The OM token crash saw $6 billion lost in value in just 30 minutes yesterday. The Terra Luna like collapse has left the investors questioning if all of this was planned.
The community notes that there were warning signs that were ignored which led to this massive loss. Crypto Jargon in a series of X posts has delved deeper to know what exactly happened in the OM crash and if there is any chance to recover the lost funds.
On April 13, 2025, OM was doing fine at $6.70 with a market cap of $5.8 billion. Just a few hours later, at 6:00 PM UTC, its price plunged to $0.37 with the token losing a staggering 93% of its value in an hour. Some traders made huge profits by shorting OM. But what caused the crash?
Earlier in the day around 2:00 PM UTC, OM co-founder Mullin tweeted “No wifi, will be offline for a bit.” Coincidentally, four hours later the price crashed. Later at 9:00 PM UTC, MANTRA’s Telegram Channel was mysteriously deleted.
Where the matter gets more suspicious is, on April 12th, a day before the crash, 3.9 million OM tokens were sent to OKX. OM’s collapse was triggered by $66.97 million in forced liquidations over 12 hours, but the problems had been growing for months. Notably, the team controls about 90% of the OM supply, which gives them significant power to influence the price.
By now, the investor trust was already low. Just a month ago, MANTRA’s OM airdrop blacklisted over 50% of wallets claiming that they were ‘bots’ without any evidence. Besides, the terms for unlocking funds was changed multiple times: first a 20% unlock, then 0.3% per day and finally 10% unlock with vesting period until 2027. This left the investors disappointed.
The Warning Signs!
The warning signs kept growing. Market makers were allegedly pumping up the token’s price before the crash. And the airdrops kept getting delayed raising concerns over price drop. In the days before the crash, on-chain data showed that 17 wallets sold 43.6 million OM, worth around $227 million, to exchanges, which was 4.5% of the total supply.
Laser Digital denied any connection to OM token sales on OKX, claiming that they have not deposited tokens there. Shorooq Investors also denied selling OM tokens, blaming the crash on a large forced liquidation, as shown by on-chain data.
Mullin Denies On-Chain Data
Besides, Mullin denied Arkham’s data, saying that they didn’t know who owned the wallets selling OM before the crash. He claimed the wallets were “mislabeled” and referenced a transparency report from April 8 with key wallet addresses.
Panic broke out in the market when the $3.9 million worth of OM appeared on OKX. Investors feared drop, selling pressure surged which was further aggravated by OTC deals where insiders sold tokens at a 50% discount to large investors who dumped them after crash. Short sellers profited as stop-losses triggered and borrowed positions were liquidated.
Within 60 minutes, OM lost 93% of its value and over $5.5 billion in market cap was vanished. The community were quick to compared this to the LUNA crash. MANTRA’s Telegram channel was suddenly deleted, leaving behind a creepy last message: “LUNA 2.0”. With no updates and no accountability, the community was left in the dark.
The Mantra team claims that the collapse was caused by broader market pressures and centralized exchanges closing positions, triggering a chain reaction of liquidations. OKX added that the price drop started with a spike in trading volume and initial declines on exchanges outside of OKX, before spreading to the entire market. On April 14, OKX announced that Mantra’s tokenomics had changed significantly since October 2024 and warned of suspicious activity across several exchanges.
Was It A Rug Pull?
Rumors of a rug pull also began circulating with traders fearing that developers might abandon the project. Market investor Gordon warned that it could be biggest rug pull since LUNA/FTX. However Mantra executives have firmly denied the claims providing verification addresses to show that the team’s tokens remain locked as planned.
“To be clear, this dislocation was not caused by the team, the MANTRA Chain Association, its core advisors, or MANTRA’s investors selling tokens. Tokens remain locked and subject to the published vesting periods,” the team stated in their community update.
In the latest updates, OM has slightly recovered to between $0.65 and $0.80, while the trading volume remains low. But the trust has now dropped. Besides, 1.2 million OM was moved to an unknown address which sparked concerns of more selling. Major exchanges like HTX and Poloniex have reduced OM trading options and Binance has even issued a warning. Meanwhile, Dubai’s VARA is investigating MANTRA’s license after several complaints.
OM Shows No Signs Of Recovery
OKX’s CEO has called it a “major scandal,” questioning its lack of transparency despite public on-chain data. Before the crash, OM seemed unstoppable. It even reached an all-time high of $9.04 in February and was up 825% year-on-year, even as the broader crypto market declined. While OM was once a leader in Real-world assets, it still fell apart. Besides, unlike LUNA, OM is showing no signs of recovery.
