The Crypto Analyst Who Predicted Mantra's $5 Billion Collapse

It started with a tweet. And, like most crypto catastrophes, it ended with billions wiped out and a founder claiming he did nothing wrong as his token spiraled 90% in spectacular fashion.

Hedgeye digital assets analyst Ishmael Asad tried to warn Mantra's co-founder. He was laughed at, but just three says later, $5 billion on paper was evaporated. After Mantra's collapse this week, the analyst who warned a crash was coming tells Coinage he doesn't want to take a victory lap.

"It feels good to be right and to ... have made some level of difference out there," Asad said. "So I feel good about being right. 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."

As Coinage covered in our interview with Mantra co-founder JP Mullin, a liquidation event triggered a massive re-pricing of the once high-flying real-world asset project. What had been one of 2024's biggest success stories quickly shifted into 2025's biggest failure as its OM token tanked on Sunday. Asad had caught some of the warning signs ahead of the collapse hitting, as he tracked a growing supply of tokens.

“I was definitely caught off guard by the hahas in front of all of his responses and kind of just the sheer arrogance,” Asad said, referring to Mantra co-founder JP Mullin’s reaction on X. “I was also caught off guard by not just JP Mullin's responses, but the community who also came at me… and told me, ‘Yeah, thanks. But we've done the research already.’”

As OM plummeted from about $8 to under $1 in the span of a weekend — roughly a $5 billion drawdown in paper value — it wasn’t just Asad’s timeline that looked eerily prescient. His skepticism was grounded in data going back months.

“We first started to realize it back in November,” he explained. “We looked at tokenomics and the fundamentals and said, you know, this doesn't justify this current valuation.”

But that warning didn’t go over well either. “They were definitely not receptive to any sort of differing opinions,” he said. “I think they called me a witch.”

At the core of Asad’s thesis was a quietly dangerous detail: A doubling of OM’s supply when Mantra migrated from Ethereum to its own L1.

“They literally doubled the supply,” Asad said. “And out of that new supply… they kept a large chunk of that as well for core contributors, seed funding and ecosystem development grants.”

It didn’t help that hype around partnerships in Dubai created the illusion of traction. “Meanwhile, there were no actual assets tokenized on Mantra,” Asad said. “You can look at the Block Explorers, you can look at DeFi Llama. The total value locked on Mantra is like 4 million. And that’s just a decentralized exchange. That’s not tokenization.”

Even as Asad warns against buying the dip, he remains puzzled by Mullin’s performance in interviews post-crash. “I don’t think he really knows what he’s doing,” Asad said. “You look at the guy’s background, you know, he graduated from college and went straight into Mantra as a founder.”

So what comes next? With some OM tokens still locked and insiders claiming not to have sold, Mullin has floated the idea of a buyback or token burn. But to Asad, the damage is already done.

“I personally probably would stay away from this one because of permanent reputation damage,” he said. “And clearly I would say an incompetent team.”

Asad, who remains bullish on real-world asset tokenization as a crypto use case, says the problem isn’t the vision— it’s the execution. Instead, he's increasingly bullish on Polymesh, a project looking to similarly bring real-world assets onchain. At a market cap that is hovering around $150 million, it's far smaller than even Mantra post-collapse.

Until then, his advice to anyone still holding out hope for OM is simple.

“Maybe at this current price it's more fitting to what's actually happening on the chain,” he said. “But that $9 valuation? That was [too quick] and it was not justifiable.”

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