The crypto market just witnessed a billion-dollar implosion. This time, courtesy of Mantra, one of the biggest RWA projects in the industry.
Its OM token collapsed nearly 90% on Sunday, evaporating over $5 billion in market value and sending investors into panic mode.
Coinglass data confirms that roughly $75 million in liquidations hit OM as prices tanked. But what set off the chain reaction in the first place? Still unknown.
In a post on X today, co-founder John Patrick Mullin stepped in, stating that the crash was caused by “reckless forced closures”:
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.
Long before OM’s Sunday collapse, critics had already flagged issues. A 2023 Hong Kong court ordered six Mantra DAO members —including CEO John Patrick Mullin— to turn over financial records after being accused of misusing funds and treating the DAO like a personal piggy bank.
Adding fuel to the fire, a wallet tagged by Arkham Intelligence as belonging to Laser Digital, a crypto VC firm that backed the project in 2024, transferred over $41 million worth of OM to OKX just two days before the crash.
Mantra’s Decentralization Claims
The project continues to pitch itself as a blockchain built for real-world asset tokenization. It operates as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), meaning holders of OM tokens supposedly help steer the protocol’s direction through governance votes. In practice, though, that decentralisation claim doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny.
As of last week, only $4.2 million was locked in the protocol’s DeFi ecosystem, while the token floated at a bloated $6 billion market value.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Earlier this year, Mantra inked a $1 billion tokenization deal with Dubai-based investment giant DAMAC. Just weeks later, the project scored a virtual asset license from Dubai’s VARA, supposedly opening the door to regulated crypto services in the UAE.
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