court intervened, ordering key MANTRA DAO figures to disclose financial records and respond to asset misappropriation and unauthorized control allegations. This case became the world's first judicial review of DAO ownership and governance.
In 2022, MANTRA DAO officially rebranded to MANTRA, initiating brand restructuring, indicating an attempt to transform from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a broader blockchain ecosystem. Since 2024, MANTRA has gained attention for OM's aggressive price pumping. CoinGecko data shows that in 2024 alone, OM surged over 168.8 times. Defillama data indicates that OM's fully diluted valuation (FDV) peaked at $15.39 billion in March, now dramatically falling to $1.25 billion. However, in stark contrast to its high valuation, OM's total value locked (TVL) has remained low since 2023, maintaining only hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The high degree of token control by the project team and the RWA narrative hype are considered important reasons for OM's rise. On one hand, according to crypto analyst Mosi's recent disclosure, the MANTRA team holds 90% of the OM token's "circulation", with the real market circulation accounting for only 5% of the fully diluted valuation (FDV).
However, the highly controlled strategy has also planted a bomb of concentrated chips and fragile liquidity. According to Hashkey Capital member Rui's revelation, MANTRA is an OTC platform where the over-the-counter market has reached at least $500 million over two years, operating on a model of "new OTC tokens replacing old OTC sell-offs" until the final unlocked chips "remain OTC" and explode.
On the other hand, MANTRA has been active in the RWA track, releasing a series of positive signals, including establishing a $109 million ecosystem fund, collaborating with UAE's DAMAC Group to plan tokenizing $1 billion in assets, introducing Google as a validator and infrastructure provider to develop an RWA accelerator, and tokenizing Dubai's MAG Group's $500 million real estate assets.
The involvement of Middle Eastern capital was a turning point for MANTRA. According to ArkStream Capital Founding Partner Ye Su, in 2023, when the OM token's FDV dropped to $20 million and was nearly abandoned, a Middle Eastern capital intervened through a middleman, retaining only the CEO position. This Middle Eastern capital, owning numerous mansions and resorts, subsequently packaged OM as a real-world asset tokenization (RWAfi) project. Ye Su noted that under high token control, OM achieved the highest growth on Binance in 2024, realizing a 200-fold increase, with the team still promoting OTC market business recently.
Public information also shows that MANTRA's co-founders and CEO John Patrick Mullin, co-founder Jayant Ramanand, CTO Matthew Crooks, and other executives have all resigned. Additionally, financing backgrounds reveal that MANTRA announced in March 2024 a $11 million funding round 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 Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (MENAP) region. After announcing Shorooq Partners' investment, MANTRA launched an incubator at the Dubai World Trade Center, focusing on RWA tokenization projects in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Overall, multiple factors including unresolved early controversies, highly controlled token economics, behind-the-scenes capital manipulation, and the RWA narrative hype collectively constitute the multiple footnotes of this tragic collapse.
