- The OM token plummeted 90% in four hours, wiping out $5 billion in market cap and sparking rug pull rumors later denied.
- On-chain data shows large OM transfers to Binance and OKX pre-crash, raising insider trading suspicions denied by involved parties.
- CEO Mullin will burn $236M in team tokens to restore trust; recovery hopes draw parallels to SOL and LUNA’s rebounds.
The MANTRA token OM remains down by 8% in the last 24 hours. Its recent collapse wiped out over $5 billion in market cap. Beginning on April 13, the token fell from over $6 to as low as $0.5 in just four hours. The ensuing incidents only added more fuel to the fire.
Shortly after that, a deleted Telegram channel sparked rugpull rumors, which turned out to be a fake account. As speculation grew, the Mantra CEO John Patrick Mullin blamed “reckless forced closures led by centralized exchanges” as the main culprit.
However, on-chain data showed that 43.6 million OM (worth $227M) were moved into Binance and OKX in the days leading up to the crash. Two of the addresses belonged to Laser Digital, a strategic Mantra investor. This has raised suspicions of market manipulation and insider trading, claims strongly denied by both parties.
Mantra and OM’s Path to Rebuilding Trust
Crypto exchanges like Binance termed the incident as a result of cross-exchange liquidations. Others called it “a big scandal” and claimed that suspicious wallet activity began in March.
Laser Digital denied ownership of the wallets tagged by Arkham, calling them mislabeled. Lookonchain found a wallet labeled as belonging to Shane Shin, a founding partner of Shorooq Partners, which received 2 million OM shortly before the collapse.
To restore trust, CEO Mullin has announced the burn of $236 million worth of OM tokens originally allocated to the project’s core team. As for OM, some believe it has a quick shot at getting back to a $2 billion+ market cap. Just like how Solana (SOL) dropped to $9 post-FTX, it has risen by 15 times and is now trading at $133. LUNA, too, went from near zero to $0.147, almost a 1000x surge.
While OM’s collapse raises serious questions about crypto market integrity, the token burn and historical recoveries like Solana’s suggest a potential comeback for investors willing to take the risk.