MANTRA (OM): Understanding its wild ride and road to recovery

In the morning and daytime hours of Apr 13, 2025, the MANTRA blockchain's native token, OM, sat at a respectable market cap of $6 billion, making it the third-highest-ranked cryptocurrency in the real-world assets (RWA) category, the area the platform specializes in. Everything seemed like smooth sailing for the token.

Then, just after 6 PM UTC, the price of the OM token suddenly began to free-fall, declining from nearly $6 to about $0.50 in the space of just two hours.

A project that started the day as one of the top players in the RWA field was now worth 90% less as the evening approached. OM's abrupt, sharp crash immediately caught the market's attention, with speculation of a rug pull being orchestrated by the project team.

However, MANTRA's CEO, John Patrick Mullin, immediately sprang into action for PR damage control on social media, reassuring the public that the team members weren’t dumping OM tokens at all. Instead, MANTRA's founder and CEO alleged that deliberate actions of some centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) had caused the catastrophic plunge.

As of our coverage date of Apr 23, 2025, this is a developing story. In this article, we’ll establish what actually happened, who's involved and what awaits the OM token in the foreseeable future.