Written by: shushu
In the early morning, the RWA sector project MANTRA (OM) fell 90% in a short period of time, from $6 to $0.5, and its market value evaporated by more than $5.5 billion.
Three hours later, the MANTRA team issued a statement saying that the decline was caused by irrational liquidation and had nothing to do with the project itself, and that it was not the team's fault.
Subsequently, OM rose from around $0.5 to $1.2, and was briefly shorted. According to Coinglass data, in just four hours, the OM contract liquidation volume reached $58 million.
Before this plunge, OM had gone through several violent pull-ups since November last year, and was called a "strong monster coin" by the community.
Recently, the community and multiple data detection tool websites have announced that OM's big account addresses have withdrawn coins and transferred them to trading platforms. There are also rumors that OM has completed several over-the-counter transactions with discounts of 50% or more. When big accounts start dumping, over-the-counter buyers will also panic and sell.
On March 25, according to TheDataNerd monitoring, the address of MANTRA's investment institution Laser DIgital deposited 1.7 million OMs to Binance, worth $11.49 million. Last year, the wallet accumulated a total of 27 million OMs and currently holds 6.756 million OMs, worth $45.67 million.
Yesterday, according to Arkham monitoring, the 0xA8...A84f address took out 776,000 OMs from Polygon's StakedOM contract, worth about $5.84 million.
According to Genç Trader monitoring, the wallet address 0x9a…1a28 transferred about $20 million of OM to OKX 23 hours ago. According to past records, this address withdrew about $40 million of OM from Binance a month ago and was one of the whales that pushed up the price of the coin before.
The direct cause of the plunge is believed to be the dumping of OM by several large OM holders, but in the community's view, perhaps all this was premeditated.
Last November, MANTRA officially announced its airdrop rules, stating that the previous "3-month cliff period, followed by initial liquidity allocation and 9-month linear unlocking" would be changed to "shortening the cliff period to 1 month, followed by 11 months of linear unlocking", which caused strong dissatisfaction in the community.
In the early stage, MANTRA stimulated user participation enthusiasm through high-profile expectation management, announcing that it would distribute 50 million OM tokens and promised to unlock 20% as soon as it went online, and the airdrop would be completed within one month.
However, in actual implementation, MANTRA has successively modified the airdrop rules, first changing "unlocking as soon as it goes online" to "linear release after one month", and then further postponed it to "10% first-phase release, and the rest of the vesting period is up to three years". At the same time, in conjunction with changes in multiple mechanisms such as the roadmap and token distribution structure, MANTRA has essentially turned community traffic into a long-term lock-up tool by continuously extending the cashing cycle.
When user sentiment rebounds, the project party introduces a governance voting mechanism to transfer responsibility in the form of "community consensus", but in actual operation, the voting rights are concentrated in the hands of the project team or related parties, and the results are highly controllable. Finally, some early participants were excluded from the airdrop list, and the project party froze their rights and interests on the grounds of "Sybil attack" without disclosing detailed basis.
The reason why OM has been rising continuously in the past six months is the high degree of control of its team. According to KOL@nihaovand, it is usually combined with three waves of buying communities in different price ranges to enter the market in turn to jointly push up the token price. At the same time, the project party will arrange an off-site exit channel for coin holders. The funds obtained after the exit will be used to increase the price of the currency and pave the way for the next wave of off-site capital inflows.
Previously, many parties broke the news that the MANTRA team controls 90% of the supply of OM tokens. Crypto analyst Mosi once wrote an article analyzing how a project with only $4 million TVL can have more than $10 billion FDV. The answer is that the team controls most of the OM circulation. The MANTRA team holds 792M OM (90% of the supply) in a single wallet, and the team is too lazy to even spread the supply across multiple wallets.
According to Mosi's analysis, the real circulation of OM = 980 million (circulating supply) - 792 million OM (the part controlled by the team) = 188 million OM
However, this number may not be accurate. The team still controls a considerable portion of OM, which they use to perform a Sybil attack on their own airdrops, further squeeze out exit liquidity, and continue to control the circulation. They deployed about 100 million OM to Sybil attack their own airdrops, so this part of the tokens also needs to be deducted from the real circulation.
Ultimately, there may only be 88 million OM in circulation, and the low true circulation makes it easy to manipulate the price of OM and liquidate any short positions. Traders should be afraid of shorting OM because the team controls most of the circulation and can pump or dump the price at will.
Mosi believes that the OM may be behind Tritaurian Capital - a company that borrowed $1.5 million from @SOMA_finance (@jp_mullin888 is the co-founder of SOMA, and Tritaurian is owned by Jim Preissler, who is JPM's boss at Trade.io) - as well as some funds and market makers in the Middle East. These operations further compress the true circulation and make it more difficult to calculate.
This may also explain their reluctance to release the airdrop and decide to implement a lock-up period. If they did airdrop, the true supply would increase significantly, likely causing a significant drop in price.
This isn't some sophisticated financial engineering, but it looks like a deliberate plan to reduce the true supply of tokens and could easily drive the price of OM up or down.
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