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Updated (April 16th, 6:50pm UTC): This article has been updated with comments from Mantra CEO John Mullin.
The problematic distributed financial (DEFI) platform Mantra issued an official statement on April 13th addressing the reasons for the 92% flash crash of OM tokens.
The April 16 announcement entitled “Event Statement: April 13, 2025” reiterates that the crash does not include token sales by the project itself, and the mantra team remains fully functional and continues to investigate the incident.
Mantra CEO John Marin previously said the team was preparing for after-death, but the new statement did not provide new details on the reasons behind the rapid movement of OM tokens with the exchange and subsequent liquidation cascades.
“The purpose of the presentation was to share the latest analysis of key factors that have led to verifiable data on price movements and circular supply,” Mullin told Cointelegraph, adding that the investigation is still ongoing.
Reasons for OM crash
In the update, the mantra team pointed out that “a significant amount of OM tokens have been moved to exchanges for use as collateral” and “forced OM location closure” as the main factors that triggered the liquidation, including those that were automated.
“We believe these are the reasons for the event, but we’re looking into the details of how and why the event happened,” Mantra CEO told Cointelegraph.
As the investigation unfolds, the Mantra team will be sharing a formal posthumous posthumous life, Mullin added.
Mantra works with nameless blockchain analysts
To advance the investigation, Mantra will work with unspecified blockchain analysts to gain insight into the underlying causes of the crash, Mullin told Cointelegraph.
“The details are confidential, but I did,” the CEO said.
Mantra is also considering hiring a forensic auditor following the April 13 event. According to Mullin, the discussions revealed that experts, including business consulting firm FTI Consulting, were involved, but no decisions have been made so far.
Related: Mantra CEO plans to burn team tokens to win community trusts
Mullin told Cointelegraph that the Mantra team has around 90 full-time employees, adding:
“Our entire team is currently focused on the health and future of the company and we do not anticipate any layoffs at this time.”
Limited circulation of MainNet OM tokens
In the post, Mantra repeatedly said that there are two types of OM tokens, one running on Ethereum-based (ERC-20) and the other running on Mantra’s mainnet.
“The incident is almost exclusively related to the ERC-20 OM, as the ERC-20 OM represents essentially the entire liquidity market,” Mantra said in a statement.
The original ERC-20 OM tokens released in August 2020 have fixed supply of 888.8 million, with 99.9% of these tokens falling into public distribution as of April 15th.
However, after the Mantra Chain cast a comparable amount of OM in October 2024, the OM tokens for the Mantra Mainnet were only 77.5 million in circulation.
Mantra conclusion
Additionally, this post mentions the divergence of OM spot prices for OKX and Binance. According to Coingecko, the inconsistency began around 6pm, about an hour before the crash of the OM token.
In its conclusion, Mantra said that further information from the exchange partners would “add the following to make these events more clear:
“We invite our central exchange partners to cooperate by making trading activities more clear during this period.”
The Mantra team has confirmed that they have prepared a support plan for the OM, including both token buyback and supply burning. No timeline for the deployment of this plan is provided.
As reported previously by Cointelegraph, OKX CEO star Xu called the mantra “a big scandal” in a post published after crash. Mantra CEO Mullin also said that Binance is the largest owner of the OM token, citing Etherscan Records.
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