OM's market value of 10 billion yuan collapsed. After the manipulation was exposed, many parties had different opinions.

Author: Nancy, PANews

With the support of RWA and violent pull-up, MANTRA once attracted a large number of investors. However, a thrilling price crash not only made MANTRA face the challenge of price fluctuations, but also exposed the complicated "black history" behind it, and the crisis of trust and governance test followed.

OM flash crashed nearly 90% late at night, and the project party, exchange and investors each insisted on their own opinions

Behind the collapse of OM's 10 billion market value is a market storm caused by the interweaving of multiple factors.

In the early morning of April 14, the price of MANTRA token OM suddenly fell sharply. According to CoinGecko data, the price of OM plummeted 89.2% in the past 24 hours.

Regarding the flash crash of OM, MANTRA officials explained that the chaos was not caused by the team, MANTRA Chain Association, core consultants or MANTRA investors selling tokens. The tokens are still locked and subject to the announced vesting period. The token economics remains unchanged. Please do not click on any fraudulent links or accounts impersonating MANTRA.

At the same time, the official pointed out that this incident occurred during a period of low liquidity, which may be due to negligence or market manipulation by the exchange. The timing and depth of the crash suggest that account positions were abruptly closed without adequate warning or notice, and that it occurred during a low liquidity period on Sunday evening UTC (midnight Asia time), suggesting a degree of negligence on the part of CEX, or perhaps deliberate market positioning.

Binance confirmed in its statement that OM's recent price volatility was volatile, and preliminary investigations showed that it was caused by "cross-exchange liquidations." Since October last year, a number of risk control measures have been implemented for OM tokens, including reducing leverage levels. Since January this year, Binance has added a pop-up warning for OM tokens on its spot trading page, reminding users that the token has made significant adjustments to its token economics and increased its token supply. Binance said it will continue to monitor the situation closely and take appropriate actions to protect users and maintain the integrity of the platform.

OKX pointed out in its announcement that OM's token economic model has undergone significant changes since October 2024, and that multiple on-chain addresses with similar operations have made large deposits and withdrawals on various exchanges since early March. Based on market risks, OKX has adjusted the platform's risk control parameters and reminded users that the recent market risks are high, and changes in the supply of some tokens may cause price fluctuations. A risk warning has been added to the OM token page. At the same time, OKX CEO Star said that this is a major scandal for the entire crypto industry. All on-chain unlocking and recharge data have been made public, and the collateral and liquidation data of all major exchanges may be investigated. OKX will prepare all reports. Although MANTRA blames the exchanges, on-chain data points to a more complex picture, raising questions in the community about potential insider selling and market manipulation. According to Spot On Chain monitoring, 19 newly created wallets in March that were suspected to belong to the same entity that it had previously tracked transferred 14.27 million OM (about $91 million) to OKX at an average price of $6.375 in the three days before the OM crash. According to The Data Nerd, in the past three days, five wallets have deposited a total of 24.4 million OM (about $143.94 million) into OKX. Four of the wallets have the same operating mode: withdrawing from Binance last month and then depositing into OKX; the other belongs to Laser Digital. According to Lookonchain, since April 7, at least 17 wallet addresses have deposited a total of 43.6 million OM tokens (worth about $227 million at the time) into the exchange, accounting for 4.5% of the circulating supply. At the same time, five hours before the OM token plunge, a wallet that had been silent for a year transferred 2 million OM to the wallet of Shane Shin, the founding partner of Shorooq Partners, an investment institution of MANTRA. The wallet received 2 million OM at a price of $12.58 million, but now its value is only $1.57 million.

However, Laser Digital, a strategic investor in the MANTRA Chain project, responded that Laser had no connection with the recent price drop of OM. The claims on social media that Laser was “associated with investor selling” are false and misleading. Laser did not deposit any OM tokens with OKX, and the wallet mentioned in relation to OKX is not Laser’s wallet. Laser’s core OM investment remains locked, and there is no interest in putting pressure on the token or destabilizing the project. Transparency is important.

Investment institution Shorooq Partners also issued a statement clarifying that the decline was not caused by a hacker attack or team selling, but was triggered by large-scale forced liquidations, followed by panic selling during low liquidity periods. Shorooq emphasized that its position as a long-term equity investor has not changed, and disclosed the relevant wallet addresses to prove transparency.

The project owner, the exchange, and the investors each have their own opinions. The deeper fuse of this plunge may be due to MANTRA’s recent adjustment of the token economic model. Recently, MANTRA pointed out in the announcement that the previous community proposal to unify OM as the native token of the main network and abolish the two-coin strategy also brought technical challenges. For this reason, the team decided to abandon the original ERC-20 OM and establish OM on MANTRA Chain as the standard version. At the same time, MANTRA announced that it would double the supply of OM from 888.8 million to 1.7777 billion, and introduce a 3% annual inflation rate to incentivize staking. Although this move is intended to support ecological growth, the greatly increased circulation and the uncapped inflation mechanism are believed to have weakened investor confidence. It is worth mentioning that although OM has fallen sharply, large-scale token selling is still continuing. According to the latest monitoring by Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens), MANTRA DAO staking wallet sent 38 million OM (about US$26.96 million) to Binance cold wallet.

It was once involved in scam controversy in the early days, and the high degree of control and narrative trap behind the surge

MANTRA's predecessor was MANTRA DAO, which was established in 2020 and initially focused on staking, lending and asset management services. However, MANTRA DAO was considered a scam under popular labels such as DeFi and Polkadot in the early days. According to previous reports by Wu Blockchain and Honeycomb Finance, the core team and consultants of Mantra DAO have suspicious backgrounds, identity fraud and even a history of fraud, including the background of founder Calvin Ng, which is very controversial and has close ties with the online gambling website 21Pink. At the same time, the project's own technology and functions had not yet been implemented, but Mantra DAO relied on marketing methods and false partnerships to attract investment.

Not only that, MANTRA was also involved in a lawsuit due to internal disputes. In early 2022, RioDeFi filed a lawsuit against MANTRA DAO, accusing it of ownership, management rights and asset misappropriation. RioDeFi said that it founded and developed MANTRA DAO in 2020, but the core team of MANTRA DAO (including co-founder John Patrick Mullin and six others) stopped financial reporting after 2021, misappropriated assets and controlled the project without authorization. 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 and ordered key figures of MANTRA DAO to disclose financial records in response to allegations 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 that it would officially change its name to MANTRA and initiate a brand reorganization, indicating that it was trying to transform from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a broader blockchain ecosystem. Since 2024, MANTRA has attracted much attention due to the strong pull of OM. CoinGecko data shows that in 2024 alone, OM rose by more than 168.8 times. At the same time, DeFiLlama data shows that OM's fully diluted valuation (FDV) once reached US$15.39 billion in March this year, and has now fallen sharply to US$1.25 billion. However, in sharp contrast to its high valuation, since 2023, OM's total locked value (TVL) has been at a low level for a long time, only maintaining at the level of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The project party's high control and the support of the RWA narrative craze are considered to be important reasons for the rise of OM. On the one hand, according to crypto analyst Mosi's recent disclosure, the MANTRA team holds 90% of the "circulation" of OM tokens, and the actual market circulation accounts for only 5% of the fully diluted valuation (FDV).

However, the highly controlled strategy also buried the bomb of concentrated chips and fragile liquidity. According to Rui, a member of HashKey Capital, MANTRA is a ground-pushing OTC disk, and the scale of the OTC disk has reached at least US$500 million in two years. It adopts the mode of "new OTC tokens take over old OTC selling disks" and operates in a cycle until the last unlocked chips "OTC does not move" explode.

On the other hand, MANTRA has made frequent moves in the RWA track, releasing a series of positive signals, including the establishment of a US$109 million ecosystem fund, cooperation with the UAE DAMAC Group, plans to tokenize US$1 billion in assets, introduce Google as a validator and infrastructure provider to cooperate in the RWA accelerator, and tokenize Dubai MAG Group's US$500 million worth of real estate assets.

The involvement of Middle Eastern capital is a turning point in the development of MANTRA. According to ArkStream Capital Founding Partner Ye Su, in 2023, when the OM token FDV fell to $20 million and was almost abandoned, a Middle Eastern capital intervened in the acquisition under the matchmaking of the middleman, retaining only the position of CEO. The Middle Eastern capital owns a large number of physical assets such as luxury homes and resorts, and then packaged OM into a physical asset tokenization (RWAfi) project. Ye Su said that under a high degree of control, OM set Binance's highest increase in 2024, achieving a 200-fold increase, and the team is still promoting OTC business recently.

Public information also shows that MANTRA co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin, co-founder Jayant Ramanand, CTO Matthew Crooks and other senior executives have all resigned. And the financing background shows that MANTRA announced in March 2024 that it had received $11 million in financing led by Shorooq Partners. It is understood that Shorooq Partners is a leading venture capital and alternative investment management company headquartered in Abu Dhabi, focusing on technology startups in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP) region. 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, multiple factors such as the shadow of unresolved early disputes, the highly controlled token economy, the behind-the-scenes manipulation of capital, and the promotion of the RWA narrative heat together constitute multiple footnotes to this tragic collapse.