Mantra post-OM token crash statement leaves key questions unanswered
Troubled decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Mantra released an official statement addressing the reasons for a 92% flash crash of its OM token on April 13.
An April 16 announcement titled “Statement of Events: 13 April 2025” reiterates that the crash did not involve any token sales by the project itself, and the Mantra team remains fully functional and continues investigating the incident.
Although Mantra CEO John Mullin previously said that the team was preparing a post-mortem, the new statement offered few new details about the reasons behind the rapid movement of OM tokens to exchanges and the subsequent liquidation cascade.
Limited circulation of mainnet OM tokens
The post also reiterated that there are two types of OM tokens, with one being Ethereum-based (ERC-20) and the other running on Mantra’s mainnet.
“The incident almost exclusively involved ERC-20 OM, as ERC-20 OM represents virtually the entire liquid market,” Mantra said in the statement.
Launched in August 2020, the original ERC-20 OM token has a fixed supply of 888.8 million OM, with 99.9% of these tokens being in public circulation as of April 15.
However, Mantra mainnet OM tokens had only 77.5 million in circulation after the Mantra Chain minted an equivalent amount of OM in October 2024.
Mantra’s conclusions
Additionally, the post mentions a divergence in OM spot prices on OKX and Binance. The discrepancy began around 6:00 pm UTC, around an hour before the OM token’s crash, according to CoinGecko.
Among its conclusions, Mantra stated that further information from its exchange partners will “provide more clarity on these events, adding:
“We invite our centralized exchanges partners to collaborate on providing more clarity on trading activities during this time.”
The Mantra team confirmed that it is preparing a support plan for OM that includes both a token buyback and a supply burn. No timeline for the rollout of this plan was provided.
Related: Mantra CEO plans to burn team’s tokens in bid to win community trust
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, OKX CEO Star Xu called Mantra a “big scandal” in a post published hours following the crash. Mantra CEO Mullin also said Binance is the biggest holder of the OM token, citing Etherscan records.
Cointelegraph contacted the Mantra team for further comment on the April 16 statement but did not receive a response by publication time.
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