Inside Mantra's $5 Billion OM Token Collapse

Mantra went from a crypto darling in 2024 to exploding $5 billion in 2025. It's quite the rise and fall, and yet somehow not terribly unique in practice for an industry that continues to learn new market tricks.

For the real-world assets focused blockchain and its OM token, the story of its incredible 90% fall in just a couple of days goes back more than four years and built on decision after decision in a winding trail that ended with an agreed-upon fact: On April 13, a massive liquidation on OKX meant the ruse was over.

Mantra wasn't really worth the more than $6 billion market cap it once boasted. It's now back down to $500 million.

Honestly, that kind of seems crazy to say. Companies might work for years to even get close to a $500 million market cap. Considering that, Mantra's rise and fall may reveal more warnings about much more than just its own token.

To understand the roots of the collapse, you have to understand what Mantra was claiming to be. A real-world asset (RWA) blockchain, aiming to “bring the world’s financial ecosystem on chain.” Led by Mullin, an American founder who spent years building the project after a career spaning Spain to China to Dubai, the chain had lined up impressive-sounding partnerships with real estate giants like DAMAC and even initiatives to tokenize electric motorcycles.

All of that seemed to work. OM, the project’s token, surged from around $0.05 to more than $4 through 2024. By early 2025, Mantra was co-hosting events in Paris with Cointelegraph. Things looks great. But strangely, that same weekend, one astute crypto analyst was asking Mullin when the token would collapse?

Mullin publicly dismissed the concerns from Hedgeye crypto analyst Ish Asad with a sarcastic “Nice research.” Three days later, OM was down 80%.

So what did Ish see that no one else did?

It starts with OM's tokenomics — something that every crypto project has to figure out. Mantra had a standard vesting schedule on paper, with new OM tokens on its Layer 1 blockchain supposedly locked. But there was a catch: OM had originally launched as an ERC-20 token in 2020. When the project debuted its L1 chain in October 2024, it allowed anyone to bridge those old OM tokens — completely undermining the idea of a meaningful lockup.

“They basically doubled the supply,” Asad told Coinage. “They minted the whole new supply on the L1. And they also allowed the old ERC-20 to come on in addition to that.”

Still, OM’s price kept climbing. Some began to suspect that over-the-counter token sales — where the team sold OM tranches to investors — were being used to fund open-market buys of OM, pushing the price higher. In an interview with Coffeezilla, Mullin admitted that while he didn’t believe he or his team were “pumping" OM's price, he conceded they had been actively buying OM.

But what made this case especially odd was that — according to Mullin — no one ever dumped. “We haven't actually sold a single token,” Mullin told us.

So if the team didn’t dump, who did?

“What we quickly uncovered after speaking with some of our key partners and investors and exchanges,” Mullin said, “is that there had been massive liquidations on centralized exchange venues where OM had been used as collateral for leveraged positions.”

In other words, someone had used OM to back a huge margin trade — and when it started going south, the exchange, confirmed to be OKX, liquidated the collateral. That flooded the market with OM and triggered a collapse in its price.

OKX later said its investigation “uncovered that several on-chain addresses have been executing potentially coordinated large-scale deposits and withdrawals across various centralized exchanges since Mar 2025.”

So while the pump may have come from the Mantra team, the "dump" may have come from someone else entirely. But digging into how things could have been coordinated so seamlessly between those events revealed other interesting findings. Mainly, something like that is really only possible if token supply is heavily concentrated — and according to Asad, it was.

Case in point: A 2024 Mantra DAO vote on allowing OM's ERC-20 token to be redeemed 1:1 to become new Mantra tokens was passed after just 91 wallets voted. “The votes are typically controlled by a small handful of voters because it's a highly concentrated token supply," Asad said.

Still, even after the collapse, Mullin insists that the project wasn’t at fault. After the collapse laid bare Mantra's real market value he's not breathing a sigh of relief.

“This is not something that I would ever feel relieved about. I mean, an unprecedented event happened. Many people lost money and got hurt. I mean, I'm hurt. Our community is hurt. Our token holders are hurt. Our investors are hurt. And I feel responsible. Even if I didn't do anything negligent or malicious or anything.”

As always, it's up to personal opinion about what exactly is malicious in crypto. Every decision by a project has its risks and rewards. Being fully transparent about those is likely the only way any project founder can ever really fully claim to be innocent. And full details about market making relationships or token buybacks really only came out after the OM token collapse. Notably, anyone who bought in at inflated prices were likely down substantially. Investors who got in earlier, as Mullin admitted, are likely still in the green.

"I'm happy to put this out categorically that we ever engaged in any sort of, pumping of the price or pumping of the token with our market making partners. That is just not how it works," he said. A couple days later, following our interview, Mullin's representation of those facts appeared to change slightly. In a following interview he admitted that undisclosed token buys from the team and market makers acting on Mantra's behalf could "have a positive impact on the price."

But the collapse does raise real concerns about transparency and governance in crypto. Perhaps it's why new guidance from the SEC hinted that disclosing exactly these things may be in order in a new statement (perhaps a looming indicator of coming market infrastructure bill language.)

Even Asad admits this isn’t unique to Mantra. Mixing a lack of disclosures with a concentrated token supply right as new tokens were about to be unlocked presented a situation where OM's existing token holders found a way to max extract.

As Asad says, it was "a recipe for disaster. And that's exactly what we got with Mantra."

In that sense, Mantra’s collapse might be less of an outlier and more of a warning shot.

“I can't say I feel good about everyone losing money and having another billion dollar crypto collapse here in 2025, but we'll get there someday. Hopefully," Asad said.

Hopefully indeed.

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