PANews reported on April 14 that according to The Block, the OM token of MANTRA, a Layer 1 blockchain project focusing on real-world assets (RWA), fell by about 10% between 01:20 and 02:20 Beijing time this morning, and then suddenly plummeted from $5.21 at the time to about $0.50 at present (as of press time), a 90% plunge in just 90 minutes. Before the project's public Telegram group was inaccessible, community leader Dustin McDaniel downplayed the team's allegations of selling, saying he was not aware of it. At 04:51 in the morning, MANTRA's X account updated that the plunge was caused by reckless liquidation and had nothing to do with the project itself. Co-founder John Patrick Mullin mentioned that large OM investors were forced to liquidate on a large scale on CEX and said that it was being processed. Previously, MANTRA had been accused of controlling a large proportion of the circulating supply of the token and attempting to manipulate the token price. In response, Mullin said: "OM tokens have been in circulation since August 2020, longer than most skeptics have been in the crypto field."
Some investors pointed out that DeFiLlama data showed that the TVL of the MANTRA protocol was only about $13 million, while its token fully diluted valuation was as high as $9.5 billion, which may be a risk signal. In addition, Insomniac, head of Castle Labs governance, found that three wallets recently transferred millions of dollars of OM tokens to OKX and Binance. One of the wallets received about $36 million of OM tokens from Binance on March 21, and transferred about 4.3 million tokens to OKX on Saturday, suggesting a possible sell-off.
