MANTRA’s OM token collapses roughly 90% in hours

MANTRA’s OM token collapsed by roughly 90% on April 13, 2025, turning a widely traded token associated with real-world-asset infrastructure into the center of an abrupt market crisis.

The Block’s contemporaneous price record showed OM declining about 10% between 17:20 and 18:20 UTC before falling from $5.21 to approximately $0.50 over the following 90 minutes. That comparison implies a decline of about 90.4%, although prices differed across exchanges and moved rapidly during the episode. MANTRA later measured a 92% decline over approximately one hour beginning around 18:28 UTC.

The collapse itself was verifiable. Its cause was not.

What the market knew on April 13

At 20:51 UTC on April 13, MANTRA’s official account attributed the movement to “reckless liquidations” and said it was unrelated to the project. Co-founder John Patrick Mullin separately claimed that a large OM holder had been forcibly liquidated on a centralized exchange. Those were contemporaneous statements from interested parties, not independently established findings.

The Block reported that MANTRA community lead Dustin McDaniel denied team selling while acknowledging that he did not yet know what caused the decline. The publication also identified recent transfers of OM into centralized exchanges, but a transfer to an exchange does not by itself prove a sale, identify the beneficial owner or establish that the transfer initiated the crash.

No public record available during the April 13 price break conclusively identified the liquidated account, the exchange that allegedly initiated a forced closure, the position’s leverage or the complete sequence of orders. Claims circulating during the disruption that the episode was a team exit, exploit or deliberate manipulation therefore remained allegations.

Why the collapse mattered

OM was tied to MANTRA, a Layer 1 network positioning itself around tokenized real-world assets and compliance-oriented financial applications. The speed of the decline challenged the assumption that a substantial headline valuation necessarily implied deep, resilient liquidity.

A token’s quoted market capitalization multiplies its latest price by an estimated circulating supply. It does not measure how much cash could be withdrawn from the market at that valuation. When order books are thin, a relatively limited volume of forced selling can move the marginal price sharply, reducing the displayed capitalization of every token without an equivalent amount of money leaving the market.

The event also illustrated how collateral and leverage can create a feedback loop. If OM-backed positions were forcibly closed, as MANTRA claimed, initial selling could have pushed the price lower, triggered additional margin thresholds and produced more automated sales. That mechanism is plausible, but it was not proven from the public evidence available on April 13.

Later records clarify the scale, not the initiator

On April 14, OKX said OM had fallen more than 80% across the broader market beginning at approximately 18:28:32 UTC on April 13. The exchange said substantial volume increases and price declines appeared on other centralized exchanges before spreading to OKX. It also reported potentially coordinated deposits and withdrawals by several addresses since March 2025, without naming their controllers or alleging a specific offense.

MANTRA’s April 16 account said its review indicated a cascade of centralized-exchange liquidations and denied any team sales during the disturbance. It also acknowledged price divergence between OKX and Binance and said its investigation remained open. Those later statements strengthen the record of a liquidation-driven market dislocation, but they do not independently resolve who held the positions, why they were closed or which venue supplied the initiating order flow.