Author: Nancy, PANews

Riding on the tailwind of RWA and aggressive market manipulation tactics, MANTRA once attracted significant attention from investors. However, a dramatic price collapse not only posed challenges of price volatility for MANTRA but also revealed a complex "black history" behind it, leading to a crisis of trust and governance challenges.

OM Plummets Nearly 90% Overnight, Project Team, Exchanges, and Investors Each Have Their Own Claims

The collapse of OM's market value, which was in the tens of billions, was triggered by a market storm caused by multiple intertwined factors.

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

In response to the flash crash of OM, the MANTRA official explained that the chaos was not caused by the team, the MANTRA Chain Association, core advisors, or MANTRA investors selling tokens. The tokens remain locked and are subject to the announced vesting period, with the tokenomics unchanged, and a reminder was issued not to click on any scam links or impersonating MANTRA accounts.

At the same time, the official pointed out that this incident occurred during a period of low liquidity, possibly due to negligence by the exchanges or market manipulation. The timing and depth of the crash indicated that accounts were suddenly closed without sufficient warning or notification, occurring during a low liquidity period on Sunday night (UTC) (early morning in Asia), suggesting a degree of negligence by CEX or possibly intentional market positioning.

Binance confirmed in its statement that OM's recent price volatility was primarily caused by "cross-exchange liquidation." Since October of last year, multiple risk control measures, including reducing leverage levels, have been implemented for the OM token. Since January of this year, Binance has added a pop-up warning on its spot trading page for the OM token, reminding users that significant adjustments have been made to its tokenomics, increasing the token supply. Binance stated it would continue to closely monitor the situation and take appropriate actions to protect users and maintain platform integrity.

OKX noted in its announcement that since October 2024, there have been significant changes to OM's token economic model, and since early March, multiple on-chain addresses involved in similar operations have made large deposits and withdrawals across exchanges. Based on market risks, OKX has adjusted its platform risk control parameters and warned users of increased market risks, stating that changes in the supply of certain tokens could lead to price volatility. A risk warning has been added to the OM token page. Meanwhile, OKX CEO Star stated that this is a major scandal for the entire crypto industry. All on-chain unlocking and deposit data have been made public, and collateral and liquidation data from all major exchanges may be investigated. OKX will prepare all reports.

Although MANTRA blamed the exchanges, on-chain data pointed to a more complex picture, raising community concerns about potential internal sell-offs and market manipulation.

According to Spot On Chain monitoring, 19 wallets suspected to belong to the same entity, created in March, transferred 14.27 million OM (approximately $91 million) to OKX at an average price of $6.375 within three days before the OM crash. Additionally, The Data Nerd reported that in the past three days, five wallets collectively deposited 24.4 million OM (approximately $143.94 million) into OKX. Four of these wallets exhibited the same operational pattern: withdrawing from Binance last month and then depositing into OKX; the other belonged to Laser Digital. Furthermore, Lookonchain monitoring indicated that since April 7, at least 17 wallet addresses have deposited a total of 43.6 million OM tokens (valued at approximately $227 million at the time) into exchanges, accounting for 4.5% of the circulating supply. Simultaneously, five hours before the OM token crash, a wallet that had been inactive for a year transferred 2 million OM to Shane Shin, founding partner of the investment firm Shorooq Partners, which received the 2 million OM at a price of $12.58 million, but its current value is only $1.57 million.

However, Laser Digital, a strategic investor in the MANTRA Chain project, responded that Laser has no connection to the recent price drop of OM. Claims on social media linking Laser to "investor sell-offs" are incorrect and misleading. Laser did not deposit any OM tokens into OKX, and the mentioned wallets related to OKX do not belong to Laser. Laser's core OM investments remain locked, and there is no interest in pressuring the token or undermining the project's stability. Transparency is important.

Investment firm Shorooq Partners clarified in a statement that the drop was not due to a hacker attack or team sell-off, but triggered by large-scale forced liquidations, which subsequently led to panic selling during low liquidity periods. Shorooq emphasized that its position as a long-term equity investor remains unchanged and publicly disclosed relevant wallet addresses to demonstrate transparency.

The project team, exchanges, and investors each have their own claims. The deeper trigger for this crash may stem from MANTRA's recent adjustments to its token economic model. Recently, MANTRA announced that a community proposal would unify OM as the native token of the mainnet, abolishing the dual-token strategy, but this also brought technical challenges. As a result, the team decided to abandon the original ERC-20 OM and establish OM on the MANTRA Chain as the standard version. At the same time, MANTRA announced it would double the OM supply from 888 million to 1.777 billion and introduce a 3% annual inflation rate to incentivize staking. Although this move aimed to support ecological growth, the significantly increased circulation and unlimited inflation mechanism were seen as undermining investor confidence.

It is worth mentioning that despite the significant drop in OM, large-scale token sell-offs are still ongoing. Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) recently monitored that the MANTRA DAO staking wallet sent 38 million OM (approximately $26.96 million) to Binance's cold wallet.

Early Scam Controversies, High Control Behind the Surge, and Narrative Traps

MANTRA originated from MANTRA DAO, established in 2020, initially focusing on staking, lending, and asset management services. However, MANTRA DAO was considered a scam leveraging popular tags like DeFi and Polkadot in its early days. According to previous reports from Wu Says Blockchain and Hive Finance, the core team and advisors of Mantra DAO had questionable backgrounds, including identity fraud and even a history of scams, with significant controversy surrounding founder Calvin Ng's background, closely linked to the online gambling site 21Pink. At the same time, the project itself had not yet implemented its technology and functions, but Mantra DAO attracted investments through marketing tactics and false partnerships.

Moreover, MANTRA was embroiled in legal disputes due to internal controversies. In early 2022, RioDeFi filed a lawsuit against MANTRA DAO, accusing it of ownership, management, and asset misappropriation issues. RioDeFi claimed it founded and developed MANTRA DAO in 2020, but the core team of MANTRA DAO (including co-founder John Patrick Mullin and five others) stopped financial reporting after 2021, misappropriating assets and controlling the project. MANTRA DAO argued that as a DAO, it is governed by OM token holders, not owned by RioDeFi. In August 2024, the Hong Kong High Court intervened, ordering 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 officially rebranded to MANTRA, initiating a brand restructuring, stating its intention to transition from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a broader blockchain ecosystem. Since 2024, MANTRA has gained attention due to the strong market performance of OM. CoinGecko data shows that in 2024 alone, OM surged over 168.8 times. Meanwhile, DeFiLlama data indicated that OM's fully diluted valuation (FDV) reached $15.39 billion in March this year but has since significantly dropped to $1.25 billion. However, in stark contrast to its high valuation, OM's total locked value (TVL) has remained low since 2023, only maintaining at several hundred thousand dollars.

The project's high level of control and the RWA narrative trend are considered important reasons for OM's rise. On one hand, according to crypto analyst Mosi, the MANTRA team holds 90% of the "circulating supply" of OM tokens, with the real market circulation accounting for only 5% of the fully diluted valuation (FDV).

However, the high control strategy also planted the seeds for concentrated chips and weak liquidity. Rui, a member of HashKey Capital, revealed that MANTRA is an OTC platform that has reached a scale of at least $500 million over two years, operating in a cycle of "new OTC tokens replacing old OTC sell-offs" until the last unlocked chips "remain inactive" and explode.

On the other hand, MANTRA has been active in the RWA sector, releasing a series of positive signals, including establishing a $109 million ecosystem fund, collaborating with UAE's DAMAC Group to tokenize $1 billion in assets, bringing in Google as a validator and infrastructure provider to develop an RWA accelerator, and tokenizing $500 million worth of real estate assets from Dubai's MAG Group.

The involvement of Middle Eastern capital marked a turning point in MANTRA's development. According to ArkStream Capital Founding Partner Ye Su, in 2023, when the FDV of OM tokens dropped to $20 million and was nearly abandoned, a Middle Eastern capital intervened through a broker to acquire it, retaining only the CEO position. This Middle Eastern capital owns a large number of physical assets such as luxury homes and resorts, subsequently packaging OM as a real asset tokenization (RWAfi) project. Ye Su stated that under high control, OM achieved the highest increase on Binance in 2024, realizing a 200-fold growth, and the team is still promoting OTC business.

Public information also shows that MANTRA co-founder and CEO John Patrick Mullin, co-founder Jayant Ramanand, CTO Matthew Crooks, and other executives have all left. Additionally, financing background indicates that MANTRA announced in March 2024 that it had secured $11 million in funding led by Shorooq Partners. Shorooq Partners is a leading venture capital and alternative investment management firm based in Abu Dhabi, focusing on tech 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, the shadows of unresolved early controversies, the highly controlled token economy, behind-the-scenes capital manipulation, and the momentum of the RWA narrative collectively form the multiple footnotes to this collapse tragedy.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。