Over the weekend, crypto traders were likely anything but zen, as the price of OM—the native token to the Mantra blockchain—crashed more than 90%.
Most Read from Fast Company
On Sunday, OM prices fell from around $6.30 to less than $0.50 within a couple of hours, shaking up the crypto markets and likely leaving many people with crypto holdings wondering if they were witnessing another catastrophe like the FTX collapse. But, so far, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Here’s a rundown of the important facts to know, as we understand them on Monday morning.
As noted, OM values plummeted sharply on Sunday, April 14, by more than 90%. It was unclear what exactly was happening at the time, so many crypto traders and investors were justifiably spooked.
In all, OM’s crash resulted in roughly $72 million in liquidations, and its market capitalization fell from around $6 billion to around $683 million. Again, this all happened within a matter of hours, creating a good amount of confusion and worry.
While initial fears centered around a rug-pull scheme—a common crypto scam similar to a pump-and-dump typically seen in the traditional stock markets—Mantra’s cofounder JP Mullin posted on X that his team was sorting things out in an effort to calm investors.
In that post, Mullin said: “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.”
He continued: “That this happened during low-liquidity hours on a Sunday evening UTC (early morning Asia time) points to a degree of negligence at best, or possibly intentional market positioning taken by centralized exchanges.”
Some back-and-forth on X also highlighted some prior concerns about Mantra and its founding team, including that some of its members had been involved in online gambling platforms.
In response to the OM crash, one large crypto exchange, OKX, released a statement noting that its team “conducted investigations and identified major changes to the MANTRA token’s tokenomics model since Oct 2024, based on both publicly available on-chain data and internal exchange data. Our investigation also uncovered that several on-chain addresses have been executing potentially coordinated large-scale deposits and withdrawals across various centralized exchanges since Mar 2025.”