Formerly, the leading real-world asset platform Mantra has been in the headlines due to its native token, OM, crashing over -90% over the weekend.

On April 13, 2025, OM suddenly fell from $6.28 to lows of $0.52 within an hour causing investors and crypto investigators to question whether the team at Mantra had ‘rugged’ the project despite their high profile.

As of April 14, Mantra’s OM token is still over -80% down with crypto investigator ZachXBT and more weighing in on Mantra’s official stance on the matter. Is something bad going on at Mantra?

OM crashes and investors anticipate the worst. What happened?

The OM token, integral to the Mantra platform, fell over -90% over the course of an hour. Investors rushed to the platform’s Discord community and X/twitter to find out what had happened. 

Traders were left in the dark throughout the ordeal as the OM chart almost reached -100% down with many traders selling at major losses and questioning if the Mantra team had effectively rugged the project, scamming investors. 

After an hour, the team updated investors saying reckless liquidations on OM holders forced by centralized exchanges caused the OM token to crash and that it had nothing to do with the project. 

The Mantra team added:

this was not our team. We are looking into it and will share more details about what happened as soon as we can.

Crypto investigator ZachXBT commented on the Mantra token decline saying “There’s no question it was a heavily manipulated token via MMs/supply control” and wondered if large wallets were hacked, or if there was an exploit on the largest holders of the token.

JP Mullin (John Patrick Mullin), the founder of Mantra, posted on X/Twitter about the situation saying:

We have determined that the OM market movements were triggered by reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges on OM account holders.

The timing and depth of the crash suggest that a very sudden closure of account positions was initiated without sufficient warning or notice. 

During the crash, Mullin was on a flight and was unable to access data about the charts during its steep decline. Mullin believes that negligence and intentional decisions made by central exchanges are at fault, especially during “low-liquidity hours on a Sunday”. 

On-chain investigators lookonchain pointed out that since April 7, 17 wallets deposited over $43 million worth of OM tokens onto centralized exchanges, making up 4.5% of the circulating supply.

 The wallets are linked to Laser Digital, a key strategic investor in Mantra. With new light shed onto the event, speculation is that large investors and centralized exchanges may have caused the crash.

With the Mantra team investigating the issue, more insight into the crash may be revealed shortly over the next few weeks.

As of April 14, Mullin has stated that no profits were taken from MMs (Market makers) or investors and that large investors who were using Mantra as collateral were liquidated.

Is Mantra able to maintain its position as a leading crypto RWA project?

Mantra was chosen by the United Arab Emirates and Google to tokenize real-world assets in a deal worth around $1 billion as part of Google’s RWAccelerator.

For the UAE, the Damac Group, based in the region, will utilize Mantra to tokenize assets in hospitality, real estate, and data centers. 

Let’s hope this liquidation setback from over-collateralized investors does not harm Mantra’s efforts in real-world asset tokenization. If the team is able to bounce back, this could be a golden opportunity for OM investors.