Insiders Implicated in Mantra Token Collapse, Experts Confirm

The team behind the RWA project Mantra and its market-making partners manipulated the liquidity metrics of the collapsed OM token. This opinion was expressed in the podcast The Chopping Block on the YouTube channel Unchained.

$OM went from top 25 token to 90% drawdown in 90 minutes. Maybe we do need public market-making disclosures?

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:47 Trump’s Tariff Turmoil
15:48 Mantra’s OM Token Controversy
29:42 Crypto Disclosures & Market Making Agreements
31:49 Debate on Exchange… pic.twitter.com/bNuDAfNOHB

— The Chopping Block (@_choppingblock) April 17, 2025

On April 13, the price of OM plummeted by approximately 90% in a short period. The asset’s market capitalization lost about $5.5 billion.

Experts believe the manipulation scheme involved distorting the token’s market metrics. Market makers conducted numerous fictitious transactions between controlled addresses, creating an illusion of activity and inflating trading volumes.

As a result, OM ranked among the top 25 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, although estimates suggest less than 1% of the coins were genuinely liquid.

Before the price collapse, the total value of OM in circulation exceeded $6 billion. Meanwhile, the amount locked in the protocol was slightly over $15 million.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, noted that the token manipulation tactics exploited shortcomings in the validation processes of CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. Both crypto market data aggregators primarily rely on information from projects and refer to the results of coin listings on exchanges and basic on-chain analytics.

However, interested parties can circumvent these checks. By distributing tokens among market makers, they create an appearance of trading activity and even simulate broad retail investor participation.

The fabricated liquidity of OM collapsed when a major token holder attempted to liquidate their position. The incident revealed the actual market depth of the asset, which turned out to be fictitious, experts emphasized.

In their view, the main solutions to the problem could include:

• mandatory disclosure of listing agreement terms on major exchanges, including discount structures, lending conditions, risk responsibility, and any guaranteed volumes provided to market makers;
• thorough verification of project claims regarding token distribution, involving wallet audits and assessment of ownership concentration.

Discussion participants acknowledged that market makers might not be interested in disclosing information, and for exchanges, implementing rules involves additional costs.

Researchers from OddEyeResearch also concluded that insiders manipulated the OM price. They believe the token’s collapse was triggered by one insider breaching the agreement.